Energy Independence:
Perpetual Motion is the Way to Go.
by Ken Amis

1. The Problem

None can deny that earth's energy resources are finite. Many, however, prefer to ignore this fact. Modern technology coupled with the accelerating growth of the human population threatens to exhaust all known sources of energy in the foreseeable future. To make matters worse, present methods of energy use inevitably produce pollution that must be dumped somewhere, degrading the quality of life we desperately seek.

This situation compels us to seek new and non-polluting energy resources. The direction we must follow has been known for several centuries, but powerful interests in the energy industries don't want you to know about it.

2. The Path Not Taken

Long before the industrial revolution, mankind used energy in benign ways: human power, animal power, water power and even wind power. But with the invention of the steam engine we turned a corner and went down the wrong path, which still continues today. We began to burn fossil fuels to feed the insatiable demands of industry. With that came a period of wanton pollution of the air and water near cities and even in the previously pristine countryside. More recently we found ways to reduce the effects of that pollution, partly by directing it elsewhere where we wouldn't notice it right away. But someone will have to deal with it in the future. And of course, pollution clean-up requires still more energy to accomplish.

Villard's revolutionary idea.
All the while a few lonely visionaries took a different path. They sought to make machines of a different kind, known as "perpetual motion machines." [1] Villard de Honnecort's overbalanced wheel of 1235, used only a simple wheel with weights on hinged arms. So far as we know, he never built a model that worked, but over the following centuries others modified the idea, tweaking the mechanism, and adding mechanical embellishments. Other independent thinkers tried different approaches to achieve continual overbalance in wheels and other mechanisms. Their confidence was unlimited. Some even designed brakes into their machines to prevent them running so fast as to tear themselves apart. One can only marvel at the ingenuity they exercised in this quest, but while the machines they built showed definite promise, a truly working model was never demonstrated. Charlatans and con-artists muddied the waters with fraudulent machines whose only tangible result was to fleece gullible investors. But this occurs with any advancing technology, and should not be used to discredit the vast majority of sincere and honest seekers, or their ideas.

Establishment scientists have, throughout history, ridiculed and dismissed such independent thinkers without seriously considering the details of their ideas. We should not dismiss all of this effort as futile or misguided. It may be that these inventors were the true visionaries, following the correct path, undaunted by failures, not allowing themselves to be discouraged by naysayers, and not swallowing the big lies perpetrated by mainstream scientists.

And what has mainstream science and engineering given us? It has given us energy-guzzling machines that must be fed with fossil fuels ripped at great cost from the earth, stoking the fires of industry while spewing out unhealthy waste products that foul our air, water and earth. By contrast, all perpetual machine designs ever conceived have these virtues: (1) No fossil fuels are required, indeed no fuel at all is needed. (2) They do not produce noxious and toxic exhaust gasses or solid pollution, for they produce no exhaust.

3. Suppressing The Truth

We know that perpetual motion machines must be possible. God wouldn't have put us on earth and commanded us to use and exploit its resources if those resources would run out and destroy us prematurely, before God himself destroys us at the final Armageddon. God surely must have provided the means to sustain humanity long enough to ensure its final destruction by His own hand. After all, the first time God wiped out most of mankind, in the great flood, did He not provide miraculous suspensions of laws of physics, to allow the survival of humankind? Surely the laws of physics as we now understand them can likewise be suspended or modified if the need arises. And that need is upon us. With sufficient faith we will find the answer. [2]

As one perceptive writer has observed, "Any Supreme being worthy of the name must have the power to make an inventor rich." [3]

Perpetual motion machine inventors shouldn't be intimidated by the laws of thermodynamics. The thermodynamic laws were invented by engineers and physicists during the industrial revolution to discourage those restless minds seeking alternatives to those incredibly inefficient coal-burning engines. Then physicists tried to add clout to the laws by cloaking them in an incomprehensible mathematical theory called statistical mechanics. Not one in a hundred degree-holding physicists or engineers really understands where these laws come from. Even the great physicist Maxwell had to enlist the aid of a demon to make sense of it all.

Instead of making laws about what can't be done, scientists should instead invent laws that show us the ways things can be done. The negative character of thermodynamics laws does nothing but stifle and discourage creative and inventive minds from the quest for perpetual motion machines. Scientists nurtured in this climate of negativity have not, and never will, discover the secret of perpetual motion. They haven't a clue how it might be accomplished.

By going down the wrong path, science has become more and more complicated, so it's now too difficult for any but a few in the elite scientific priesthood to understand. It's time to say "enough!" and return to the basics of simple things that any basement or backyard inventor can grasp. We can no longer expect narrow-minded and closed-minded scientists, who waste their time mucking around with higher mathematics, to be able to understand simple things. Having lost any firm connection with reality, they have sold their souls to mathematics.

4. Friction: There's the Rub.

Look at an atom.
Some people assert: "You can never achieve perpetual motion, for you can never get rid of friction." That dogmatic assertion is easily refuted. Look at the atom. The atom's electrons, if not disturbed, circulate around the nucleus forever without energy loss. Nature is rubbing our noses in the truth: friction-free motion is possible!

Any practical engineer knows that there are ways to reduce friction, and doing so increases the efficiency of machines. Every such improvement in efficiency is inevitably followed by still more improvement. When a machine attains an efficiency of 1, its output equals its input. With just a bit more work and ingenuity one could surely push the efficiency above one, so the machine produces more output energy than input. The final stage of development would redirect part of the output to supply the input. Then the excess output energy could be used for other purposes. The goal of the over-unity perpetual motion machine will have been achieved.

5. A New Paradigm

Still, we must admit that all past efforts to make perpetual motion machines have failed. Ingenious inventors have devised overbalanced wheels and over-unity devices, all with overconfident expectations. This history of total failure should tell us something. It's time to try new approaches.

Instead of re-inventing the square wheel, we should learn from these past failures, avoiding the reasons for them. Friction is the bugaboo of perpetual motion inventors, for it wastes energy wherever a machine has moving parts. Past efforts to entirely eliminate friction have failed. Therefore we must get rid of all moving parts.

Whenever electrical currents encounter electrical resistance, heat is generated, also wasting energy. So we must eliminate electrical currents.

Real work output requires input energy, and that costs money. So we need a machine that produces only virtual work, which requires no energy input. Virtual work has another advantage for our purpose. Virtual work is the result of virtual displacements, which aren't subject to the usual constraints and limitations of mechanical systems, and are inherently friction-free.

By far the majority of past failed perpetual motion machines attempted to extract energy from the force of the gravitational field, or from the buoyant force of liquids. So that's probably not the way to go. Gravitational fields and buoyancy are quite well understood by physicists, so it's unlikely there are loopholes there to be exploited. More recent perpetual motion research focuses on magnetic fields, for they are as yet not completely understood in all their ramifications.

Our goal should be a machine with no moving parts, and no electrical currents. It would operate by unwinding the curl of magnetic fields, thereby tapping the enormous energy that all modern perpetual motion machine inventors know is contained in the field of every magnet. Previous motors and generators operated by cutting field lines, a destructive process. We exploit the fact that the curl of a magnetic field is much like a tightly wound spring. Our process doesn't cut field lines; it only takes out their kinks.

In case you doubt that magnets have unlimited stored energy, consider the lowly refrigerator magnet. It can hold itself in place forever on the refrigerator against the constant pull of gravity. Therefore the magnet must have an inexhaustible source of energy, which we can tap if we are clever enough, and have sufficient faith in our noble goals.

6. Geometry Points the Way

Mainstream scientists scoff at the notion of unwinding the curl of a magnetic field. They forget that one of the synonyms for the technical term "curl" is "rotation", a term dating back to the early history of field theory when scientists still had a tenuous grip on reality. Indeed fields without curl, such as electric and gravitational fields, are called "irrotational", which means they can't produce rotation, and would be useless for achieving our goals.

But how can this fact be harnessed to extract the curl of a field and produce rotary motion? For insight we only need look at the history of failed attempts to achieve perpetual motion. In every case the fundamental fact of nature that thwarted inventors was geometry. The geometry of space and time was the roadblock to success. Inventors tried to make a wheel turn forever by "overbalancing" it—keeping greater mass continually on one side. Imbalance can cause motion of a machine, but a wheel is (geometrically) a cyclic device, which must return to its initial position every cycle. That means that the boost you get from weight overbalance is lost when the weights must complete their cycle by moving back to the other side. You gain from the overbalance only temporarily, then you must lose what you gained. Geometry defeats one's aspirations at every turn.

But in this failure lies hope. We must alter the geometry. We must warp space itself to our purposes. That's what our device will do. It is a reverse curling-iron for the matrix of space.

So our machine shall be in a box (black if you like) that contains no moving parts and no electrical circuits. It takes the curl out of any magnetic field in the vicinity (the earth's field, if you like). This process induces a torque in any nearby ferrous material, such as a wheel, causing it to turn. [4] Our machine need not touch the wheel, but it should be bolted down so that it exerts only reactionless forces on the wheel.

Unwinding the curl of the magnetic field tends to linearize magnetic field lines, making the mathematics considerably simpler. Therefore engineers will find these machines much easier to understand and to exploit for useful purposes. There may no longer be a need for engineers to study calculus, thereby reducing the cost of their education. Lagrange equations need never again give grief to budding engineers.

Lest someone worry that use of such machines worldwide might "deplete" the earth's magnetic field, remember the refrigerator magnet example, which conclusively shows that the energy of magnetic fields is inexhaustible.

7. The Quantum-Mechanical Approach

We are pursuing several paths to this goal. Of course we can only give general descriptions, without revealing anything useful to competitors.

One method we hope to exploit is based on a radical re-interpretation of the uncertainty principle. In its usual form, that principle says that the measured position of a particle in space can have considerable uncertainty. That is, we cannot say precisely where it is, or when. But is the particle uncertain about where it is? Could it be that the matrix of space and time is a bit "fuzzy" in the vicinity of a particle? We are building a prototype to explore this idea. If this works, we may be able to extract the curl of the magnetic fields of the fundamental particles themselves. Perhaps this method can even be used to extract the field of magnetic monopoles.

Another one of our research groups pursues a different method. We have found a way to control the fundamental particles in solids so that electron-positron orbiting pairs are temporarily "parked" in quantum-mechanical forbidden states for infinitesimal time intervals. This process takes advantage of a newly-discovered loophole in the uncertainty principle. [5] The solid's angular momentum is altered, causing the remaining charges to move in synchronism in near-circular orbits to compensate for the change. Their combined fields act to remove the curl of any other fields in the solid.

What's in our black boxes? Of course we cannot reveal all of the details at this time, for if these became known, anyone could build the machine. Once you build a few, they could power the factory to turn out still more. While this machine could be the salvation of the world, it's only fair that the inventor be allowed to get filthy rich before every third world country begins turning them out in sweatshops at low cost.

Besides, certain details still need to be tweaked and refined before we can demonstrate a working model, but we assure you that we are very near reaching our goal.

Of course we expect that greedy big energy companies will try to suppress this invention. Physicists and engineers will declare it can't work because of their sacred laws of thermodynamics. To this we say, with all due respect, "poppycock!" These laws were invented to discourage independent thinkers who believe that "nothing is impossible". [6] We are confident our machine will free us totally from dependence on fossil fuels forever. No longer will we have to worry about a future of human deprivation, or face the prospect of compromising our lifestyle due to the inconvenience of energy sources running out.

8. A Warning and Disclaimer

Any technology can have unwanted side effects, and perpetual motion is no exception. Basement tinkerers should be aware of these dangers. No one should undertake building a perpetual motion machine without a solid background in physics and engineering.

Since the laws of thermodynamics are crucially dependent on the fact that certain physical processes are irreversible, then a perpetual motion machine, which would necessarily violate the laws of thermodynamics, must also be reversing some process previously thought irreversible. In that case, someone with evil intent could re-engineer the process to reverse the machine itself. This would give it the capability to consume energy without outputting any. Such a weapon could suck all the energy out of a city or small country in one fell swoop. Basement tinkerers who are ignorant of physics are playing with dangerous stuff. They may desire the salvation of the world, but they could inadvertently cause its total destruction.

  • Ken Amis

Endnotes

1. Verance, Percy. Perpetual Motion 20th Century Enlightenment Specialty Company, 1916.

2. Jeremiah 33:3, Ezekiel 1: 4-21.

3. Tierney, John. "Perpetual Commotion." Science 83, May 1983, p. 34-39.

4. Pfumbler and Goufhoff. "Cross-Coupled Backlash and Whiplash in Magnetic Fields." Applied Speculative Science, 15, 6 (June 99) pp. 2352-64.

5. Swartzengruber J. A. et. al. "A Hitherto Overlooked Consequence of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle." Journal of Alternative Physics, 7, 3 (Fall 02) pp. 1564-8.

6. Brush, Stephen G. The Temperature of History: Phases of Science and Culture in the 19th Century. New York, B. Franklin, 1978.


Watch for this new book by Ken Amis, due to be released early next year, available in fine bookstores worldwide. This long-awaited comprehensive look at perpetual motion includes its history, theory and application. Drawing on his many years of experience in the field, Ken Amis covers everything you need to know to avoid the mistakes of the past, anticipate the needs of the future, and achieve the holy grail of an over-unity machine.

Publisher: The 21st Century Enlightenment Company. Hardbound, $54.95. 9" by 10", 516 pages, 12 plates, many graphs and diagrams.


Ken Amis is the founder and CEO of Entropy Innovations. He has devoted his life to the quest for perpetual motion and holds several patents for key ideas and mechanisms that could contribute to this goal. He has worked apart from the more visible proponents of over-unity devices, free energy, anti-gravity and reactionless drives, for he doesn't want to be bothered with publicity or take the time required to respond to "clueless critics" of perpetual motion. Mr Amis does not have a web site, but has generously shared this and a few other documents for use on this site, granting us permission to edit and polish them into appropriate format. Serious inquires and questions may be directed to the address shown at the right. Important: Put Entropy Innovations on the subject line of your email to ensure that it reaches the correct department. Ken has asked us to screen these to weed out frivolous or abusive email. We will forward interesting or original queries to Mr. Amis for possible reply.

Some visitors to The Museum of Unworkable Devices have complained that the whole tenor of this site is negative—discouraging to folks who might wish to pursue the holy grail of perpetual motion. Therefore we have added Ken's document to represent another side of this issue, or as Ken puts it, "to give equal time to the lunatic fringe". With Ken's permission we have edited this document to fit the dimensions of reader's minds and attention span.

© 2002 by Ken Amis and Donald E. Simanek. Permission for reproduction and use of this entire document is granted for educational non-profit purposes only.


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