Newton's Third Law broken?

[ME]

I wouldn't pay too much attention to Donald Simanek. After all, on that 2nd page you've linked to, he states:
"The fundamental laws of physics do not prohibit perpetual motion."

Simanek just reiterates the laws of physics there andI think he means: things are doing fine up to the 100% conversion limit (which could practically never be reached) - and warns against expecting any surplus.

But all kidding aside, you actually think that there is some kind of friction that is causing the behavior you see in these videos?

I think that motor has simply two settings: Slow and Fast.
Both separate wouldn't give such effect and would just wobble in its place: - one can see the "wobble"-action going backwards when moving slow.
The main reason for motion is the fractional acceleration-parts (added force) when speeding-up and slowing down at the appropriate locations.

--add
Actually that acceleration doesn't work either, as it should still wobble.
So I now tend to agree with the (static/dynamic) friction explanation...
--

I have a battery driven clock hanging on the wall that does what we see here!

Must be really something to have such swimming clock.

----
About FC,

I agree with Fletcher, the mentioned lever-example should just be balanced:
[Five weights 8 inches, will lift one weight dropping 40 inches]
[One weight dropping 40 inches will lift five weights 8 inches]
- these are equal!

Fcdriver makes it sound simple and obvious, but in his short phrases all important information is missing: hence the continues requests for explanatory diagrams; as those kinds of remarks make no sense without them (I hope).

[Fcdriver]

A weight dropping 40 inches will lift five weights 8 inches, these are equal!

Fanning the weights 8 inches apart means one will always be reaching the top!

Yes there is no additional energy! But only if you are lifting and dropping using the exact same fulcrum point! Nothing says you have to use the exact same fulcrum point!

the problem comes when dropping the weight 40 inches does not lift the other weights 8 inches each!

Some will claim there is a loss of distance!

This only means something is not right!

The dropping weight has to lift the other weights!

Frank Driver .. here's my input to your above statements that I see appearing again and again.

When a mass drops it loses GPE and gains and equal amount of KE, when there are no frictional loses. This is a linear trade-off of GPE for KE gain. It is purely height dependent since the mass and 'g' are not variables in this scenario.

When you treat the situation you are explaining like an Archimedes Law of Levers problem then you are forgetting something of major importance IMO.

Levers are often explained in text books and in on-line tutorials (e.g Khan Academy comes to mind http://freevideolectures.com/Course/2553/Physics/49 ) as showing the balanced situation which is force times distance etc, where the force is weight force of different masses at different horizontal distances. It is also used to explain why there is no torque because of the balancing of forces.

To get a balanced situation to move e.g F1D2 = F2D1 then you actually have to apply an additional force (could be a small additional mass) to one side or another. Then it is unbalanced and will move downward on that side etc.

However the KE of the masses (plz do not consider the mass of the lever for this thought experiment) is NO greater than the GPE lost of the additional small mass added to one side. The heavier that mass the more velocity and KE's of the F1 & F2 masses.

So my point is simply this. When levers with weights on them move, either up or down, then forces are not balanced. They will accumulate KE which they will retain until they reach a physical limitation such as a stop or the ground etc. Since they have KE then that must come from a conversion of available GPE loss (i.e. NET GPE loss).

one thing you are not understanding, lifting at one point, then dropping down twice that distance from center, is mechanical advantage! It would be balanced only if lift and drop were done at the same distance from center!
Anybody that has ever turned a wrench, knows the value of a 24 inch wrench, over a 12 inch wrench!

[Furcurequs]

(snip)

But all kidding aside, you actually think that there is some kind of friction that is causing the behavior you see in these videos? Really? The friction between the axles of those little wheels and their bearings (in 1st video, I can see that they use ball bearings)? If that is what is going on, then why does the experimenter covering his working surface with oil not change the behavior of the "reactionless_drive" (as Wubbly correctly points out is what we are talking about here) car?

Yes, I do believe that the behavior is due to friction.

Although in these experiments the forces that could be supported by friction are probably but a small fraction of the weight of the device, they are still greater than the much smaller forces in the slow portion of the cycle that would be able to move the mass of the device in a zero gravity non-contact situation.

Of course, it would have been a lot more convincing if they had done these experiments on an air-table. Or even better, built a device to do it in 0-gravity and done it on the ISS. But of course, we can't have everything.

(snip)

...if, of course, they were actually able to work in such situations. ;) It really is important to try to do the best experiments that we can so we don't deceive ourselves.

Were I testing these devices, I would first redesign them, as you suggest, so that they could operate in a 0 g environment - if, of course, their proper operation originally required surface contacts maintained by the force of gravity (which appears to me to be the case in the second video) - and I would then test them while dropping them above a mattress or foam packing material or something.

If the devices actually started moving horizontally while falling rather than just wobbling on their way straight down, I would then take the experiments much more seriously. From there I would try to eliminate any sort of aerodynamic effects as the cause of the behavior.

[ME]

One fun and handy space-application would be in stuffing such mechanism inside some softball, add a camera + controller + usb-charger and we have remote-controlled 0-G camera - even or especially useful for exterior inspections.

[John doe]

A weight dropping 40 inches will lift five weights 8 inches, these are equal!

Fanning the weights 8 inches apart means one will always be reaching the top!

Yes there is no additional energy! But only if you are lifting and dropping using the exact same fulcrum point! Nothing says you have to use the exact same fulcrum point!

the problem comes when dropping the weight 40 inches does not lift the other weights 8 inches each!

Some will claim there is a loss of distance!

This only means something is not right!

The dropping weight has to lift the other weights!

Frank Driver .. here's my input to your above statements that I see appearing again and again.

When a mass drops it loses GPE and gains and equal amount of KE, when there are no frictional loses. This is a linear trade-off of GPE for KE gain. It is purely height dependent since the mass and 'g' are not variables in this scenario.

When you treat the situation you are explaining like an Archimedes Law of Levers problem then you are forgetting something of major importance IMO.

Levers are often explained in text books and in on-line tutorials (e.g Khan Academy comes to mind http://freevideolectures.com/Course/2553/Physics/49 ) as showing the balanced situation which is force times distance etc, where the force is weight force of different masses at different horizontal distances. It is also used to explain why there is no torque because of the balancing of forces.

To get a balanced situation to move e.g F1D2 = F2D1 then you actually have to apply an additional force (could be a small additional mass) to one side or another. Then it is unbalanced and will move downward on that side etc.

However the KE of the masses (plz do not consider the mass of the lever for this thought experiment) is NO greater than the GPE lost of the additional small mass added to one side. The heavier that mass the more velocity and KE's of the F1 & F2 masses.

So my point is simply this. When levers with weights on them move, either up or down, then forces are not balanced. They will accumulate KE which they will retain until they reach a physical limitation such as a stop or the ground etc. Since they have KE then that must come from a conversion of available GPE loss (i.e. NET GPE loss).

one thing you are not understanding, lifting at one point, then dropping down twice that distance from center, is mechanical advantage! It would be balanced only if lift and drop were done at the same distance from center!
Anybody that has ever turned a wrench, knows the value of a 24 inch wrench, over a 12 inch wrench!

MT 49

[Fcdriver]

My 51

[John doe]

Maybe.

[honza]

Hi all, and thanks for the link to the Russian videos !

I don't have a definite opinion on the first one. It can be the differential friction factor, but it can also be that the jerk in one direction is slower - hence there is less energy expended in that direction and more in the other.

What is shown in the second video I do have practical experience with. This a phenomenon I wanted to somehow utilize and never got to it.
Years back I used to work on ropes suspended from roofs of buildings & structures. There were situations where one could not reach anything solid around (suspended in overhang) and when there was a need to turn around it wasn't possible. This is till I have discovered the very movement shown in the video. When I've spread my legs somewhat apart and moved one leg in CW direction and the other leg CCW direction I was able to rotate myself without any reference point. I have thought this skill to all my co-workers and they all started to use it.

I know it can be caused by the friction differential, however, my feeling (based on the experience with it) always was that it is something more fundamental.
Definitely worth of more exploring (put the gadget into a vaccume chamber).

[Fletcher]

Phaedrus ..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuTMYgQDUzs

[Furcurequs]

Hey honza,

You may have missed the video I posted of astronauts showing how they can rotate themselves around their own centers of mass while in space. Rotating isn't really a problem. It's changing the linear motion of the center of mass of an isolated system that is believed to be impossible.

Here's a thumbnail sized gif animation of the video:



Here's the full sized video - a 2.4 MB avi file:

http://www.besslerwheel.com/forum/download.php?id=16350

Here's the original longer youtube video from which I extracted that segment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvXKTOjaVQ4#t=365

NASA and others have investigated claims of supposed reactionless drives and have not found any to be valid - except for possibly a new thing called an EmDrive which uses microwaves in an enclosed cavity but they and others are still testing it.

The latest BBC Horizon program - "Project Greenglow - The Quest for Gravity Control" - seems to have some information about their highly sensitive test procedures.

It appears that those in the UK can watch the program online for the next 28 days.

Here's the link to the episode:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0752f85

Here's the link to the accompanying "magazine" article - "Project Greenglow and the battle with gravity":

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35861334

Dwayne

[Phaedrus]

Well, I sincerely hope that someone seeing these videos will reproduce these Russian experiments in a way that is enough to convince people like Furcurequs. I would think that an air table would be good enough. Or something like what I got to play with in high school, which was a long squarish-in-cross-section beam, but with opposite corners of the square profile on the top and bottom. Then we had these extruded aluminum upside-down-Ys-in-profile pieces that would slide along this beam, which had little holes through which air was blown to keep the things just about friction-free. I would think you could demonstrate its validity on one of those too.

I don't know that this has anything to do with solving the Bessler Wheel puzzle, but it would free our minds further to find out that Newton's 3rd law was not in fact accurate, the way John Collin's book has freed our minds from the myth that perpetual motion machine is impossible.

But something else. I wonder how many like me dreamed of being able to construct a flying saucer when they were little. While reading about reactionless drive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive), it pointed me to something I hadn't heard about before. In the 60's there was this guy named Norman Dean who came up with the "Dean drive". From reading a little about him, he seemed to be kind of a modern day Bessler. He came up with this demonstration of doing something which seemed to defy physics, only demonstrated for a select few people and was looking for a buyer. He even patented his idea (or maybe not), but after he died he didn't seem to leave the stuff he had demonstrated. And if you go to the wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_drive), you can see that just as with Johann Bessler, they write him off as somebody who thought they had done something significant but they were obviously mistaken. Now, if some John Collins type would come along, research what this guy did really well, and write a book about it, it might start a whole new bunch of people trying to see if they can do what he tried to do.

Oh and the thing I wanted to say was, if what we seem to see in those videos is true, just imagine, I mean, Mr. Dean is said to have thought maybe he could develop enough force this way to lift something off the ground (though he never did). But what if you had one of these devices on the Moon, for example. Then I think it would be able to take off. And if you COULD come up with a more powerful version, you could actually make a craft that could move around in the air without having to do what we do now, with rockets shooting all that crap into the atmosphere in order to fly, which I just find so uncouth (although its true that we also have aircraft that stay up by pushing the air down, which is less uncouth, but can still be quite noisy)! You could theoretically just fly silently through the neighborhood, not disturbing anyone, just getting shot at by various people who like to shoot at things like that, whether Earthly or Extraterrestrial.

Photo of Norman Dean: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... nDrive.jpg

Wesite maintained by Dean's son to uphold legacy of Dean Drive: http://deanspacedrive.org

[Phaedrus]

Oh and by the way, here are more Russian videos demonstrating this phenomena. I discovered that the name of what they are doing I believe is called инерциоии, which translated into English comes out as "Inertsioid".

Движение 4D гироскопа Шипова только вперед без остановки
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Igt1pV8ojTc

Инерциоид Толчина на воздушной подушке
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVHg4BVGUhM
The above seems to be demonstrating the effect on an air-beam similar to what I mentioned in my previous post

Развитие инерциоиидной техники
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i3p0AMj1yY

Инерциоид от Доценко
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYAkrvNRQ4Y

[Sam Peppiatt]

Phaedrus, A great example of a linear drive. I've worked on this problem a lot. The levelness of the track is critical. The problem is; it stops briefly each time. IF, the 3rd law could be circumvented in some way, where it didn't stop each time, it would accelerate to light speed and beyond! It would be fabulous for marine propulsion and or star ships. Some how, some way, it has to have something to push off from. I've tried but never found a way to solve it. Sam Peppiatt

Live Your days Inspired Anew, LYDIA

[honza]

Dwayne, yes I have not seen the video with astronauts yet. What they do is much less efficient than what I have described.

I didn't know reaction-less drives can cause rotation but not a linear motion.
Any easy explanation why is that ?

Anyway, I am surprised that NASA or Wikipedia do not consider liner reaction-less drive possible. I would consider it proven possible after the Thornson's drive demonstrations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=p ... 1hfr9c#t=8

Cheers all

[ME]

I didn't know reaction-less drives can cause rotation but not a linear motion.

As far as I understand:
Because the action of rotational motion (motor) results in a reaction of linear motion, because the heaviness of that which is rotated refuses to move (inertia). To keep the center of mass somewhat in the same place some cart is moved on some track. When things rotate back (more slowly) there's a variable friction effect. So in space such rotational action is about the same as a cat flipping to its feet in mid-air, while the center of mass remains the same.

I don't see "reactionless"-stuff happening.