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Energy cannot created or destroyed. As the case is such, how can perpetual machines be operated?

2007-06-19 23:05:05 · 3 answers · asked by abcdefghijkl 1 in Science & Mathematics Engineering

3 answers

Nothing will be created from nothing. Perpetual motion machine is not possible.

2007-06-19 23:08:18 · answer #1 · answered by ali j 2 · 0 0

Your question has the answer. since energy cannot be created from anything nor it can be destroyed, a perpetual motion machine is not possible in earth. But philosophically it may be possible in black hole or in some galaxy.
There are three laws of thermodynamics: you can't get something for nothing, you can't win, and you have to lose. The first law says you can't produce matter or energy from nothing; they are conserved. The second says the amount of entropy in the universe can only increase. The third notes that friction exists, so entropy does increase.

Perpetual motion machines are machines that are supposed to disobey one of the laws of thermodynamics. Usually it's the second law that people want to break, reversing the flow of entropy. Entropy is the amount of disorder in the universe.

Why you can't design perpetual motion machines
The second law of thermodynamics isn't actually an axiom. It can be deduced from the other laws of physics. It's an application of the pigeonhole principle.

The known laws of nature are reversible, that is, given a current state the previous state is uniquely determined.
Which implies that if you start with n possible states, after any amount of time you'll still have n possible states.
For every state that looks like something other than heat, there are a zillion states that look like heat.
Therefore any process will map at most one in a zillion heat states to something that looks like work. Almost all of the time heat stays heat. You can't map all the heat states to work states, they just won't fit.
I saw a published proof of the second law once that was based on quantum mechanics. Instead of arguing about n states, it represented the set of possible states as a volume in 6-dimensional space (3 for space, 3 for velocity), and showed that the volume stayed constant over time. (Um, it seems to me like that published proof covers the continuous space, while my outline of a proof was more quantum, but what do I know.)

This still allows perpetual motion machines to be built -- just not designed. If you succeed in building one you're guaranteed to be unable to explain it using the known laws of physics.

recycling works
But wait. Anyone using a perpetual motion machine would want to do something with the work after it's been extracted from heat. If you consider such a system as a whole, work maps to heat maps to work. The number of possible states does not decrease.

This suggests it is possible to make a machine that continually does useful work without requiring outside energy. The key is to always know what state you are in, and to make sure useful states always map to useful states. An example of such a machine is a quantum computer.

2007-06-20 06:21:02 · answer #2 · answered by veeraa1729 2 · 0 0

Okay, then it would have to have an energy source. But you could no longer call it a perpetual motion machine. The term "perpetual motion machine" is reserved for an impossible contraption that extracts energy form nothingness.

2007-06-20 08:37:42 · answer #3 · answered by jsardi56 7 · 1 0

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