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[tolkafox]

Perpetual motion needs the further study of gravity and it's effect on dark matter.

Oh, and it uses gravity. There was a thesis I wrote a while ago about a planet orbiting around a sun and being pulled 'back' by a secondary distant sun thus remaining in permanent orbit until something disturbs it, but I appeared to have misplaced it.

Also: space. Just think of a turbine that doesn't stop because there isn't any large force of gravity and air friction. Only problem is it moves in one direction :/ Still, it's damn well close enough for anything we need.

[BigD145]

It's not close minded, just impossible.

Nothing is impossible. To our current knowledge, we can't do it, but that doesn't mean it can't happen.

Turning myself inside out with my own bare hands is quite impossible.

[Azated]

It's not close minded, just impossible.

Nothing is impossible. To our current knowledge, we can't do it, but that doesn't mean it can't happen.

Turning myself inside out with my own bare hands is quite impossible.

I'm pretty sure it is possible, you just won't live long enough to complete the action.

[worldspawn]

It seems possible with the machine shown in the link in my last post. I intend to make one at some point and if it works I'll post it here since it's pretty dwarfy.

[Capntastic]

"Most likely" fake?? Of curse it's fake, you can't get more out than you put in, the end.

Such close-minded thinking will get us nowhere. Think of the people who said "mankind can't flu, the end." or "there will never be humans on the moon, the end."

Flight and space travel are possible things, and the people who said otherwise were close-minded.  There is nothing close-minded about asserting that perpetual motion is false.

[Capntastic]

People thought that sailing around the world was 'impossible' at the time due to ship design, food preservation, navigation, and knowledge of sea travel in general.  As their knowledge increased, it became 'possible', with more and more ease.  At no time was the concept of sailing around the world factually impossible. People thousands of years ago believed in many things we now know to be false, and scoffed at many notions we now know to be very true.   Cultural relativism has no bearing on what is actually true.  Conservation of energy is a truth of the universe's workings.  This will not change.

[612DwarfAvenue]

Think of the people who said "mankind can't flu, the end."

What, did someone finally invent the flu to prove those people wrong? Is that kind of raws editing possible without genning a new world?

[Cruxador]

People thought that sailing around the world was 'impossible' at the time due to ship design, food preservation, navigation, and knowledge of sea travel in general.  As their knowledge increased, it became 'possible', with more and more ease.  At no time was the concept of sailing around the world factually impossible. People thousands of years ago believed in many things we now know to be false, and scoffed at many notions we now know to be very true.   Cultural relativism has no bearing on what is actually true.  Conservation of energy is a truth of the universe's workings.  This will not change.

People thought sailing around the world was impossible because they thought they would fall off the edge. As ship design, food preservation, navigation, and knowledge of sea travel in general were increased such that circumnavigating the globe became possible, the idea that it was impossible was disproved.

[Capntastic]

What point are you trying to make?  Like I just said, at no time was circumnavigation of the globe actually impossible.  Manned space travel was just as possible in 'caveman days' as it is today, even if cavemen had nothing even remotely approaching the means to make it happen.  Binding 'possible' and 'impossible' to what a culture knows is saying that the fundamental truths of the universe depend on who you are and what you know.  It's saying that 'clean drinking water' is 'impossible' for people in the 3rd world because they don't have access to it.  And it also says that 'clean drinking water' is 'possible' for me, since I've got access to clean running water.  It's logically inconsistent and is pretty much the basis for a lot of distortion and preconception with regard to morals all that the world over.   But back on point:

Obviously flight was never impossible, and people knew that flight was certainly possible just by looking at birds.  All that remained was to figure out how to get a dude to be able to do it.

But perpetual energy is impossible because it requires the fundamental laws of physics to break down.  Not one of the things that people said would never happen that ended up happening involved the fundamental laws of the universe to break down.

[JohnieRWilkins]

I really want to write a newbie guide to creating massenergy out of nothing. If you can find anything relevant to my interests please PM me with your ideas. Don't listen to all the haters in this thread, they don't know what they're talking about. Thanks in advance.

I'm so excited.

[Cruxador]

What point are you trying to make?  Like I just said, at no time was circumnavigation of the globe actually impossible.  Manned space travel was just as possible in 'caveman days' as it is today, even if cavemen had nothing even remotely approaching the means to make it happen.  Binding 'possible' and 'impossible' to what a culture knows is saying that the fundamental truths of the universe depend on who you are and what you know.  It's saying that 'clean drinking water' is 'impossible' for people in the 3rd world because they don't have access to it.  And it also says that 'clean drinking water' is 'possible' for me, since I've got access to clean running water.  It's logically inconsistent and is pretty much the basis for a lot of distortion and preconception with regard to morals all that the world over.   But back on point:

Obviously flight was never impossible, and people knew that flight was certainly possible just by looking at birds.  All that remained was to figure out how to get a dude to be able to do it.

Right. People only thought it was impossible due to their incomplete knowledge.

But perpetual energy is impossible because it requires the fundamental laws of physics to break down.  Not one of the things that people said would never happen that ended up happening involved the fundamental laws of the universe to break down.

Many involved the breakdown of the fundamental laws of the universe as they were understood at the time. Why do you assume that our current models are perfect when all its predecessors have not been?

[Uthric]

Many involved the breakdown of the fundamental laws of the universe as they were understood at the time. Why do you assume that our current models are perfect when all its predecessors have not been?

THIS

[JohnieRWilkins]

What point are you trying to make?  Like I just said, at no time was circumnavigation of the globe actually impossible.  Manned space travel was just as possible in 'caveman days' as it is today, even if cavemen had nothing even remotely approaching the means to make it happen.  Binding 'possible' and 'impossible' to what a culture knows is saying that the fundamental truths of the universe depend on who you are and what you know.  It's saying that 'clean drinking water' is 'impossible' for people in the 3rd world because they don't have access to it.  And it also says that 'clean drinking water' is 'possible' for me, since I've got access to clean running water.  It's logically inconsistent and is pretty much the basis for a lot of distortion and preconception with regard to morals all that the world over.   But back on point:

Obviously flight was never impossible, and people knew that flight was certainly possible just by looking at birds.  All that remained was to figure out how to get a dude to be able to do it.

Right. People only thought it was impossible due to their incomplete knowledge.

But perpetual energy is impossible because it requires the fundamental laws of physics to break down.  Not one of the things that people said would never happen that ended up happening involved the fundamental laws of the universe to break down.

Many involved the breakdown of the fundamental laws of the universe as they were understood at the time. Why do you assume that our current models are perfect when all its predecessors have not been?

OK. We didn't have the technology to test any scientific claims before the 19th century. Now we do. Guess what? Massenergy is conserved, end of story.

You can't claim that incomplete knowledge will allow us to break fundamental laws of physics we already know to be true. We know that energy is conserved, just like we know that 1+1=2. We know that from the millions of tests we've already done, and not one exception has been found. There are no exceptions. That's just what energy is.

Regardless, I'm going to throw you a bone. The fact that energy is conserved doesn't mean that there's no such thing as infinite energy. We can't know if energy is truly finite because:
1) Photons are believed to have no mass. So even though we can reliably guess at the total mass of our universe, we don't know anything about the amount of EM energy present. What if there are other massless particles? What if they're infinite? What if we figure out a way of extracting energy from them?
2) What if this scenario is true: What if there is an infinite number of other universes like our own that have finite energy. And if there are an infinite number of universes. So if we can somehow leech energy from those other universes, we'll effectively have infinite energy.

[Capntastic]

There's a difference between a model being perfect and a model being incorrect.  I never claimed our current model was either. Our theories of the universe have been growing closer to the data we can attain over time, not further away.  Our science is like an asymptote that never quite reaches perfect knowledge, as opposed to simply throwing a dart at a board and going "does this theory work? nope?  welp," and throwing another one.  It's the reason we still use newtonian physics despite having learned that, at a deeper level, quantum physics is the real deal.  Conservation of energy has been central to every model for an incredibly long time, and there's never been any reason to doubt it, and nothing but evidence backing it.

According to a theorem within the realm of mathematics, Noether's theorem, any system that has a set of rules that stay constant over time, you have to have one variable that never changes.  For the physics of our universe, they seem to be energy and momentum.  Any set of rules you'd use to describe the universe, any possible model you come up with, would have to have some measurable property that stays constant.  This is coming from pure logic, not scientific observation alone.

Some new physics model breaking conservation of mass is about as illogical as some new physics model revealing that gravity is a function of aetheric pressure.

If you have some sort of refutation of all of this beyond "well maybe in the future they'll know better", I'd be glad to listen, but I'm not really willing to continue debating against a person's faith.

[Cruxador]

Many involved the breakdown of the fundamental laws of the universe as they were understood at the time. Why do you assume that our current models are perfect when all its predecessors have not been?

OK. We didn't have the technology to test any scientific claims before the 19th century. Now we do.

This is blatantly false. This is so false as to be rather stupid. We have technology to test more things more easily, but there were things that could be tested without modern technology, and there are plenty of things we still can't test.

Guess what? Massenergy is conserved, end of story.

In all observed circumstances this appears to be true. That doesn't mean it's impossible for their to ever be a circumstance where it does not hold. It doesn't even mean it's true in observed circumstances, since our perception could be in some way lacking.

You can't claim that incomplete knowledge will allow us to break fundamental laws of physics we already know to be true.

We don't absolutely know it to be true. We only know that it very much appears to be true. The same is the case with almost everything.

We know that energy is conserved, just like we know that 1+1=2.

Numbers are a tool designed to help us understand. They work the way they work, because we designed them to work that way. Our understanding of the natural laws of physics is not comparable, as that is a thing we make deductions about based on observation.

We know that from the millions of tests we've already done, and not one exception has been found. There are no exceptions.

In fact, we have found cases were it is not observable that this law holds true. There are explanations in each case for how it might be that unobserved matter or energy is present, of course. But is more of a side note; even if every example ever found observably followed this law to the letter, that does not rule out the possibility of an undiscovered exception.

If you have some sort of refutation of all of this beyond "well maybe in the future they'll know better", I'd be glad to listen, but I'm not really willing to continue debating against a person's faith.

No, my primary assertion was merely that any belief, even when backed up by significant evidence has the potential to be false. I do not have any refutation of the actual principle in question.