Is it possible to create an energy device that could spin for a very long time using magnets?

Question

You could have a wheel that was spinning and have magnets on the wheel and magnets away from the whole that were pushing and pulling the wheel around. Would that work? Some magnets push the wheel and the other ones pull it keeping it spinning.

Answer 1

It is possible to build something that will spin for a long time, with frictionless bearings, and in a vacuum.

But it will not be able to do any useful work, that would be a violation of thermodynamics. Also a violation of hundreds of years of experience.

People have been trying to build a perpetual motion machine for hundreds of years. There have been a huge number of models. But not one has worked. Not a single one.

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Answer 2

Most people who have studied magnetics will say that it isn't possible.  However, there are people who are working on designs and building prototypes to attempt it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMa4OLO9A...

Answer 3

keep thinking ,buddy I do.Draw it up or make a prototype

Answer 4

What you describe is called a perpetual motion machine. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to them as PMMs. Perpetual motion is a concept that has been around for thousands of years, however it is often considered as fundamentally flawed.

Perpetual Motion is in clear violation of the first law of thermal dynamics: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Despite this, I encourage you to design one and attempt to make a prototype.

Michio Kaku wrote a wonderful book called Physics of the Impossible. In his book, Kaku discusses the possibility of perpetual motion and notes many past attempts at creating a PMM. To learn more about what you are trying to do, I highly recommend you read it.

What you describe has been attempted many times, unsuccessfully. Thousands of years ago, there was a design similar to yours. The idea was to place a series of magnets on to the sides of a wheel. A larger magnet would be at the base of the device. This large magnet would repel the smaller magnets, causing the wheel to rotate. The wheel could then pump water, or move another magnet within a coil of wires creating an electrical current.

Perpetual motion is in its self a holy grail. It could solve countless energy problems for years to come. Good luck, this is no small feat.

Answer 5

Yeah maybe if you move the magnets in and out... sounds like an Idea I had a long time ago but never finished.  Move the magnets in at the right time so they accelerate the wheel, then move out the magnets.  Or maybe there's a way to set it up to work on its own.  Might take the same energy to move them away from the wheel though...

The conservation of Energy may be true, but hey maybe it's wrong, so keep trying, like me.

Answer 6

Yes and no.  You can get a magnet to levitate and spin over superconducting ring.  But you can't get more energy out of it than you put in.  Energy is conserved.

The nuclear power plant down the road does seem to get energy from nothing.

Answer 7

I think what we need here is not a design of magnets to make a motor run,  but a magnetic shielding materiel that would be used between polarity changes eliminating out of place polarity's

Answer 8

Technically speaking, that wouldn't be possible. energy would eventually be lost because some centripetal force will be lost per unit time.

That's because work (and hence energy will be consumed) will have to be done to overcome air resistance. (Force * displacement (think in terms of the circumference of the wheel) ).

If you had the whole set up in a vacuum, then i think that would be more likely. You'd also need a frictionless axle.

Keep thinking! your idea is great. I had pretty much the same idea when i was 8, but my teacher told me it wouldn't work either.

Answer 9

That is called an electric motor...

Answer 10

There are certainly mag-lev spinners which use magnets to reduce friction, but magnets cannot be used to create a perpetual motion device.

Why not? Well, the easy way is for me to say, "we know the laws of electrodynamics, and we know that they obey conservation of energy."

But there's a deep result in theoretical physics called "Noether's Theorem," which states that anybody who says, "this device violates conservation of energy," is literally also saying, by mathematical equivalence, "the laws of physics that govern this device will be different tomorrow from how they are today." (wiki it!)

Now *that* is a rather tough pill for most perpetual motion theorists to swallow. But that's also why most physicists are intensely skeptical about perpetual motion: the perpetual motion theorist is *literally* saying that "I don't know what my machine is going to be doing tomorrow."