Let's start with a water wheel in still water with an electric generator hooked up to it. Let's say it has a ratchet wheel so it can only turn in one direction. I want to calculate the probability ...

On November 12th, 1717, clockmaker and mechanic Johann Bessler placed a 12-foot diameter, strange-looking wheel into a room. With a tender push, he started the contraption rotating, then confidently ...

My favorite shelf in the home library is where Raymond Roussel, the Comte de Lautréamont, E.T. A. Hoffmann, Leonora Carrington and other writers form a brilliant phalanx of eccentricity and marvel. I ...

The idea of a perpetual motion machine is promising, from a distance. Through brilliant engineering maybe we could find a way to create a device so ingenious that it can produce unlimited energy, ...

Humans have been fascinated with perpetual motion machines since the Middles Ages. In theory, a machine that could run indefinitely without an energy source would change our entire entire world far ...

A wheel weighted with swinging mallets. A cylinder rotating in a sealed, water-filled container. A siphon that transfers liquid back and forth in a seemingly endless loop. These may sound like the ...

A wheel weighted with swinging mallets. A cylinder rotating in a sealed, water-filled container. A siphon that transfers liquid back in forth in a seemingly endless loop. These may sound like the ...