Hi Graham .. well summed up .. the trick, once you have arrived at the deeper understanding, is to keep hold of that perspective and not lapse - not always easy .. solving the enigma of B's. runners is an exercise in logic imo - for that you have to be logical, and build your house on the facts of science ( no matter how hard they are to swallow, or learn, or see their relevance, from time to time ) - that does not mean there is no room for intuition - intuition is your subconscious connecting the facts .. imo ..
If I think along these lines it usually isn’t too long before Besslers words come back to me and the problem is he doesn’t make it sound like he was stealing potential energy from anywhere.
Put yourself in B's. shoes - Newton's Laws had been published but B. makes no mention of them - he does use the English words of momentum and force ( in MT ), so he was familiar with these terms to use them occasionally - the circles he moved in would have been familiar with them to some degree or another .. but he did not have the classical physics framework ( conservation Laws based on Newton's second f = ma , kinetic energy etc) and Work Energy Theorem to fill in the picture as we do - tho he did know about mechanical advantage because all machines used it in some way or another and it could be and was calculated - so he also would have been aware that the Law of Levers underpinned these machines and since that was just a ratio of WD/Energy ( force x distance ) IN = WD/Energy Out , which effectively in that context is a rock solid proof of Work Energy symmetry and LOL's symmetry ( as it generally stands ) ..
But, he had an intuition based on MUCH lesser framework and facts available in his time, that enabled him to imagine a mechanical workaround to the problem of keeping his wheels condition net positive torque - this intuition would have been based on institutional learning of the time, and his own personal disappointments with non-runners i.e. practical experience and analysis of why there was no excess torque, and what
skills he had acquired in his journey to a runner - this all happened in just 10 short years - I place a lot of weight on the skills he acquired - and the one that sets him apart imo from others was his skills in horology ( repairing time pieces ) - that is a specific area of expertise and not common knowledge ..
Somewhere amongst those influences is a deductible logical path to a mechanical runner in a gravity field, that does develop and maintain net excess torque, where weights are 'assisted' via a prime mover feedback to the OOB system to have their PE restored, with left over energy input to output downstream as Work ..
If in any doubt of that look at MT's 44 and 48 - clearly on their own they can not have a net excess-torque to become runners - something mechanical was interacting with these basic OOB systems of weights translocating sideways, producing torque, and giving the background wheel momentum, whose momentum was then converted into energy and used to re-lift the weights sequentially to the tipping point again i.e. fully restore their operating GPE in a runner ..
Best ..
