Perhaps the most persistent nonsense in physics: the perpetual motion machine. Bad ideas come and go in physics. But there’s one bit of nonsense that is perhaps more persistent than all others: the ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

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 ...

Why AI is taking on impossible challenges. How a perpetual motion machine can power an AI. Why we have to put an explicit explanation about an April 1st article so that the search engines don’t ding ...

A perpetual motion machine operates in a continual repetitive motion, indefinitely; without someone providing an energy source. Considering this concept, imagine a business operating with little to no ...

On Sept. 20, 1913, rumors were running rampant around North Dakota that J. W. Kennedy, of Mandan, North Dakota, had invented just such a machine. A news clipping about J.W. Kennedy and his perpetual ...

F.L. Minnick, a resident of the Wilson Hotel in Spokane, claimed to have produced a “perpetual motion” machine. He said, in a written statement to the Spokane Daily Chronicle, that the machine is ...

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 ...

To the editor: Making gasoline from carbon dioxide to power your car is a new twist on a perpetual motion machine, which has been a dream for many backyard inventors for centuries. The idea is that, ...