Perpetual motion

“ We have heard from time to time of the term perpetual motion. Philosophers have from time to time endeavoured to discover some application of this perpetual motion, but all efforts in this direction up to the present have proved futile. In one sense there is no such thing as perpetual motion. In another sense, that is from the standpoint of the conservation of all modes of motion, as motion cannot be destroyed, it must therefore be perpetual. ”

“ If by perpetual motion nothing more is meant347 than the putting in motion some of the most durable substances with which we are acquainted, in such a manner as to ensure a continuance of motion as long as those substances will resist the effects of time and friction, I do not despair of seeing it accomplished. * * * [He thinks there is] reasonable ground to hope that the time is not far distant when even this impossibility must yield to persevering ingenuity. ”

“ What is meant by the term "Perpetual Motion?" Is it supposed that there is an undiscovered substance in the world, that will of itself perpetually move, with as little apparent cause as that which actuates the needle in becoming motionless in one particular position? ”

“ The most satisfactory confutation of the notion of the possibility of a perpetual motion is derived from the consideration of the properties of the center of gravity; it is only necessary to examine whether it will begin to descend or ascend when the machine moves, or whether it will remain at rest. ”

“ Do we not know besides, à posteriori, that all the attempts made to produce perpetual motion by any means whatever have been fruitless?—that we have never succeeded in producing a motion veritably perpetual, that is, a motion which will continue forever without alteration in the bodies set to work to accomplish it? ”

“ It may be demonstrated, indeed, to all those capable of reasoning in a sound manner on those sciences, that a perpetual motion is impossible: for, to be possible, it is necessary that the effect should become alternately the cause, and the cause the effect. It would be necessary, for example, that a weight raised to a certain height by another weight, should in its turn raise the second weight to the height from which it descended. ”

“ CHAP. XIV.—The seeming probability of effecting a Continual Motion by Solid Weights in a Hollow Wheel or Sphere.
The third way whereby the making of a perpetual motion has been attempted is by the Natural Affection of Gravity; when the heaviness of several bodies is so contrived, that the same motion which they give in their descent, may be able to carry them up again. ”

“ The general and philosophic acceptation of the words perpetual motion should include not only a motion susceptible of indefinitely continuing itself after a first impulse received, but the action of an apparatus, of any construction whatever, capable of creating motive power in unlimited quantity, capable of starting from rest all the bodies of nature if they should be found in that condition, of overcoming their inertia; capable, finally, of finding in itself the forces necessary to move the whole universe, to prolong, to accelerate incessantly, its motion. ”

“ But when we reach the interior world of matter, the world of molecules, atoms, and electrons, we have [Pg 191] reached a world where perpetual motion is the rule; we have reached the fountain-head of energy, and the motion of one body is not at the expense of the motion of some other body, but is a part of the spontaneous struggling and jostling and vibration that go on forever in all the matter of the universe. ”

“ By such an engine it seems very probable that a man may produce perpetual motion; the distance of the plummets from the center increasing with weight on one side, and their being tied to one another, causing a constant succession in their falling. ”

“ The laws of motion alone will not produce the regularity which we admire in the motions of the heavenly bodies. There must be an original adjustment of the system on which these laws are to act; a selection of the arbitrary quantities which they are to involve; a primitive cause which shall dispose the elements in due relation to each other, in order that regular recurrence may accompany constant change; that perpetual motion may be combined with perpetual stability; that derangements which go on increasing for thousands or for millions of years may finally cure themselves ”

“ Is a motion which, although not caused, is ENABLED by another motion, worthy of the name of a perpetual motion; seeing the perpetuity of motion has not to do merely with time, but with the indwelling of self-generative power—renewing itself constantly with the process of exhaustion? ”

“ Perpetual change, perpetual progression, increase and diminution, appear to be the rules of the material world, and to prevail without exception. [159] The smaller portions of matter which we have near us, and the larger, which appear as luminaries at a vast distance, different as they are in our mode of conceiving them, obey the same laws of motion; and these laws produce the same results; in both cases motion is perpetually destroyed, except it be repaired by some living power; in both cases the relative rest of the parts of a material system is the conclusion to which its motion tends. ”

“ The perpetual motion has been the quicksand of mechanicians, as the quadrature of the circle, the trisection of an angle, etc., have been that of geometricians: and as those who pretend to have discovered the solution of the latter problems are in general persons scarcely acquainted with the principles of geometry, those who search for, or imagine they have found, the perpetual motion, are always men to whom the most certain and invariable truths of mechanics are unknown. ”

“ Perpetual motion is a motion which is supplied and renewed from itself without the intervention of any external cause: to find a perpetual motion, or to construct a machine which shall have such a motion, is a subject which has engaged the attention of mathematicians for more than 2,000 years ”

“ In other words, these men in reasoning on specific problems presented to them, and on the problem of Perpetual Motion in particular, appear to have appreciated and applied in their reasonings, the principle of Conservation of Energy. ”

“ Observing that persons no less distinguished than Bishop Wilkins, the Marquis of Worcester, etc., have amused themselves with such things as perpetual motion, it may be some apology for a humble individual residing as I do in a very retired part of the country—scarcely within reach of much society—to confess that by way of a little rational amusement and relief to the mind, I have at times, amid a variety of other investigations and inventions, amused myself amongst the rest, with this of perpetual motion. ”

“ A generation ago, however, this principle was not known and taught, and the state of the world's learning was at such a stage that many even scientific minds thought Perpetual Motion possible, and worked for its attainment. ”

“ Again, let the natures in question be Motion and Best. It appears to be a received division and drawn from the depths of philosophy, that natural bodies either move in circle, or move straight forward, or remain at rest. For there is either motion without limit, or rest at a limit, or progress towards a limit. Now that perpetual motion of rotation seems to be proper to the heavenly bodies ”

“ These facts are all well known to the Perpetual Motion enthusiast. It is, therefore, of no avail to tell him that the scientific world has pronounced his aspirations and attempts but dreams, and that Perpetual Motion workers are by the scientific world denominated cranks. ”

“ These masses being saturated, in process of time become the sources of springs and the heads of rivers; and thus, by an endless round of ascending and descending waters, form, on the great scale of nature, an incessant cause of perpetual motion, in the purest acceptance of the term, and precisely on the principle that was contemplated by Boyle. It is probable, however, that any imitation of this process on the limited scale practicable by human art would not be of sufficient magnitude to be effective. ”

“ This Succession of temporal Ideas impressed, or excited in the Mind, as an Effect of Matter in Motion, producing a perpetual Change, both of Objects earthly and celestial, enables us not only to reflect upon past Vicissitudes of Nature, but from their regular Courses, known Order and Returns, predict Phænomena to come, and prove the periodical Effects of Nature's constant Laws so just and certain, that Time may be said with Truth, to co-exist with Motion. ”

“ All nature is in perpetual rotation; and in the great variety of actions which it produces, some must appear very extraordinary and unaccountable to us, by all the powers of matter and motion which fall within our narrow observations ”

“ If we are to accept the persistence of energy, we must accept the persistence of motion; if we are to accept the persistence of motion, we are compelled to accept the persistence of motion as speed in every particle. ”

“ In the physical world we are congnizant of but four elementary or primordial ideas, beside the inevitable Time and Space. They are Matter, Force, Position, and Motion. Of these, motion is simply change of position; and force is recognized as the agent in every change of motion. ”

“ I give the name of images to these representations; and, indeed, their movement through the vacuum taking place, without meeting any obstacle or hindrance, perfects all imaginable extent in an inconceivable moment of time; for it is the meeting of obstacles, or the absence of obstacles, which produces the rapidity or the slowness of their motion. At all events, a body in motion does not find itself, at any moment imaginable, in two places at the same time ”

“ And yet all generation takes place from motion, without which the universal nature of things would become torpid. The motion of the Sun, the motion of the Moon, cause changes; the motion of the Earth awakens the internal breath of the globe; animals themselves do not live without motion, and the ceaseless activity of the heart and arteries. For of no moment are the arguments for a simple straight motion toward the centre, that this is the only kind in the Earth, and that in a simple body there is one motion only and that a simple one. ”

“ If you imagine a body at rest, in an intangible medium, and not in contact with a gas or any substance capable of creating friction, that body by the prevailing theory of matter and motion, unless disturbed by an impulse from without, would remain forever at absolute rest. ”

“ If any analogy whatever existed between the human mind, on one side, and the laws of motion, on the other, the mind had already entered a field of attraction so violent that it must immediately pass beyond, into new equilibrium, like the Comet of Newton, to suffer dissipation altogether, like meteoroids in the earth’s atmosphere. ”

“ Every form, as the temporary result of a multiplicity of phenomena of motion, is as such perishable, and of limited duration. But, in the continual change of forms, matter and the motion inseparable from it remain eternal and indestructible. ”

“ Increasing indeed for a while in radius and depth, under the force of mechanic law, the world of motion and life is however destined, by force of its own friction, to be restored sooner or later to equilibrium ”

“ It is said that experience shows bodies to be indifferent to rest or motion, and some works on physics at the very beginning lay it down as a thing beyond all doubt, that a body placed at rest would remain in the same state for all eternity, and if put in motion it would move for all eternity in a right line, and always with the same velocity which it at first received. ”

“ Thus it is that the first cause of motion is derived from that which is in its nature self-moving; but this can neither be born nor die. Were it to die, the whole heaven would of necessity collapse, and all nature would stand still, nor could it find any force which could be set in movement anew from a primitive impulse. ”

“ It means, in the first place, that the ultimate facts in physics must be events, rather than bodies in motion. A body is supposed to persist through a certain length of time, and its motion is only definite when we have fixed upon one way of dividing intervals between space and time. ”

“ The fourth mode of action is by continuance, the very steward and almoner, as it were, of nature. We apply the term continuance to the abandonment of a body to itself for an observable time, guarded and protected in the meanwhile from all external force. For the internal motion then commences to betray and exert itself when the external and adventitious is removed. The effects of time, however, are far more delicate than those of fire. ”

“ There is, therefote, some one moment of time and some interval of space, in which the power or action is suspended between the two bodies creating the motion. Our consideration, then, is reduced to this, whether the bodies which are the extremes of motion prepare or alter the intermediate bodies, so that the power advances from one extreme to the other by succession and actual contact, and in the meantime exists in some intermediate body; or whether there exists in reality nothing but the bodies, the power, and the space? ”

“ All these millions, these thousands of millions, of suns hasten through boundless space with a speed which attains a velocity of two, three, and even four thousand metres a second. Motion maintains the equilibrium of the universe, and constitutes its organization, energy, and life. ”

“ The persistency of force means also the persistency of motion. All forms of physical energy—as light, heat, sound, electricity, magnetism, chemical action, gravity and sensible motion—he says, are different manifestations of force. ”