When a person reads about Johann Bessler's wheels outputting energy to their immediate environments to perform useful work, then it is easy to immediately declare that his inventions must have been fakes that had to have a hidden, though conventional, power source...such as, perhaps, a person in an adjoining room maintaining the motion via a cleverly concealed mechanism.
My way around this problem is to simply say that a working gravity wheel does not create energy, but, rather, is able to tap some unseen or normally unappreciated source of energy. As I'm sure everybody here knows by now, I favor the idea that ANY type of working overbalancing type gravity wheel will actually, while in rotation, be converting minute amounts of the rest masses of its weights directly into mechanical energy to power the wheel and anything attached to it. Such a power source, according to the concepts of relativity theory, makes sense to me and such a source of power would certainly not have occurred to either Bessler or the others who examined his machines.
If I'm right, then, even by my definition, such a device would not truly be "perpetual" because, perhaps after millenia of its outputting energy (assuming its parts did not wear out!), the weights in it would no longer have any rest mass left. They would eventually become massless and, thus, weightless and the gravity wheel would no longer have any imbalance in it to make it run. Yes, the idea of massless lead weights is rather bizarre, to say the least. But, then again, so is much of modern physics. Perhaps there would be some process that would prevent this from happening and which would somehow restore the rest masses of the weights by taking it from the environment.
This is, of course speculation on my part. For the immediate future, we need to concentrate on finding that mechanism that does, indeed, maintain the imbalance in a rotating set of weights. Once that is done, we can worry about developing the precise physics needed to rationalize the effect.
Jonathan...
You wrote:
I agree that a lot of the rituals in Catholocism do not make sense if one goes strictly by the Gospels. The Roman Catholic Church, however, justifies any of its beliefs by just stating that Peter (considered to be the first Pope) was given the "keys to the kingdom" and, therefore, he and his predecessors have free reign to institute any rituals or beliefs that they want! (I also question the meaning of the verse that is based on!)The Catholics are wrong because they have many meaningless traditions, and tend to worship Mary.
Many of the rituals in Catholocism are derived from a mixture of the New Testament and various "oral traditions". Generally, although I am sure that I would have "logical" objections to the tenets of practically any religion, I can peacefully co-exist with them just so long as they do not try to force beliefs on me and I am convinced that their members have "a good heart" when it comes to their dealings with their fellow human beings...even if they are members of a different faith.
Genesis 2:7 states:
And the LORD God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
I think it this context that the word "soul" probably means "being"...I think I'd believe in the conventional idea of a soul more if Gen 2:7 could be translated as "...and a spirit being was given a physical body and became a living man".
ken
