Word: motioning
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HOFFMAN: Yes, but who is to say that all these scientific theories won't ultimately be replaced by ones with greater explanatory power? Galileo and Newton thought their laws of motion were the cat's pajamas, explaining everything under the sun and many things beyond, but 2 1/2 centuries later a Swiss patent clerk toppled their notions of space and time. Obviously, Galileo and Newton did not foresee what Einstein found. I think it's ahistorical to assert that in the future there will never be an Einstein of, say, the mind who will be able to pull together...
Human nature stays constant enough that it's easy to answer this one. Yes, someone will build a perpetual-motion machine in the next few years. Or, more likely, dozens of perpetual-motion machines, as starry-eyed inventors have been doing since medieval times. Not a single one will work, but they'll keep trying. Nothing is more seductive, after all, than the idea of a free lunch...
That, in essence, is all a perpetual-motion machine amounts to: a device that operates without any external power source. Or, rather, doesn't operate--for perpetual-motion devices are mechanical impossibilities--and unless someone finds a way to repeal two fundamental laws of physics, they always will be. The regulations in question are the first and second laws of thermodynamics. They say, respectively, that energy can be neither created nor destroyed but only changed in form and that it's impossible to make a machine that doesn't waste at least a little energy. In short...
Physicists didn't figure this out until the 1800s, so at least the early advocates of perpetual motion had the excuse of ignorance. In 1618, for example, a London doctor named Robert Fludd invented a waterwheel that needed no river to drive it. Water poured into his system would, in theory, turn a wheel that would power a pump that would cause the water to flow back over the wheel that would power the pump, and so on. But the second law means that any friction created by wheel and pump would turn into heat and noise; reconverting that into...
Once thermodynamics was codified, it was clear that Fludd and the hundreds who followed him had been doomed to failure before they began. Yet if anything, learning that their task was impossible spurred perpetual-motion fanatics on to even greater efforts. So many hopefuls continued to apply for perpetual-motion patents that in 1911 the U.S. Patent Office decreed it would henceforth accept working models only--and they had to work for a year to qualify. No one has pulled...