It’s been plaguing me for days: how could I devise a ball that would rise from the bottom of a tank of water, then somehow get automatically weighted down at the top in order to sink back to the bottom—where, of course, the weight would disappear, making the ball rise. If such a thing worked, its endless energy could be harnessed, and it would save the world billions of dollars, put energy companies out of business, save the world from the ill effects of fossil fuels and generally cause a global non-stop party.
One minor obstacle stands in the way: Isaac Newton. I mean, sure he’s dead and gone, but his laws go right on keeping machines from ticking away free of the constraints of conservation of energy. If his laws are any indication, Newton was a stubborn fellow.
Thing is, pursuers of machines that produce free energy—devices best called perpetual motion machines—are yet more stubborn. They’ve been at it for at least hundreds, probably thousands of years, all without a single verifiable success. Me, I look at that and think it’s more likely that I’ll get bitten by a spider and develop the ability to proofread in eight dimensions than that I’ll create the aforementioned magic ball. But not the pursuers of perpetual motion.
Never mind that engineers and scientists go on verifying Newton’s laws and working within their constraints to improve machines. Science, being science, always comes with an asterisk. Newton’s laws have proven inescapable so far. That tiny window is motivation enough for garage tinkerers worldwide. Check Youtube sometime, and you’ll soon be awash in claimants to gravity motors, magnetic motors, and a bewildering array of “overbalanced wheels.” Most don’t work even briefly, prompting their inventors to say they are really, really close to getting them to work. Others exhibit closed boxes, claiming that within lies the holy grail device.
Dig longer, and you’ll discover one of the most absorbing sites for lovers of science (and pseudoscience) on the Internet. It’s run by an emeritus professor of physics named Donald Simanek, and it’s called the Museum of Unworkable Devices. It’s not flashy, but it’s a remarkable convergence of concerns artistic and scientific. Simanek clearly enjoys the endless variations on the perpetual motion machine that he’s collected on an aesthetic level, but he does a fascinating job of helping the uninitiated understand just what these inventors are up against.
“Even people with some experience with machines can be stumped by a cleverly constructed diagram, just as we are deceived by artistic illusions even when we know they don’t represent reality,” Simanek said in a recent interview.
He also expanded on the tiny sliver of hope that keeps these inventors going: “Scientists haven’t yet learned everything there is to know. What we can say is there’s absolutely no evidence for the possibility of over-unity machines, and not even a clue in all that we know about nature to even suggest it as a remote possibility. All the evidence is against it. Human time travel and teleportation fall into the same category. So if someone thinks such goals are worth pursuing, he’s left with nothing as a starting point, and no clue as to how to proceed or where to look.”
What fills that “nothing” is a strange brand of creativity that reveals much about what it means to be human. That kind of creation raises a curious question: what exactly are these quixotic inventors making? Their “science” is not science, and the only kind of endless energy they foster is the pouring out of their own. What these dogged alchemists are really doing, though most would blanch at the thought, is creating a kind of art, creating monuments to human persistence that possess a distinctive, homegrown and often old-fashioned aesthetic. Simanek points out that this aesthetic is also a distinctively male vision of the word—whatever the reason, he says, the ranks of such inventors don’t seem to include women.
Gender aside, some artists tap into the curious machinations of the perpetually hopeful, crafting machines they don’t think will work at all. These don’t always possess exactly the same feverish aura, of course, but they are often beautiful. A gorgeous example graced the halls of Mass MoCA a couple of years ago as part of the exhibit What Time Is It on the Sun?
In it, Spencer Finch created a large chute of sorts, filled with apples and suspended high in the air. Every so often, it spilled an apple, which bounced into a position informed by the chance interactions of all those forces Newton codified. Finch’s artistic contraption in turn created an artwork, a pattern of apples on a green carpet, crafted mostly by nature.
They may not know it, but it’s just such strange romances that perpetual motion inventors foster, combining the clunky contraptions of human effort with the mute and persistent forces of nature. It’s a beautiful thing to see.
A book version of What Time Is It on the Sun? is available, and here’s a link to the Museum of Unworkable Devices.
For the complete interview with Donald Simanek, please see this post at the Ten Gallon Liberal.