THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, June 10, 1995 TAG: 9506090017
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A15 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
The dream of inventing a ``perpetual motion machine'' was the focus, once upon a time, of much lively comment and quirky experiment.
For quite a spell, we heard hardly anything about the once-tantalizing notion that such an apparatus - making all conventional sources of power obsolete - might be built.
However, on two occasions recently, I stumbled upon references to the idea (in two quite different settings), reminders of just how large it had figured in human speculations at one time.
One reminder was a 75-year-old newspaper story that caught my eye while I was poking through some microfilm files. The report was about an indictment returned in Chicago against a man who claimed to have invented a perpetual-motion machine, operating on magnetic principles, but whose two demonstrations for stockholders in his company were suspiciously canceled, first by a bomb blast and then by the report of a bomb threat.
A second jogging of my memory, just a few days after I read the above (the synchronicity was a bit scary), was musical: At the recent Portsmouth concert of the Air Combat Command Heritage of America Band, one of the selections was a Strauss (Johann the younger) composition titled ``Perpetuum Mobile.'' Perpetual motion in Latin. It seems, as I have since learned from a little digging, that several composers have used the title for pieces with a special rapid tempo and continuous rhythmic pattern.
Knowledgeable physicists have long pooh-poohed the achievement of actual perpetual motion, saying it would violate certain fixed laws of thermodynamics. As protracted as the running of some inventor's device might be - and even today you can see some remarkably long-lived whirligigs, teeter-totters and similar gimmicks in the gadget shops - the solid wisdom is that any such apparatus will run out of momentum eventually. Same with the earth spinning in space and all that kind of thing. Simple friction has been one of the more vexing slower-downers for the inventors.
Well, from the cooling of the perpetual-motion fever over recent decades, can we conclude that the experts have finally prevailed? Not really, I'm willing to bet.
Late or soon, for somebody, ``impossible'' becomes a fighting word. I remember working months in my spare time as a teenager trying to do what the geometry books said was mathematically out of the question - the trisecting of an angle using only a compass and a straight-edge. I never found anything remotely hopeful, but I sure tried.
My guess is that with all of today's new ways of perceiving this universe, somebody will be working, for one thing, to unfix those ``fixed'' laws of thermodynamics that have argued against perpetual motion. They may very well fail, too, but no matter.
One of the surest things on this Earth is the eagerness of humans to take dares. This is something that's really perpetual. MEMO: Mr. Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star.
by CNB