Re: SMOT

[Stephen A. Lawrence]

John Steck wrote:
I disagree.  Your zeal is not letting you think clearly.
You misunderstand.  It's my knowledge of physics which causes me to see 
Greg's claims for what they are, not my "zeal".

He needs gravity
to break the flux field and drop the ball.
Bosh.   Two conservative fields => energy out == energy in.  Greg claims 
to be violating this.

OU requires more energy out than
put in, right?  Gravity, in this case IS a power source that must be
included in the energy calculation.
 

Nonsense.  You get back _exactly_ what you put in with (Newtonian) 
gravity.  It's not a power source.  With a closed track the ball ends up 
at its starting point and the net gain from gravity is zero.

With a net drop (e.g., rolling a ball down a hill) there's a gain in 
energy but Newton already explained that one, quite some time back.

Do you understand the difference between a "power source" and a force, 
or the difference between power, force, and energy in general?  Do you 
understand the difference between energy _storage_, such as happens with 
a spring or with a boulder we push up a hill, and things we commonly 
call "power sources", such as sunlight or burning coal?  In SMOT both 
gravity and the magnets are acting as springs.  They can store energy 
and give it back, but they're not "power sources".

Did you miss the bit where Greg said he suspected the magnets might be 
getting cold during the run, but hadn't checked it?  That was apparently 
his attempt at a smokescreen to show that the device wasn't OU, of 
course, but it made no sense -- there's no mechanism at all to cool off 
a magnet as a result of its action on a piece of iron.  (If there were, 
it would be action at a distance of the most grotesque kind, to say 
nothing of another sort of first law violation.)

I think it is relatively safe to say that 2nd law is valid in ALL cases...
 

Irrelevant too.  Greg's talking about first law violations, not second 
law:  _something_ provides the energy to overcome friction as the ball 
goes around the track and there isn't any power going in.

Gibbs free energy never increases, except in SMOT.
OU is claimed only when the true power source is not known, not non-existent
(some poor chap on the other end of your hyper-dimensional energy straw is
getting a raw deal).  Eventually all energy sources will be found and OU
claims debunked.
 

In this case he has nothing but static magnets and a locally flat 
gravitational field.  There is no man behind the curtain -- there's 
nothing present that isn't already extremely well understood.

That, of course, is why he can't make the device work.
By the way, conservation of energy isn't a given at all scales; in the 
general relativity model of the universe it's not even a well defined 
concept.  But at low energy densities using common material objects 
occupying a small volume of space, as in the the SMOT device case, 
conservation of energy can be safely anticipated at a level far, far 
finer than any measurement we can make.

Moving a ball around a SMOT track is a nice Sharper Image desk toy (if it
really could be made to work), but I really don't see how this kind of
motive power could be harnessed to do work.
 

I will be blunt:  This statement indicates that you have completely 
missed the point.  It sounds exactly like Greg's either ignorant or 
dissembling statement that all he had been able to make was a "toy" 
which wasn't of any great importance.

Do you understand Newtonian mechanics?  Do you understand that, 
according to all that is known from physics experiments and theory for 
the last several centuries, it is flatly impossible for a ball to go 
around a (mechanical) track, over and over, indefinitely, without a 
power source?

Put the whole thing in a big box and measure the temperature.  Friction 
with the track will eventually warm the system up.  Voila!  Heat out, 
nothing in.


Stephen I too once shared your intoxication with the concept of what Greg
proposed in SMOT and RMOD,
You seem completely confused here.  I have never been "intoxicated" with 
any concept of Greg's -- it was obvious from the start that he was 
talking about a perpetual motion machine of the first kind.

I was, however, polite in the initial discussions.
To repeat:
Greg is talking about letting something fall down and then raising it up
again, and getting energy out of the whole circuit, from starting point
back to the starting point.  That certainly _IS_ "OU" -- it's free
energy, perpetual motion, a violation of the First Law.  It's radical.
And it's the whole point in his magic arrangement of magnets which will
pull on a steel ball on the way in but then let it go without resistance
on the way out.
Proof that gravity isn't conservative would be, to say the least, an
important result.
 

If you don't understand this then you need to brush up on your physics.