Here’s a particularly absorbing site that’s a sort of museum of failures to invent the permanently elusive “perpetual motion machine”–sort of a monument to the stubborness of those who think they will magically discover that physics is somehow wrong, despite the inability of anyone to upend the academy by cobbling together a magic wheel. The site concerns itself primarily with understanding why these machines fail–great stuff if you’re into physics.
UPDATE: Our regular Joe makes a reasonable point. More exact language is indeed required.
So let’s replace the general “physics” above with what’s really the case: Newtonian physics, which, at the macro scale of the everyday, have held up to hundreds of years of scrutiny without failure.
It takes a particular sort of mentality to continue challenging Newton’s laws. I’m glad someone is willing to do it, but at this point, it’s got to be considered quixotic at best. With at least hundreds, probably thousands, of years of failed attempts at perpetual motion, it’s at least extraordinarily unlikely that Newton will go down in flames.
