When I was little, I loved playing with magnets. It was endlessly fascinating to find that exact spot where one magnet falls within the thrall of the other. I don't know what the technical name is, ...

On November 12th, 1717, clockmaker and mechanic Johann Bessler placed a 12-foot diameter, strange-looking wheel into a room. With a tender push, he started the contraption rotating, then confidently ...

To the eccentric inventor, perpetual motion probably seems a low-hanging fruit. Sure, those pesky Laws of Thermodynamics tell us that no machine can do work forever without some sort of energy input, ...

Perhaps the most persistent nonsense in physics: the perpetual motion machine. Bad ideas come and go in physics. But there’s one bit of nonsense that is perhaps more persistent than all others: the ...

My favorite shelf in the home library is where Raymond Roussel, the Comte de Lautréamont, E.T. A. Hoffmann, Leonora Carrington and other writers form a brilliant phalanx of eccentricity and marvel. I ...

A wheel weighted with swinging mallets. A cylinder rotating in a sealed, water-filled container. A siphon that transfers liquid back in forth in a seemingly endless loop. These may sound like the ...

Perpetual motion—it's fun to say that. For some people, perpetual motion machines hold the secret to everlasting free energy that will save the world. To them, it's a machine that is just beyond our ...

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 ...