Apparent Perpetual Motion Machines
Even though they fully respect the laws of thermodynamics, there are a few conceptual or real devices that appear to be in "perpetual motion." Closer analysis reveals that they actually "consume" some sort of natural resource or latent energy, such as the phase changes of water or other fluids or small natural temperature gradients. In general, extracting large amounts of work using these devices is difficult to impossible.
Read more about this topic: Perpetual Motion
Famous quotes containing the words apparent, perpetual, motion and/or machines:
“[Women’s] apparent endorsement of male supremacy is ... a pathetic striving for self- respect, self-justification, and self-pardon. After fifteen hundred years of subjection to men, Western woman finds it almost unbearable to face the fact that she has been hoodwinked and enslaved by her inferiors—that the master is lesser than the slave.”
—Elizabeth Gould Davis (b. 1910)
“The moment when she crawled out onto the back of the open limousine in which her husband had been murdered was the first and last time the American people would see Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis crawl.... She was the last great private public figure in this country. In a time of gilt and glitz and perpetual revelation, she was perpetually associated with that thing so difficult to describe yet so simple to recognize, the apotheosis of dignity.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“I still think I ought to leave Washington well alone. I have many friends in that city who can of their own motion speak confidently of my ways of thinking and acting. An authorized representative could remove some troubles that you now see, but only think of yet greater troubles he might create.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“The machines that are first invented to perform any particular movement are always the most complex, and succeeding artists generally discover that, with fewer wheels, with fewer principles of motion, than had originally been employed, the same effects may be more easily produced. The first systems, in the same manner, are always the most complex.”
—Adam Smith (1723–1790)