Hi elecar,

You seem to be silent I hope you are still around?  With your silence you only feed negative opinions.

About 10 days ago you mentioned retaking a video and upload it, please continue and show it. Afterall, you wrote in Reply #193: 

I think I got his idea.   The self destructing video which he has posted in Reply #18  itself  is his working device.  Ball is getting jammed at junction.    He needs help from the forum to solve that problem.  He is making others to get involved just to solve his problem telling that he has a working device in which ball runs continuously for three hours without attaining escape velocity.

If somebody in this forum succeds in making self looping SMOT and post the video,   he may make some alterations in his design,  make it to work and claim the invention is his.

INGENIOUS!!!!


PS :  He is also telling that he would post the video of his 'working device'  after striking deal with toy manufacturer.   But once he strikes deal with toy manufacturer,  I don't think he is supposed to leak out the design without their permission.  SO we would never see his 'working device' here.   We may have to buy the toy in market after TM  manufactures it.



 

@TK
 
If you are correct and the magnetic field makes the ball fall slower, then one can assume that the energy lost in the fall would be exactly the same as the energy gained in raising the ball and this is the point where all SMOT ramps will fail.

I am certainly correct, and the people on this thread who are building SMOT ramps have the means to construct and perform comparison tests to see for themselves. The "magnetic wind tunnel", remember? The Wrights didn't just start putting stuff together and try to fly it... they examined their assumptions by doing background research -- inventing the wind tunnel along the way -- that showed them that a built-up wing _could indeed_ generate enough lift to make further research efforts worthwhile.

So let's see some experimenter set up an experiment to TEST the proposition, if you can't believe it from first principles.  You can even use Galileo's trick of using ramps instead of dropping your balls straight down, to slow the acceleration due to gravity and make the data easier to gather. If -- or rather _when_ you find that what I say is true.... what then? (The experiment has been done before, many times, so I am confident of the outcome, but don't take my word for it, do the experiment yourself.)

Is this the point at which all SMOT ramps fail? Well, if they are built upon the assumption that you stated in the post, then it is certainly _one_ of the failure points. There are others, though. Inevitable losses of momentum due to friction, eddy currents, aerodynamic drag and even the Earth's magnetic field are going to be loss mechanisms that subtract from the kinetic energy of the moving parts. Where is this energy replaced, in any of the SMOT designs we have seen? Do you think that JLN's apparatus would work in a vacuum, frictionless environment?  Well, consider the pendulum. In a vacuum, a pendulum can swing for a _long_ time and it can be very difficult to detect, from one swing to the next, that it is decaying. Some pendulums I have worked with are so sensitive that they effectively couple vibrations from the ambient, into their swing and without active damping would indeed keep swinging forever. But this is because there IS a mechanism to replace the decreasing energy; it's coming in from outside. In one case I can tell you about, the very sensitive Cavendish torsion pendulum was so very sensitive that it actually  responded to a heavy truck that parked, once  every few days, across the street while the driver went into a business. Just occasionally, and the presence and removal of the heavy truck was enough to keep the undamped pendulum swinging. It took nearly two years to track down and confirm this source of artefact in this very sensitive experiment.

By the way, if you think about pendulums enough you will realize that you have a ready-made SMOT ramp analog right there. Just position a magnet somewhere along the steel ball's travel and see if you can make a perpetual swinger. The pendulum does away with all problems associated with ramps: consistency, friction, cost, etc. but is functionally equivalent to a two-ramp system. And you can have that little insight for free.

To point out a few "birds" from my perspective.

We live in a universe that is expanding at an accelerating rate,, interesting

We now have 2 new toys to play with, dark matter and dark energy,, interesting

Then there is the big ugly wart on everyones nose, that thing that resides at the center of our little galaxy, and it seems to NOT be the only one,, yep the Black Hole,, that thing that does not follow the rules as they have been set forth by man.

These are some of the birds that show me that we do not know and or understand all of the workings of the things we play with.

I appreciate the knowledge and skills of the members of this board,, but that does not mean I agree with all that is said in either direction, I make my own decisions and observations.

To start a quest we must start with an assumption,  upon testing for that assumption we need to be able to change it with the information gained.

Some assumptions have not been changed even with the advent of more information that is not in line with those assumptions.  I read a report some time ago about triangulating with some distant known objects to see if the universe is round or not,, and they came beck with exactly 180 degrees,, not round,, that is interesting.

My 2 cents worth.

When you figure out how to incorporate dark matter, dark energy and black holes into a SMOT, please be sure to let me know.

BTW, while black holes are pretty much accepted these days, the existence of dark matter and dark energy is still very much an open question. The galactic rotation profile data that is the "best" evidence for dark matter is very controversial, counterexamples abound, and recent re-evaluations of things like the Pioneer "anomaly" have called into question the idea of dark energy as well.

2 cents won't buy you much these days. That's one kind of "inflation" that is very real.


Someday, webby, we'd like to hear your complete story of the Wayne Travis affair. One has to wonder, considering your history, why you aren't right there by his side in Oklahoma, helping him to bring his "flat-pack" rotary Zed-Taz free energy overunity buoyancy drive to market. Don't you believe in Travis any more?

Tinman:

I will get to your other points later but I will discuss the levitating spring top now and touch on other matters later.

It is counter intuitive to see a levitating top or a brick and be told that no work is being done because there is force but there is no displacement.

For starters, let's forget about holding a brick in your hand.  Yes, it takes energy for your body to do that.  But it's a completely different thing all together.  What your body is doing compared to what is going on in an experimental setup are completely different things and not to be mixed up.   Your body is expending energy to hold the brick steady but if the brick is not moving then you are doing no work on the brick itself.  It should be easy to distinguish the two.

Take an example of a brick with magnets on the bottom and an electromagnet setup with an on-off switch.  You know the switch has to be on for the brick to float.  You know current is flowing through the electromagnets.  Same question here applies, are the electromagnets doing any work to keep the brick floating in place?

MileHigh

Tinman:

I will get to your other points later but I will discuss the levitating spring top now and touch on other matters later.

It is counter intuitive to see a levitating top or a brick and be told that no work is being done because there is force but there is no displacement.

For starters, let's forget about holding a brick in your hand.  Yes, it takes energy for your body to do that.  But it's a completely different thing all together.  What your body is doing compared to what is going on in an experimental setup are completely different things and not to be mixed up.   Your body is expending energy to hold the brick steady but if the brick is not moving then you are doing no work on the brick itself.  It should be easy to distinguish the two.

Take an example of a brick with magnets on the bottom and an electromagnet setup with an on-off switch.  You know the switch has to be on for the brick to float.  You know current is flowing through the electromagnets.  Same question here applies, are the electromagnets doing any work to keep the brick floating in place?

MileHigh

That would depend on your frame of reference point. From our reference point,the brick would seem to be not moving. But in reality,it is traveling at the same speed as the earth through space.

As far as the electromagnets doing work while keeping the brick floating in space go's-my answer is yes. But you must have the ability to stand back,and see everything that is happening to know why i answered yes-i wonder how many can do that.

Nice vid, Tinman.
Along similar lines, but on a larger scale:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9BsOW6P7QM

Starting around the 8:30 mark, Gil.. does an interesting experiment.  We observe a fairly massive "roller" accelerating up the magnetic ramp from starting point A, and then INERTIA carries it past the "sticky point" to exit point B, where it goes down a ramp and effectively out of the magnetic field.

Unfortunately, the experimenter does not measure the starting height ( A) nor the height of point B.  A few simple measurements would tell us a lot.  As it stands, there is no claim of untapped energy entering the system somehow.   I would like to see the experiment re-done with careful measurements taken.  (There are a few other measurements needed as well,like the mass of the roller and the work needed to move it  into initial position.)

 He does talk about working towards a looping device, but I see nothing along these lines in his later vids (which are numerous and quite interesting).

  Question, I put my ball on the scale and weighed it, held my magnet above the ball and the
weight got less,is my magnet doing any work?

Magnetic potential at any point in a magnetic field is defined as ' work done on a unit north pole to bring it from infinity to that point'.    Which means you have already done work to bring the magnet above the ball and holding it with force to balance force of attraction between ball and magnet.  The weight lost by the ball appears on your hand and you will feel that magnet has become heavier. ( you will feel the force of attraction on your hand). 

If ball jumps and sticks to the magnet,  it is only dissipating the energy which you have already done on the magnet to bring it from infinity to that point.

   I dropped my ball through a vertical plexiglass tube, I positioned my magnet so that
it retarded the fall, was my magnet doing any work?

Magnet does the work by imparting additional acceleration to the falling ball  and ball falls with higher speed than under normal gravity and sticks to the magnet.    But to seperate them and take ball to the original place you have to do equal amount of work which magnet did on ball while falling.

(snip)

@TK
Your magnetic wind tunnels you speak of,are something we have been useing for years in our window motor builds-maglev bearings-infact any MLD shows this magnetic wind tunnel you speak of. The magnets are provoding a continual force that is equal and opposite to the force of gravity-without physical attachment-show me any other device that can do the same without any energy input.

(snip)

I think you have missed my point. The Wright brothers invented the wind tunnel as a tool to test different airfoil shapes, angles of attack and so on. I am not making an analogy between "wind" and the magnetic field. I am saying that I haven't seen anyone explore the critical features of magnets and magnetism _without_ trying to build some kind of functional apparatus. Have you ever seen anyone build a test fixture and use a force gauge to measure the relative attraction of gravity and magnetism for magnets and balls in various positions, to determine whether or not the SMOT idea is viable? That is the kind of "wind tunnel" for magnetism I mean, just one example.

When I was working on Steorn's Orbo, I constructed just such a fixture, to determine the actual relationship between applied current and the "core effect" decrease in attraction of the core to a PM, by plotting current, separation distance and force for many different kinds of toroid material. What I found was very surprising to me, and I have never seen anyone else perform such a test, not even Steorn ... so I think my knowledge of the Core Effect and its ability to drive motors may be more complete than others. I used my knowledge to select the optimum toroid material, to make a core effect motor (Orbette 2.0) and test it, even to the point of reproducing Steorn's scope displays showing the negative energy integral, "proving" that my Orbette 2.0 was doing the same things that Steorn claimed indicated OU.

That's what I mean by "wind tunnel": A system that allows you to examine the critical parameters of your idea _before_ you try to build something by trial and error. People apparently think the Wrights just slapped together a bunch of old bicycle parts and went flying. The truth is very different. For example, they had already been flying, and even soaring for sustained flights, for several years, perfecting their control system and flying skills on _kites and gliders_ before they took their best-performing _glider_ design and added a motor to it to make the first real airplane. They used the wind tunnel invention to try shapes and motions before they put anything together to take flying. They knew without doubt that a certain wind speed over their wing would provide enough lift to fly, that their control system (wing warping) would work, and that their structures could carry the strain, before they ever built anything to take out to Kill Devil Hill.

So my "wind tunnel" suggestion was to examine the particular assertion that a magnet above doesn't retard the fall of a ball in gravity. Build an apparatus that isn't an attempt to make a running SMOT, but just to test that particular bit of critical behaviour.  The things you might find out by examining the critical parts of SMOT ideas may change your position about the feasibility of the idea. Or you may discover something that makes it all possible. Without actually doing the work you will never know. Repeating the designs and experiences of hundreds of previous failures isn't really going to teach you anything much. Testing the fundamental assumptions will.

It's odd that you think repulsion or attraction of a PM isn't a "physical attachment". I know what you mean, of course, you mean non-contact. Now I'll get whacky: Gravity is not a force. It is one kind of "space warpage" that is caused by the presence of mass. Magnetism is another kind of "space warpage" that is caused by certain configurations of electric fields: moving charges within bulk material. The motion of a ball that feels both gravity (because it has mass) and the magnetic field (because its atoms have a certain electron configuration) is the result of the total warpage of space by the mass and the moving electric fields. The ball, left to its own devices, takes the route that represents the _least energy_, that is, a "geodesic" path to the local energetic (PE) minimum or "potential well".