A diagram of Charles Redheffer's machine
Credit: Public domain
Almost as soon as
humans created machines, they attempted to make "perpetual motion machines" that work on their own and that work forever. However, the devices never have and likely never will work as their inventors hoped.
"In short, perpetual motion is impossible because of what we know about the geometry of the universe," said Donald Simanek, a former physics professor at Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania and creator of The Museum of Unworkable Devices. "Nature provides no examples of perpetual motion above the atomic level."
Laws of thermodynamics
To the best of our knowledge, perpetual motion machines would violate the first and second laws of thermodynamics, Simanek told Live Science. Simply put, the First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another. A perpetual motion machine would have to produce work without energy input. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that that an isolated system will move toward a state of disorder. Additionally, the more energy is transformed, the more of it is wasted. A perpetual motion machine would have to have energy that was never wasted and never moved toward a disordered state. https://www.livescience.com/55944-perpetual-motion-machines.html
