Is Magnetic Repulsion Indefinitely Stable?

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=%22frictionless+bearing%22+%2Bmagnet+&btnG=Search&meta=

As I understand it, the energy taken out of the Joseph Newman's Energy Machine slowly demagnetizes the magnets, until the machine stops. Then you have to re-magnetize it by pumping in external energy again - just like charging a battery.

There obviously is no 'free lunch', but the question is: how economical can this process be? How practical is the process? Any ideas?

I have his book from ~25 years ago. Entertaining but not much more than unsubstantiated conjecture with little actual detail on practical method. Lots of horror stories abound on the fellow. There is a very good chance that he is nothing more than a scam artist, whether he knows it or not. If he had anything of merit then by now either we would all be using it or someone would have whacked him. He is apparently very secretive and won't disclose any details to anyone who could apply good science in evaluating his stuff. Of course there is always the possibility he has finally found it but then there may be an equal possibility that flying spaghetti monsters exist.

Jorrie

I'm impressed by the quality of your posts--at least the few (I'm a new user of the forum) that I have seen--would not really have expected to see you weigh in on this and reference Newman's device. Would you care to share any comment or opinion on the work of Col. Tom Beardon..or T.H. Moray...or perhaps others of your own choosing?

Lonnie

Hi Lonnie, you asked: "Would you care to share any comment or opinion on the work of Col. Tom Beardon..or T.H. Moray...or perhaps others of your own choosing?"

My knowledge of Tom Bearden and Dr Moray is limited, but from what I know, they are from the "free energy" grouping. Another one that I do know a bit about is Myron Evans, of Grand Covariant Unified Field Theory (GCUFT) "fame". Evans also has a 'vacuum energy solution' to his field equations. His theory has been thoroughly debunked by various scientists and mathematicians, amongst others by Bruhn in the link above.

Back to Dr Moray. I'm pretty sure if he had a real source of 'free energy', himself or others would have exploited it by now. As engineers and scientists, we obviously do not believe that there is free energy! Further, I believe his thoery (if he had one) has never been published in a peer reviewed publication.

But, and this is a BIG BUT, cosmologists believe that the universe at large is exploiting some or other form of "free energy" (vacuum energy or dark energy in general), that they do not understand. So, who knows?

Jorrie

Jorrie

Thank you for the reply. The interesting, even disturbing thing about Moray's work is the quality and level of expertise of the scientists and engineers and responsible laymen who examined and tested his machines. They may not have understood what they observed and perhaps even been taken in somehow, but it is hard to impugn the validity of their affidavits--and Moray's own personal reputation for integrity is hard to deny.

If this were in a court of law, it would be difficult to destroy the credibility of these witnesses. The same cannot be said for many of the "free energy" statements that abound. Interesting stuff.

Lonnie

Hi Lonnie, yes, it's somewhat disturbing, as you said. But why has nobody ever been able to replicate Moray's work and demo it again? Lack of documentation? Lack of the "secret source"?

It is true that a lot of 'radiant energy' reach Earth every second, but the density is so low that it is hard to believe a small antenna can pick up enough to be useful, resonance or not.

The cosmological vacuum energy is of extremely low density; today it only manifests itself over vast volumes of space. But then, the big bang presumable extracted vast energies from every tiny region of space...

I don't think you will find simple magnets can be configured to control position. There has been a lot of work done with magnetic bearings but they use active servo-loop control to regulate the position of the rotor within the bearing. The US Air Force has spent a lot of money developing this along with numerous others.

you can make magnetic levitation work as long as you have a lateral restraint, and this is done all the time. You can also have servo restraint as they have on levitating trains (even these have a backup mechanical restraint system )

A stable untouched magnetic levitation can only be done with superconductors,

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=%22magnetic+levitation%22+%2Bsuperconductors&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

I guess I assumed the whole purpose of a magnetic bearing was to eliminate mechanical contact. It would seem to defeat the advantage to have some contacting restraint. That's what a regular bearing does.

I have a spinning top which levitates on a magnetic field. It runs for quite a while, but eventualy slows due to air resistance, at which point it becomes unstable, and either flops over or flies away, in a funny and startling manner. Making a useful device running on this principal would be very difficult, I'd think, without the friction of a guide bearing. But then maglev trains work, so if you are willing to endure some friction, you might read about them. How about a pinpoint bearing in which the load is hanging from a magnet (So a 1 kg rotor is suspended with a magnetic force of 1.1 kg, for example)? Eddy currents a concern?

I'm surprised that no one before you mentioned eddy currents, and that you only mentioned them in passing...

Any conductive material spinning near a fixed magnet is going to generate eddy currents, which can be a very significant source of energy loss. The better the conductor, the closer to the magnet, and the higher the speed of rotation, the greater the loss.

For example I used to have a phonograph turntable that used a magnet brought near a spinning aluminum disk on the motor shaft to adjust the speed of the motor to the correct value (natural motor speed and pulley sizes made so the turntable ran somewhat too fast when the magnet was far from the disk.)

If you've never tried it, drop a rare-earth magnet into a heavy-walled tube of copper or aluminum just slightly larger ID than the OD of the magnet, and see how fast it falls. If you don't have the tube, it will work almost as well sliding the magnet down a not-quite-vertical U-channel or Angle.

Ken

Typically, your 1kg rotor "suspended" by a 1.1kg magnetic force would not stay there without mechanical restraint because of the inverse square law for force fields (whatever they are), but I have observed phenomena of interest when playing with small bar magnets as a child.

When similar poles are forced toward one another, instead of the repulsive force growing stronger continuously until physical contact is made, there is sometimes a region when the similar poles are very close to each other when the perceived force necessary to continue closing the gap diminishes. I believe this is caused by the sensible attraction of the opposite poles making itself felt.

If this is an actual fact, and if the inverse can be accomplished, that is, two opposite poles approaching physical contact, perhaps there could be a physical geometry which would center a rotor--built in negative feedback to keep a rotor centered.

I won't go further for fear of painting myself into a corner--if it would work, someone would have surely done it already.

Same idea, old experinment. Tie a piece of string to a steel nut or washer and attach the other end of your string to you bench top. Now arrange a permanent magnet on a stand such that it will hold the nut stretched up on its retaining string but not touching the magnet. It is "levitated". The magnet is doing something to counteract the 981 cm/s^2 acceleration of gravity. Is it "working" (force through distance)? No. Is it expending energy somehow to sustain the counter-acceleration (force)? If so, where is it coming from? Will the magnet wear out? My old physics teacher's long winded answer basically came down to, "that's just the way it works".

Fun stuff to think about.

Lonnie

Lonnie, your questions: "... Is it expending energy somehow to sustain the counter-acceleration (force)? If so, where is it coming from? Will the magnet wear out?" are not easy to answer. My 'engineering gut-feel' tells me that if no work is performed, no energy is lost, so the magnets should be able to suspend a weight 'forever and a day'...

Then, if I try to hold up a weight against gravity for any length of time, my arm gets very, very 'crampy' and tired, while I'm performing no work at all! OK, I know the processes that my body uses to hold up the weight is 'lossy', while a magnet's process may not be...

So, perhaps 'scientist' can enlighten us on the efficiency of the mechanism that magnets use to 'hold up' a weight?

What I believe I read once on that qualified "work" as a useful expenditure. Clearly, it would seem, energy must be expended to counter the acceleration force of gravity. So in a sense it would seem that it is not exactly "static" it is accelerating. I've always felt that perhaps the notion of "work" is a bit archaic and in need of revision. Accelerating against gravity, even in a static sense is the same acceleration that would create classically defined work on a body in free space. If we believe that energy is being expended it isn't much of a leap to believe that it is converted from a mass loss in the magnet but since the conversion rate is so high we can't practically measure it. Now if we could discover a way to speed up the conversion rate we might be able to get really useful levels of energy from magnets. I think the think that may be overlooked in all the "permanent magnet motor" hopefuls is that even if it could be made to work, with the best magnets we currently have I don't think we would be looking at a prospect of tremendous amounts of power or power to weight ratio.

Rcaper you stated;

"Clearly, it would seem, energy must be expended to counter the acceleration force of gravity. Accelerating against gravity, even in a static sense is the same acceleration that would create classically defined work on a body in free space."

Which is not correct. Look at it this way, if you lifted up an object and placed it on the table would the table be doing any work? The answer is of course no. The object picked up potential energy as it was raised from the ground to the table top but once it was placed on the table top there in no further change in motion and therefore no energy is being expended.

Recapper

Reference placing of an object on a table and no work being done or energy expended, perhaps it is useful to consider what is happening at the atomic/molecular level. What we think of as "physical contact" seems poorly defined to me.

Apparently, you have one batch of molecules (what the table is made of) whose apparent external fields (whatever those are) are repelling ("touching") those of another batch of molecules (those of which the object is composed). Must be so, because the two materials do not normally integrate into each other (although something similar can be accomplished with extremely fine machining and polishing of two pieces of the same material).

I imagine this to be a result of differing vibrational frequencies between the molecules--much the same as the method by which you can straighten a bent driveline by hammering on it while it is rapidly rotating. If it is spinning fast enough, you always hit the "high" spot.

Again, at the molecular level, we are dealing with moving electrons (packets of wave energy that exhibit "mass" because of their velocity?) and that sounds to me like kinetic energy of movement. If the acceleration of gravity tends to force two of these orbits together, they resist being deformed. You see where this is going...is energy used, even work accomplished, to maintain the integrity of those surface atoms/molecules?

Over my head, but it still seems relevant to the magnet discussion--can the magnet sit there forever holding the washer suspended under tension? Change the string for a spring or rubber band--now you can have measureable movement over a limited range with concurrent, measureable force-through-distance and kinetic and potential energy exchange. Perhaps I am flogging a dead horse and it is just as my old physics teacher said, "...that's just the way it works...".

That never really satisfied me. Thank you for your comments very much.

Lonnie

If the acceleration of gravity tends to force two of these orbits together, they resist being deformed. You see where this is going...is energy used, even work accomplished, to maintain the integrity of those surface atoms/molecules?

You are right. During the time from when the object comes close enough to have a repulsion for the table's molecules until the person or device placing it there releases it (and for some time after, if you count oscillation of the surfaces) work is done bending and compressing the table and the object. The table and the object store that energy as a spring stores energy, more or less indefinitely, until an additional force moves the object or the table.

"...that's just the way it works..."

If your physics teacher said that, it means one of three things: (A) he or she didn't want to take the time to give a full explanation, (B) he or she didn't think you would be interested in or understand the full explanation, or (most likely, since you were interested enough to ask the question in the first place) (C) he or she didn't really understand the full explanation him/herself.

OK so, perhaps what is required is a slightly different way of thinking about this. I would propose that there should be two classes of work, dynamic, according to the classical definition and static. The table is providing useful work by establishing a displacement in an acceleration field. The work is of a static nature so it is not classical. The energy required to do this work, and I will always agree with Jorrie on the contention that there "is no free lunch", so the energy is rendered as a result of a mass loss in the table but at the rate of E=mc^2 we are not likely to be able to measure it with current technology. Classically speaking, Work = Force x Distance, so can we define a new class of work as maybe Static Work = Acceleration x Distance where distance is the measure between centers of gravity? Surely we must agree that the gravitational field is an energy field. If we tie a string to a weight and spin it around we must exert energy to keep it from flying away. So does the Earth exert energy to keep the Moon in orbit. No free lunch so gravity must result from a mass loss in both attractive partners. So I would contend that it is work to accelerate or resist acceleration whether in a static or dynamic manifestation.

As I attempt to further refine my thinking on this it occurs to me that my idea of "static work" when we include mass is essentially potential energy. But maybe the idea of what constitutes potential energy or how we think about that needs to be re-thought. If there is no free lunch in terms of energy why should the concept of energy that is "potential" be static and hence thought of as "storage for free". Storage, or the holding in an unreleased state implies an equal and opposite force since normally entropy would dictate the conversion of that energy into a lower state. I'm just thinking out loud here trying to get out of the box so I welcome your comments.

rcaper you stated

"I would propose that there should be two classes of work, dynamic, according to the classical definition and static."

First up work by definition is the rate we are using energy or stated mathematically

Work = Energy_Expended / Time_Expended

That means that to have a potential rate of energy expenditure you would need to remove the time from the equation. Doing this results in what we already have, Kinetic Energy or the energy of motion and Potential or the energy associated with gravity. Which brings us right back to all the Newtonian equations we already have.

Good point, thanks for commenting. I suppose what I am attempting is to change the way I think about this and to do so a change in wording and language seems useful. "Potential" internalized seems to infer static, not dynamic and it seems that it could be more useful to think of it as more dynamic, albeit in a different state from kinetic. Perhaps it seems silly, fruitless or unnecessary but sometimes the way we habitually frame things can be limiting and it happens to be an envelope I like to push when an opportunity presents.

When similar poles are forced toward one another, instead of the repulsive force growing stronger continuously until physical contact is made, there is sometimes a region when the similar poles are very close to each other when the perceived force necessary to continue closing the gap diminishes.

I remember experiencing this effect with bar magnets. I believe this effect is due to one bar manet having significantly stronger magnetism than the other: once they approach closly enough, the stronger magnet's field either (A) attracts the unmagnetized molecules of the weaker magnet more than it repels the magnetized ones, or (B) temporarily (or permanently, if there is sufficient difference in the strength of the two magnets) realigns the magnetic poles of the magnetized molecules of the weaker magnet.

I just tried it with a good rare-earth magnet and a cheap ceramic magnet of roughly the same physical size; the same thing happened. With repeated trials, the mid-distance repulsion got weaker each time they were brought together, until finally they attracted at any small distance. So the 'B' option is at least part of the solution.

Dick

Actually, when I mentioned suspending a 1kg with a 1.1kg magnetic force, I had in mind a bearing (jewel style) on the magnet, with the 1kg rotor hanging below it, so that the load on the bearing would be relatively low. In this case the inverse square law tends to reinforce stability ( because there is less force acting on the lower, more massive, suspended parts of the rotor) There is a simple motor that showed up here several months ago (and on YouTube) in which a nail or wood screw serves as the rotor hanging from a battery, with a small neodymium magnet on the lower end of the nail. Add a wire and a battery and you've got a 10,000 rpm motor. See this.

I made a motor like this and it spun quite well, with the bearing point not drifting all around as it does in the video. These things are fun to make and are puzzling in their operation -- I'd expect the plane of motion to be different.

Another interesting link from YouTube: Here, there is a levitating plate, which does not seem to require rotation to stabilize it. I don't understand the language, so I don't know whether the coils are ac or dc, etc.

Ken--VERY cool links. I must try the battery/motor soonest. Thank you. Lonnie

Without active regulation there is no stable "capture" range. The point of stability, without restraint is just that a point. Slightly to one side you loose capture and to the other you accelerate to contact. Of course I am speaking again of a practical situation and not one of just floating a magnet over a superconductor.

If you are planning to support a rotating shaft you might look into air bearings (foil bearings), as used in some high speed turbines. They require no lubrication, and are very low friction.

With all the Expert Engineers on this site, I challenge you to intelligently de-bunk the obvious facts of the operation of this magnetic repulsion motor/generator

http://www.josephnewman.com/Analysis_by_Dr.Hastings.html

Sorry, but as is typical with all of the material I have seen regarding Newman's machines, it is completely lacking in any exacting details about the construction and wiring of the machine. There are no illustrations of the test arrangement in regard to the exact construction. Based on no useful information and just general descriptions that are of little use I would have to say any presumed results are simply the result of incompetent measurements or and intent to scam on Newman's part. If he really wants to get recognition and there were any merit to his method, he must be more forthright in disclosing details. It would be easy to say he seems content to scam small time investors on a project he has been working on for 30 years but has never demonstrated in a competent way any worthwhile results.

As Ken pointed out, no images or diagrams and lacking in detail. One thing that I see as a glaring example of how not to measure the efficiency of a machine is his mixing of measurement standards.. For example he states the rotor weighs 700 pounds then goes on to stat the moment of inertia as 40Kgm². Every time you convert from one system to another you introduce an error and when you are talking things like coils with small currents that error multiplies. If you wish to calculate the efficiency of a machine then it is absolutely critical that you stick to one standard of measurement. Since electrical energy already uses SI units my suggestion would be to forget about imperial weights and measures and only use SI units.

The other thing that stands out, like a prostitute in a bevy of bishops, is that he has this humungus coil with 55 miles (88Km approximately, but you get my point about mixing measuring standards) of copper wire, and god knows how many turns in it. Now I hate to say this but with the amount of electromagnetic radiation you, this coil and everything else is bombarded with is going to end up inducing a not so insubstantial voltage and current. If you then start moving the thing through the earths magnetic field it turns into a generator. The over unity power, he may or may not be getting from it, is more than likely due to induced voltage and current in the coil.

The only way to test, if his motor is indeed running at over unity, is to stick it in a faraday cage to shield it from electromagnetic radiation. The faraday cage then needs to sit inside a further cage, made of something like soft iron, that is capable of collapsing the earths and every other magnetic field, that could and probably is, effecting it. Only then will any measurements of energy input and output relate solely to his motor.

It reminds me of the post in the last over unity machine thread about the guy that invented an over unity generator. They used to power the world, everybody was happy and everything was perfect, till the aliens rocked up with the bill for the power. Sooner or later somebody will work out that the free energy he is boasting about comes from something like transmission lines. The day after that is when the bill will arrive for the energy he has been nicking for the past 20 years.

You know Guys, I can see this discussion having merit, if this was theory.

I, and many hundreds of others have actually seen this motor/generator WORK.

Science that trys to explain away something that WORKS, is NOT true science but brain washed efforts to protect the status quo and the DAMN power companies that have robbed us for years.

Years ago this dude drove an automobile from Mobile Alabama to Montgomery with only this motor powering it..

If people were really interested they could get the detailed questions answered as to the how's and whys.

I have seen a man pull a rabbit out of a hat, saw a woman in half, disappear, but that doesn't make it a scientific fact. Looks can be deceiving. I would love to build one of his machines and verify it for myself but alas, no data. If he has a working principle, there should be no need for massive magnets and miles of wire. It should scale just fine. It has all the trappings of classic magical misdirection.

You claim to have seen Newman's motor/generator work.

This is straight from Dr. Hastings: "The total generated energy ---- consisting of mechanical work, mechanical friction, ohmic heating, and light ---- is many times larger than the battery input energy."

When you saw this machine working, how much energy did the battery supply in Joules? What was the sum total of mechanical work, mechanical friction, ohmic heating, and light, in Joules? What was the ratio of joules in to joules out? How many kilometers away from any sources of energy, such as power lines and radio stations was the machine? Was the device shielded from all sunlight? Was it in a room in which any thermal gradients were minimized? What was the air pressure in the test chamber before, during and after the demonstration? Who performed these measurements? Who did the disassembly of the machine to verify that there were no energy sources obscured by its construction? How many scientists were there to witness the event?

Consider that YouTube (cool, but a triviality in comparison to a machine that actually creates energy) went from zero to $1.65 billion in one year. A device that creates energy "many times larger than the battery input energy" would be worth, certainly, thousands of times more than that. Single year revenue alone could run into the $ trillions. Why is Newman sitting on his idea? Why not either give it to humanity, or greedily make unfathomably large amounts of money from it?

Might it be that the machine does not work as advertised?

This site provides a list of various greater-than-unity claims and scams through history. (Newman's machine is in the list.) Prizes have been offered to anyone who can demonstrate such a machine, but the prizes remain unclaimed. Although some of these claims reflect ignorance, many were/are active frauds.

You say "If people were really interested...". I think there are many people who are really interested, and who have read of Hasting's and Newman's writings, but still have not had their most basic questions answered, let alone their "detailed questions". I look forward to your answers to the basic questions above. After those are answered, we can move onto the details.

Years ago (in '79 I believe it was) some fellow came out with a purely permanent-magnet motor design based on rare-earth (samarium-cobalt, I think) magnets. The motor actually did work - for awhile.

It takes energy to make a permanent magnet a magnet. More so in rare-earth magnets. In a way, the resulting "residual magnetism" can be thought of as a form of potential energy. The motor I saw in '79 was a very clever arrangment to extract this energy and convert it into motion. By the time the motor petered out, the motor's magnets weren't much stronger than a typical 'fridge magnet.

The motor worked fine - while it worked - and it was very clever. It wasn't the motor to which I objected. It was the inventor's wild claims of the motor being a revolutionary source of "free" energy. Once it was discovered the magnets were depleted during operation, the guy disappeared.

-e

Europium

I am somewhat interested in this motor you saw in '79. It occurs to me that having the magnets wear down is not very important. They can be "recharged". My question is whether they can have an energy/weight ratio better than current battery technology. Imagine pulling into a service station to refuel and all they have to do is hook up a couple of cables and zap the domains in your "permanent" magnet back into allignment and off you go again. Do you know of any research along this line? What about a POC (point of contact) for the above motor?

Thanks

Lonnie

Hello Ishurtle,

I wish I could tell you more. About the only thing I remember of it now was that it had a rotor and stator and that you varied the torque by moving them axially with respect to each other. The motor needed an initial "push" to get going, but once it did, it sustained the motion without further help. The prototype was a linear motor which had been "bent into a circle" so that the output fed back into the input, so to speak. It depended entirely on shaping the field so that a pole in the rotor saw a gentle increase of flux density, then "went over the top," upon seeing a switch to the opposite polarity which decreased rapidly, switched again (due to the field from the next magnet in the stator) which, again, gradually increased. This is my recollection of the device, but it has been many years and my memory of it is very likely incomplete and flawed. I also seem to recall that the number of magnets in the rotor and stator differed by one.

As far as "recharging" the magnets, you and I both would need to probably google how rare-earth magnets are made. My guess is that you heat the magnet above its Curie point, apply a strong magnetization field, then gradually cool the magnet. If this is the process, I suspect it consumes a great deal more energy than that stored in the magnet itself as a residual field. But I say this without actually having looked into it. Nor do I have time at the moment, because if I don't get my butt moving Real Soon, I'll be late for work AND have to pay for parking!

TTYL,

-e

Your post piqued my curiosity, so I looked around and found this site, which contains quite a lot of practical info on how magnets are made, re-magnetized, etc.

I am essentially in agreement with the pragmatic engineering arguments that have been made--almost always negatively--over this device and many others of the same ilk. I do believe however that there is a danger that we who do understand some technologies to a profound level may inadvertently acquire a paradigm from which we make our assessments.

We may tend to think that because we know a lot about a little that we can transfer that knowledge to areas where we are not as all-knowing as we would like to believe. Sort of like those celebrities who, because they receive so much adulation and attention in their own sphere, don't realize how silly they sound when they choose to make pronouncements about other things...like foreign policy for instance.

There is no "free lunch", but you have to go quite away into it before you can show that a water wheel is not a "free energy" device. I think there have been a fair number of technologies that were put to use with only the most primitive theory to back them up. The bottom line was that they could be shown to work.

Another place that we may go astray is in putting too much faith in the math. Math is perfect, as far as I know, in and of itself--although I suspect there are foundational theorists who would argue with that. We use math to model the physical world--and by definition, models are not identities, they approach truth. And any formula or equation that depends on measured physical quantities is suspect to some degree. And of course when you drop into the sub-atomic universe, all macroscopic common sense seems to go out the window.

When we analyze some of the so-called over-unity devices for instance, it may be about as difficult to prove that they don't work as it is to prove that they do.

I must beg your forgiveness--just my Sunday night philosophical rambling with little except opinion to back it up. But it is fun.

Lonnie

Hey I would love to have an open mind but open to what? All that is given is claims. I can claim I am not from this planet and in fact have for years but in reality, even though my father claims to have found me under a flat rock, my mother was the one who saw me exit her womb and has the true data. So that's all we're saying is give us all the facts not just second hand observations or I will send my friend the flying spaghetti monster to steal them from his dreams.

You wrote: "Another place that we may go astray is in putting too much faith in the math. Math is perfect, as far as I know, in and of itself--although I suspect there are foundational theorists who would argue with that. We use math to model the physical world--and by definition, models are not identities, they approach truth."

---------

Mathematics is, after all, a completely artificial construct. There was a thread not long ago in which the original poster questioned certain operations involving zero and infinity. One responder went so far as to say that the number zero was (to paraphrase) not a "mathematical number" and that one couldn't use it in mathematical operations (then promptly used it in a mathematical operation). But mathematical frameworks are, as is mathematics overall, artificial constructs. For someone to say division by zero is possible or that 0/0 = 1 in the conventional framework we use day-to-day is total nonsense because of the way the system is defined. It's a matter of definition, not belief. There are other mathematical frameworks in which division by zero is meaningful, but the division operation itself is defined differently (in certain frameworks called "wheels" for instance). Let the poster subscribe to one of these frameworks instead. But to say zero is not a number or to say 0/0 = 1 merely because one wants to believe this is true is silly. The innumerable contributors of our day-to-day system defined its properties. It's not a matter of belief one way or another as if this system existed as some feature of Nature. The whole thing is artificial, like a house. If you build your own house, how you built it is how you built it and not something else. What you put inside is what you put inside, and not something else. How it's built and what it contains simply is. It could have been done differently, but it wasn't. For someone to come along and insist certain features are other than they are because this person believes it to be so is a clear sign of lunacy. They might not like the way it is, but it is regardless.

My point is basically this: for "foundationalists" to come along and assert that mathematics is not perfect, I'd say it all depends on the specific mathematics applied to a specific domain. The Real number system is inappropriate if an electrical engineer's objective is to locate the poles and zeros on a Bode plot of an elliptic filter. For that sort of problem the Complex number system is ideal (in spite of the fact that the complex number system relies on the "preposterous" idea of i ≡ -1^1/2). The concept of Perfection - and consequently, Imperfection - needs a context in which it has meaning.

My 1.5 + 0i cents, for what it's worth.

-e

Guest: You say "the obvious facts..." I can think of few things less obvious as facts. They seem to be either obvious lies, or gross misunderstandings. If they are facts, they are anything but obvious, and Newman has done little to make the facts of the matter clear. If, as Newman claims, he is pursuing his over-unity machine for the good of humanity, then it would make great sense to give a full disclosure, schematics, demonstrations, etc. All our energy woes would disappear, if his machine works.

The laws of physics and thermodynamics have worked with very high precision to enable us to create wonderful things, and to understand many of the workings of nature and the universe. Someone who claims to overturn all that, but fails to make a full disclosure, can only be regarded as a con man or delusional. Although there is nothing I've read about him or his machine that leads me to think it works as advertised, if I were shown the machine and its schematics, and found that it indeed created more energy than it consumed, I'd be among the first to say, "Good for you, my understanding of physics has clearly been flawed." But now, without schematics, drawings, and a working machine, there is nothing to debunk. It's fun to tell my son about my walk to school and back each day, uphill both ways. But I certainly hope he doesn't believe me.

Nobody has said that Newman's motor doesn't work. What we are saying is that the energy is coming from somewhere. The law of conservation of energy and matter has held for absolutely every case that has been investigated to date.

Since the whole idea is to minimize pollution by getting free energy if we find out that it turns out the energy is actually due to his machine adding a small additional load to an existing power source then we end up going backwards.

For the moment lest assume that we eventually found out that the energy came from the electricity grid. The fact that there is only one extremely small machine adding a extra load to the grid would be undetectable. If we however make hundreds of millions of these machines we end up worse off because the increased load on the grid and inherent losses means we need to generate more power than we would if the his machine was connected directly to mains power.

It's vitally important to know how your machines work and the consequences of operating it, anything less is naïve, dangerous and exactly what Newman is doing.

You wrote: Nobody has said that Newman's motor doesn't work. I'll correct that oversight: Newman's motor does not work. His cohort, Hastings, claims "The total generated energy ---- consisting of mechanical work, mechanical friction, ohmic heating, and light ---- is many times larger than the battery input energy."

He's never proven that to be the case, but has taken millions of other peoples money. He sells "dealerships" for the "future" right to sell his "invention." He and Dennis Lee are both scam artists, and remarkably similar ones at that.

"Nobody has said that Newman's motor doesn't work."

I must apologize for my simplistic and erroneous phraseology. What I meant to convey was that while his engine actually goes round and can produce motion, as Ken stated and I agree with emphatically, there is absolutely no evidence that it produces more energy than it consumes. He also seems to be deliberately dancing around answering any technical questions. Everything I have read seems to be lacking critical and essential information that could be used to either substantiate or debunk his claims.

Like Ken, I too believe he is a scam artist rather than a deluded pseudo scientist/engineer. My apologies for the unfortunate wording and for giving this extortionist the slightest modicum of support. Please forgive me.

As an A/E type mechanical engineer, I was very interested in who might come up with a way to use permanent magnets for fan or pump shaft bearings first. No one has been able to come up with a way to economically do so...yet.

However, dynamic control of a system using magnetic bearings has already been in use for several years now to make one of the most efficient and oil-free compressor systems on the market. It is continuously monitored for vibration and kept so tightly within the tolerances needed for stable operation that only by the refrigerant noises in the piping can you tell whether or not 50 tons of cooling is happening right beside you.

http://www.turbocor.com/products_technology/magnetic.html

So by all means, go for it with your research into magnetic bearings, just don't expect to find an 'easy' answer using cheap permanent magnets that will let you do heavy work or make a mint, and expect that at higher force levels you will need either active feedback and electrical control of the system or a mechanical restraint. Also, at high temperatures (induced by high rotational speeds) most permanent magnets will lose their fields. That's just one of the challenges they are trying to solve right now for microturbines...which I believe will also end up developing toward the air/foil bearings noted above, or a combination of an initial electro-magnetic 'float' until stable rotation allows the foils to take over.

Anyway, this is an ongoing good theoretical/practical field for questioning. Wish I could patent the answer!

Sheloske,

If you're a bit mathematically inclined, this document may be of some use. In it the authors develop closed-form equations (!) governing a type of permanent-magnet bearing design. Their particular PM bearing is used in a medical device, but the principles should apply regardless:

http://www.launchpnt.com/uploads/media/2003_Optimal_Design_of_Permanent_Magnet.pdf

A lot of work on superconducting magnetic bearings was begun in the 1960s. Most of these depend in one way or another on the Meisner effect - the tendency for superconductors to completely exclude magnetic fields.

-e

Btw, is "sheloske" your real name? Sheloske is my mum's maiden name.

thanks for the link. every little bit helps. I am currently enrolled as a student and I have only accomplished up to an algebra math level so you could definitely say that im some what mathematically inclined. Yes sheloske is indeed my name.

Hello again Sheloske,

Here is a very recent work done by NASA's Glenn Research Center on mag bearings based on Halbach's work (referenced in my previous post's link). The math in this one is not for the faint of heart, but the text and diagrams is worth a read:

http://gltrs.grc.nasa.gov/reports/2006/TM-2006-214357.pdf

-e

Hi europium, good to see you back and thanks for dragging this thread back to the original poster's question by solid references!

I was tempted to write a "Dear Thread..." ... "Sorry Thread..." post like you did once before - can't remember the thread, but I found it very appropriate at that time.

There's nothing wrong with a bit of diversion into things related, like 'free energy', but for that to dominate the thread and leave the original question large unanswered is not so good...

Jorrie

Hi Jorrie. It's nice to get some positive feedback once in awhile. Thanks.

-e

Now look what's happened.

I have gone blue in the face and my eyes are all bloodshot.

Maybe it from talking till I am blue in the face to somebody that doesn't want to listen,

Hi Masu,

Whenever your avatar feels blue, tell it to just start breathing again. (It might also help if he/she cut back on those Asian Pharmaceuticals! Everything is better in moderation - including moderation.)

-e

Hi e,

Like I said in another thread maybe it's caused by those rising levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere from all those fossil fuels we keep burning. If I lie down for a while the colour might come back. By the way the biggest legal opium poppy fields in the world are in Tasmania and last time I look it was still part of Australia.. Mind you there are quiet a few Tasmanians that would disagree.

Anyway my new telescope has arrived from the USA and I pick it up today so I will defiantly be cutting back a bit on my CR-4 posts for a while. I'm off to find a dark room and lie down for a while so as Tigger would say TTFN.

Speaking of international shipments, a friend asked if I would find and install an under-car lighting kit for her son's 18th birthday. I finally found one that had all the features he'd want - color-changing, chaser lights, interior control console, a remote - the works. I found the perfect kit on a British site - for £400! Yikes! (I just wanted to buy the kit, not the whole company!)

I finally found a comparable kit, in Queensland, Australia (!), which was only a tiny bit less ideal than the British kit (about the only difference was that the Brits used surface-mount LEDs which let them make the lighting strips very thin). Compared to £400, the Aussey kit cost less than AUS $300 and it included FREE international shipping - or so they said. Turns out "international" didn't quite include the United States (or even the Northern Hemisphere, for all I know.) The company sent me a frantic email graciously offering my money back in lieu of asking me to actually pay for what they advertised as FREE (I'm sure they were embarassed by having not anticipated an order from the U.S.) I told them I'd pay AUS $300 plus twice the shipping, if necessary, any day of the week, rather than pay 400 bloody pounds. Even with shipping, I was way ahead. So yes, I said, charge me the difference and please ship the damn thing with all speed.

Immediately after I'd placed my order their website qualified the offer of "free" international shipping.

Like your scope, it took for-bloody-ever to get here, and when the box finally arrived it was plastered with just about every kind of Australian postage stamp you can imagine. Some of them were quite beautiful! I kept the stamps for my son, who collects them.

I checked the kit out. It was totally awesome and was even better than I expected. Inside the package was a note from the company saying they had to charge me even more for postage than they had quoted earlier "to use a different kind of delivery method that wasn't so prone to the rising problem of highway bandits." In the remoter parts of Queensland, bandits apparently have an affinity for postal trucks. Sounds a bit like Far West Texas, circa 1860.

-e

It makes me wonder some times. I purchased a PIC microcontroller kit a couple of months ago from the US and expected it to take forever to get her. I was pleasantly surprised when it rocked up on my doorstep in less than 72 hours. I looked at the shipping docket and it turned out they paid something like US15$15 for shipment worldwide via next available aircraft.

Admittedly it weighed less than a kilo but if PIC can manage to ship something half the way round the world in 3 days why cant everybody. I worked for PRIME computers back in the 80s and we could get just about anything anywhere in Australia within 24 hours and parts from the US in 48 hours back then.

At the same time I ordered the PIC unit we also ordered 2 new cable TV interfaces locally and was told if we wanted them installed it would take 5 weeks. If however we installed them ourselves we would have them in 3 days so needless to say we decided to install them ourselves. We called after 4 days for find out where they were and were told that they really meant 3 to 5 working days. After a week we called again and they repeated the 3 day promise. When the boxes rocked up after 3 weeks they ended up sending the wrong type of interface. We called them yet again and informed them of the mistake and within 12 hours we had the replacements. My question was since it took 12 hours to ship the right ones the second time how come it took 3 weeks to get the wrong ones?

I was repairing a PCB for my brothers company the other day and needed a part from the US which I was told would cost US$200 for shipping and it would take between 3 and 5 weeks to arrive. I just don't understand why, if PIC can do it for $US15 in 3 days why cant everybody else? I sort of get the feeling that couldn't care less about customers that aren't next door.

If we are supposedly moving towards a global market place then I would suggest more companies take a lesson from PIC and get their shipping sorted out.

By the way I am still waiting for my telescope to travel the last couple of kilometers

Interesting that you worked for Prime (which I think was based in Massachusetts) in the 1980s, while I worked for Parker Bros. (makers of Monopoly, et al), also in Massachusetts, also in the 1980s.

Yeah, I agree with you completely. If PIC can do it, why can't everybody? Interestingly, prior to FedX and other over-nighters, the record for the fastest mail delivery was held for many years by the Pony Express.

Customer care has fallen by the wayside. I don't know how it is Down Under, but here in the States it generally sucks and is getting worse. You don't have to be an international customer to experience the dubious pleasure of those who couldn't care less.

One checkout clerk at Wal-Mart barked at me "HAVE A NICE DAY!!!" I said, "No thanks, I have other plans" and left. I never saw the bee-atch again. At least they had the good sense to dump the worst ones.

We use PIC microcontrollers at the Observatory, by the way. I have several development kits myself, but they're pretty ancient by now.

-e

Hi e its nice to see you back.

When I worked for PR1ME I was based in Adelaide but about half of the machines I looked after were in or around Darwin. I'm not sure if you are familiar with Australia but that's like being based in Washington DC and working out of Las Angelis. As you can imagine I spent a fair amount of time flying back and forward and living in hotels.

I originally worked in the controls industry and ended doing product support for Struthers-Dunn PLCs. This was back when PLCs were a fairly new concept and my job included a lot of application re-engineering because everybody was still learning and the tricks of the trade weren't yet developed. I noticed one day that there was an upcoming training course on PLC application engineering, theory and maintenance so I ask my boss if I could go on it. His response was a very emphatic NO and when I asked him why he said because I was the person that was teaching the course. It was fun and interesting but could get frustrating.

Anyway I have been out of the controls game for over 20 years now so you can imagine I am a little rusty. I decided to buy a microcontroller kit and have a play with it in an attempt to get my brain thinking in control mode again.

The other day I stumbled onto a company that still supports and sells second hand Struthers-Dunn Director 4001 PLCs. I was surprised that there was still any in existence so you can imagine how I nearly fell of my chair when I saw they were selling second hand ones for more than the were new back in the 80s. I don't know if this is because they were that good or that nobody knows enough about them any more to replace them with newer technology?

Gadzooks! Here I am, really needing to get back to work, but I decide to pop in on this thread. The very same thread where Jorrie congratulated Europium for getting things back on track. I look at posts chronologically, so I can see the new ones quickly at the bottom of the "page." They are all about shipping, PLC's customer service, etc! What was our topic again?

Which suits me just fine. I often find the detours more interesting (here, on roads, and in life in general).

I could rave about rotten customer service, but won't right now.

Actually, the thing that caught my eye was the PLC discussion. I used to teach people about various industrial subjects (via interactive videodisc programs, multimedia programs, etc, that I would design and produce, and also, rarely, by simply standing in front of a class and pontificating). I did lots of work with PLCs, and, like Masu, I think it would be fun to have one around to play with. But I have no time (because I spend too much time here) so might instead get something I could play with while being with the kids. A Lego Mindstorms kit seems appealing. I coached a First Lego League team last year, and had a great time. If you have not played with these things, Masu, You should look into them -- I think you'd get a kick out of them.

It sounds like you may have gotten away from PLC's a little earlier than I did, but for about the last five years of my time with them, graphic programming was becoming popular. The Lego Kit uses a version of LabView, which works just like the more sophisticated graphic PLC interfaces of my day -- if anything it's better. All in a $250 dollar kit. Last year, the sensors were a little crude, fine control over motor speed was difficult, and memory management delays could be problematic for tasks that relied on timing. But they were still very cool toys (and not juvenile -- they are used through grad school). Now, the processor is vastly improved, sensors are much better, etc. So... If you haven't seen them, look into them. Fun

I don't have and children of my own but I have a 4 year old nephew and 8 year old niece that both love Lego, they actually have the Lego that I had when I was a child. It sounds like a great excuse to spend money on toys for them that I can play with. Nephews and nieces are good because you can give them back when they start to play up.

Personally I prefer "stream-of-consciousness" threads. I'm sure my "getting things back on track" was just a fluke. So now we're talking about Legos. Cool.

I have four kids who have all accumulated extensive Lego collections over the years. Last year I was working a contract in Cleveland, Ohio, and flew my two boys up for a ten-day vacation (my two daughters had other committments and couldn't come). We spent several nights in Washington, D.C. and several more on the Canadian side of Niagra Falls. One of the more obscure tourist attractions turned out to be the best of them all: a complete Lego landscape with eleven working trains, scale models of various famous structures, including the Statue of Liberty, and some natural features, like the Matterhorn in Switzerland - complete with skiers and ski lodge.

The exhibit consisted of over one million Lego pieces and took the guy six months to build. Talk about a cool job! (As a Lego junkie myself, I'm gonna ask Santa for one of these Mindstorm kits) My boys spent over two hours taking pictures and movies (the thing had a lot of moving parts), and pelted the guy - who at first was very shy and retiring - with a gozillion questions about every little detail. We got our money's worth, you can be sure!

-e

This link describes a Mindstorm Rubik's cube solver. The thing looks at the cube with a camera, does the recognition math, calculates the required moves, and then executes those moves. All from this "toy!" If you read the text, you can see that the guy who did the work had to come up with lots of creative solutions to deal with the limitations (such as available torque) of the kit (and he uses more stuff than comes in the basic kit), but it shows the potential for these little robots. Tell Santa to get the new version... I think. It's almost too slick. On the old ones, getting the thing to simply go straight across an unmarked surface (to within, lets say, 10 mm over a distance of a meter) could be tricky. (Rotation counter resolution was fairly low, and the processor would occasionally appear to drop a count or two as is did some garbage collection or some such thing). But part of the challenge (and fun) was coming up with ways to overcome these limitations. The new one has tachogenerators (or encoders or some such) built into the motors, a teach function so that it can easily memorize a path, much faster processing, more memory, etc. So it's easier to do stuff, but that will no doubt simply raise that bar for what kids and kids-at-heart will do with the things.

If you haven't seen a First Lego league competition, definitely catch one around Austin. In most states, the locals have finished up, and the state competitions will be in January or February. Although there is occasionally evidence of too much parental involvement, FLL is among the best at policing for that, and most of what you see is really the work of the kids.

I coached an all-girl 5th grade team last year, and their technical presentation got perfect scores. (They did it entirely off-the-cuff, with no preparation at all -- they simple knew the robot and its programming inside out, and were wildly enthusiastic. There were eight of them around the competition table, explaining and demoing features of their design to the several judges. They had this uncanny ability to chime in enthusiastically when appropriate, listened to the judges questions well and gave complete, well-worded responses, virtually never stepping on comments of other team members, etc. These fifth graders could have stepped right into a dissertation defense and done very well! As the crowd cheered for them I was almost in tears.) Several of the boys' teams used cue cards, and others were clearly memorized and stiff. Interestingly, the girls' research presentation (where you can do skits, or anything else to get your points across) was where (stereotypically) you'd expect the girls to to better; they were about average. But overall, they won a Director's Award, and were one of only a few elementary schools competing with middle schools. If you can find time to coach a team, I think you'd find it really gratifying.

My son, who is a high school sophomore, is on a First Robotics team (the older kid version of FLL). They raise money and find sponsors for building a robot that costs $manythousands and uses industrial components as well as stuff they machine themselves. The resulting robot is pretty cool, but, to me, not as impressive as the Mindstorm stuff. The Mindstorm challenges require that the robot is entirely autonomous; the large bots have an autonomous challenge, but spend most of the competition time under human remote control.

I hope Santa is good to you!

Interestingly (again), I worked with PLC code in 2000-2001 as a contract software developer. My client, an "oil patch" company, was designing the control and communications electronics for a billion-dollar (USD) semi-automated offshore drilling platform being assembled at that time in Europe. Much of the C&C was implemented using Siemens PLCs. My client represented the thousands of PLC interconnects by means of a huge SQL database.

My job was to write a "compiler" (which I wrote in C++) to access this database via ODBC calls, and then emit Siemens Step-7 source code as output. The PLC network, in turn, ran this code to instantiate the rig's network topology. It was an interesting job, but it was compromised considerably by the project leader whose task it was to write the ODBC/C++ interface upon which my code depended. His code was garbage. Each time he modified the interface the (working) program broke. But each time, he also insisted the bug was in my code and so, according to him, it was my responsibility to fix it (even if my working code hadn't changed). But, as project leader, he was the boss.

While I was diagnosing the problem, he'd badmouth me to others in the group, making appear to be some kind of pariah. A few of the brighter engineers saw through his smokescreen and eventually I was vindicated, fortunately, but by the end of the project fully 60% of my code consisted of diagnostics written mostly in self-defense. For example, by setting a run-time switch you could see every bit of traffic through his interface. At first he gave me his source code to compile along with my program. But after awhile he'd release only object modules so that I couldn't peek at his code to see what was going on. Consequently, to see exactly what he was sending the database, I quietly wrote a remote "loopback" server which ran on the SQL machine and echoed his queries back to my program for comparison. He didn't know about this server.

Not long after I completed the contract I saw this guy in an elevator in downtown Austin where I was working on a contract for a different client. Turns out this guy now worked at a company in the same building. The encounter was very uncomfortable for both of us. Later I called his old manager (who had become a good friend in the interrim and who knows a bit of C++ himself) and asked what had happened. Turns out he'd taken an interest in my program's diagnostic output after learning that my program failed, and saw just how mangled some of this guy's SQL queries were (after I left, the guy had modified his interface yet again and broke the program; but this time there was no one around to blame). The manager then asked to look at his source code and realized that this whole C++ "guru" facade was just that - a facade. He'd been bullsh!tting them for years and had gotten away with it. He was politely asked to leave forthwith.

You know, so much of this crap goes on in modern American corporations that it's a wonder our economy isn't worse off than it is. So much energy spent on building petty little empires at the expense of morale, incentive, and real productivity. Like turkeys vying for the top spot on the day before Thanksgiving.

I now work at a university and love the academic environment. Screw the Corporation and its pathological, dysfunctional Corporate Culture. I'd had quite enough, thank you.

-e

I know exactly what you mean I can think of numerous examples of where PLCs were falsely blamed for problems because people were ignorant of how they operated and what they could do.

It reminds me of a story, unrelated to PLC, but along the lines of bad engineering. I have posted this before so if you have read it just skip to the bottom It is however one of the better examples of not looking at the problem and narrow mindedness.

We had a computerized control system that needed to interface with an elevator control system to monitor what floor the lift was on. The input to the computer system was current loop binary coded decimal while the lift control panel supplied a separate contact closure for each individual floor.

The problem was how to convert the floor indicator to binary coded decimal input for the computer system. This very intelligent engineer decided to use CMOS logic to do it and designed a mind bogglingly complex box to carry out the task. When I saw it I shook my head and said you can't expect that to possibly work but he insisted he had thought of everything and he guaranteed it would work. I installed it and as expected the induced voltages in the cables between the computer system and the lift panel blew the unprotected electronics to oblivion.

Now I know you are going to say the silly idiot, he should have put protection in, or even better used a simple PLC to do the conversion. You would of course be correct but the solution to the problem was so simple that everybody had completely missed the point. You see the lift couldn't stop on every floor, in fact it could only stop on the first, second, fourth and eighth floors. Put bluntly it could only stop on binary coded decimal floors so no conversion was required.

You can imagine how red his face was when I, the afore mentioned engineers cadet, replaced his beautifully engineer circuit board with four 5cm long pieces of wire.

Getting back to the PLCs though I thought back in the early 80s they were the way to go and were only utilized to an incredibly small fraction of their potential. I get the impression that they are still not fully appreciated and utilized to the maximum. Is it that they are just misunderstood? Maybe they have become to complex and are scaring people away? I don't know why but by now I would have expected them to have made a far greater impact than they apparently have.

Some of the force information will naturally depend on the quality of the rare-earth magnets you employ as well as the size.

A quick search netted this older pdf summary from some work at Stanford: http://www-sldnt.slac.stanford.edu/nlc/notes/Bowden_Eng/ABC_TechNote-067_2.pdf

that may be somewhat useful.

I agree with the previous post that if you are looking toward passive magnetics, you are going to end up at the door with Halbach's (patented?) array for your bearings.

Good Luck - and post the pictures!