exchemist

I’m a chemist by training, so I am very much aware that chemical bonding is electrostatic. Every solid object gains its solidity due to electrostatic attraction, between atomic nuclei and their surrounding cloud of electrons. It is this that bonds atoms together in solids. Magnetism is only different in that it arises from electric charges in relative motion. In a permanent magnet the atoms have unpaired electrons, which have angular momentum, circulating and/or “spinning” and this motion creates a magnetic dipole on each one. These align and their collective dipoles combine to create the magnetic field of the magnet. Unless it is an electromagnet, in which case, the field arises from the flow of electrons (electric current) in a coil of wire.

Magnetic attraction. If you have a bolt screwed into the beam, all that holds it in place is actually electrostatic attraction, because that is what is responsible for the chemical bonding in the metal that enables it to keep its shape and resist deformation under stress. There is no difference in principle. Don't be fooled by how biological muscles work. Those do expend energy to hold a weight in a static position, but that's to do with the biochemistry of muscle fibres. My example of the bolt screwed into the beam is what you need to consider. That does not expend any energy, not even if the bolt supports a 1 tonne weight suspended from it! Or think of a concrete support holding up a weight. If you did that by your muscles, you would get tired, but the concrete is not doing any work to hold the weight up. Work is only done if something moves under the action of a force. So a crane lifting a weight does work against the force of gravity. But if the operator stops work for lunch and leaves the weight hanging there from the cable, no work is being done. So there's no energy accounting to do in the case of the magnet. A magnetic force or an electrostatic force can both equally hold something in position against the force of gravity, in the right circumstances. There have been a few on this forum. My favourite was Tom Booth's "ice engine". He got banned in the end but that was for failing to take in anything anybody said, not because he was proposing a perpetual motion machine. Unusually, that was a perpetual motion machine of the 2nd kind. But it was a crank classic in that it was all based on Tesla [groan]. I had not realised that among his many eccentricities, Tesla thought you could run a heat engine using ambient heat. There was also, on another forum, aJapanese who thought an IR photovoltaic cell could be put in a fridge, light a bulb and cool the fridge. So that was another 2nd kind example. Tom Booth was interesting in that he had researched the history of thermodynamics and put me onto a paper by Sadi Carnot (in translation) in which he, Carnot, was applying the idea of caloric, i.e. before the modern concept of heat even existed, and nevertheless was able to get the right answers!

That, we were all sure, was the intended joke. We hoped he would win , so that he would have to be announced at the prize-giving ceremony. Sadly, he got knocked out of the competition in one of the heats.

This comment of yours illustrates exactly what I feared about your grasp of physics when it comes to magnets. No work is done by a static magnet sticking to a beam. Mechanical work is a force applied through a distance, F x d. You would not think a bolt screwed into the beam was continuously doing work by staying there, would you? So why do you imagine a magnet sticking to a beam is doing work?

I recall a competitor in one of the single sculls events at Henley Town Regatta who registered to race in the name of H Janus. This was in the days before the Amateur Rowing Association insisted on ID membership cards. Calling your son Janus seems an invitation to trouble, whether or not you know your Roman deities.

Jan, for men at any rate, is not a nickname but a full name, being how John (Jean in France, Iain in Scotland, Yann in Brittany) is rendered in a number of Continental languages. Jan as short for Janet is a female nickname, though.

Well, as someone who once long ago trained as a patent agent, I rather like perpetual motion machines. It can be fun sometimes to analyse them mechanically, without resorting to the easy thermodynamic way to dismiss them, just as an exercise. But at the same time I have some sympathy for the moderation at this other forum you mention. When one sees an apparently pointless machine like yours, which has a shaft output nominally the same as the input but with a needlessly complicated mechanism, especially one involving magnets for no obvious reason, alarm bells ring, (especially if one has been around on science forums for a few years as I have) and one tends to think, "Hello, that smells like a perpetual motion machine to me". Some of the stricter forums don't encourage mental exercises with perpetual motion cranks. By the way, it seems to me your machine can pass power backwards: if you were to give your rotor a spin so its arms passed through the magnet gap at a rate similar to the rate at which the magnets were made to reciprocate by turning the output shaft, I think it would align its speed with the reciprocating motion, rather like a synchronous motor aligning with the frequency of mains AC.

The advantage of considering the energy changes in a physical system is that it is often the simplest and most powerful way to analyse it, without the need to get bogged down a mass of in tricky mechanical calculations of forces etc. I learned this in the 6th form at school. The "reflexive insistence" you refer to is simply people applying this principle, to save getting into the weeds of mechanical calculations. Such calculations, though far more complicated, would in any case rely on other laws of physics (laws of mechanics and electromagnetism), which are on an equal footing with the laws of thermodynamics. All are equally as reliable as each other, so it really doesn't matter whether you choose the mechanical route or the energy route, from that point of view. But free energy cranks are all the same, really. They come up with a contraption that is just complicated enough to exceed their powers of analysis - and then claim they have broken the laws of thermodynamics. Magnets are often involved, as magnetism is particularly poorly understood by such people. (Tesla often comes into the picture too, though thankfully not in this instance.) By all means build your machine. It won't output more work than the work input. That is guaranteed.

Simple application of the laws of thermodynamics will tell you that the energy input cannot be less than the energy output. If this device is an attempt to get more out than you put in, it won't work.

As others have pointed out it's a terrible video. Pointing a camera straight at the sun with no filter is a lousy way to see an eclipse - all you get a bright splodge. As to your (strangely naïve) question, you can measure the speed of motion of the clouds, relative to the zone of maximum brightness, by comparing its position with 2 clear areas in the cloud. At 0:05 there is a clear area above the zone of max brightness and one below and a bit left of it. On my screen, these areas have moved ~5cm relative to the zone of max brightness by the 1:05 mark, i.e the clouds are moving at 5cm/min relative to the sun, on my screen. The magnification (zoom) of the camera also changes. On my screen these two clear areas are 2cm apart at the start of the video, 4cm apart at 0:13, 6cm apart at 0:15 and 10cm apart at 0:44, indicating an increase in magnification from 1 to 2 to 3 and finally to 5x. So at 5x, the rate of apparent motion of the clouds will be 25cm/min, i.e. ~4mm/sec. Later he zooms in even more, leading to an even faster rate. But he's holding the camera unsteadily and tends to keep it trained on the clouds, rather than fixing it on a stand so that it points steadily at one point in the sky, where the sun is. So that makes it look as if it is the sun that is "moving" diagonally down and right, whereas in reality it is the clouds that are moving up and left. And obviously, if you magnify the image by 5X or more, the rate of relative motion, of clouds w.r.t sun, will increase 5x or more too. So there is nothing strange going on here. As with the credulous stories some of us have seen previously of spontaneous combustion, or people being strangled by their own thymus glands, a bit of analysis is all one needs to make sense of it.

"Nick" as a noun means a small cut to an object or a person, and to nick something is to make such a cut. It is also English slang for jail (gaol). As a slang verb, to "nick" someone is for the police to arrest them. Assuming you mean nickname, there are quite a few androgynous ones, especially involving originally masculine names that have been feminised e.g. Jo for Joseph, Josephine or Joanna (N.B. "Joe" almost always refers only to Joseph), Pat for Patrick or Patricia, Lou for Louis or Louise, Charley/Charlie for Charles or Charlotte, etc. Nick itself can be a nickname for Nicholas, but I have never heard it used for Nicola or Nicole - Nicky tends to be used for the feminine forms. (Old Nick is a nickname for the Devil, by the way.)

What snails do is fertilise one another, I understand.

But you also get that with hermaphrodites like garden snails.

From what I read, the evolution of sexual reproduction is one of the unsolved problems in evolutionary biology. So a good question that is still awaiting a convincing answer.

I suspect a large part of the Biden strategy is to avoid the USA becoming too reliant on China for all its low carbon technology, which is a clear risk the way things have been going recently, whether it be the current glut of Chinese solar panels (I read that some people in continental Europe are even using them for fencing panels!) or their dominance in purifying lithium for batteries. No doubt the malevolent idiot Trump will tear all that up on principle (i.e. because it was Biden's idea) if he returns to power, even though independence from China is one of the things he talks about.

I've already given a link to read about that, earlier in the thread. Have you read it? If not, why not? But if you want to pursue this subject I suggest you need to start a new thread about it, as it is a quite different topic from the title of this one.

The problem with your idea is that the energy in sound waves is generally extremely low. There is a convenient table in this link: https://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/sound/u11l2b.cfm. from which you can see that a 100dB sound has an intensity of only 0.01Watts/sq. metre. So, far from it representing an unlimited source of energy, sounds is not going to be much use for energy extraction.

What is the point of this machine?

It's just a new concept for a battery. I repeat, the protons do not take the place of electrons, in any way. They take the the place of the lithium ions in a conventional lithium ion battery, that is all. The electrical circuit remains entirely conventional, with metal wires, through which electrons carry a current, as usual.

......thereby bringing in Edge Theory and @NeptuneSeven into the discussion as well?....................

The rate of time depends on the frame of reference, sure, but that does not make it subjective. The decay rate of the radioisotopes in your example would be affected in the same way, whether they were accompanied by an observer or not. Just as the decay rates of atmospheric muons are affected, without them being in any way conscious. So yes we can agree time ( and equally distance, by the way) are relative, but neither of them is dependent on the presence or absence of an observer.

How then do you account for the age of the Earth, say? The decay rates of radioisotopes seem to me an objective measure of duration, applying to inanimate entities (atoms).

It is not the truth. There is no centre, according to the Big Bang theory: https://www.astronomy.com/science/ask-astro-where-is-the-center-of-the-universe/

Nonsense. A time delay of a millisecond or so does not make the information received and interpreted by the brain a "lie" at all. If you want to talk about how the brain "lies" to us, you would do better to start a thread on how the brain makes assumptions about the information it receives, which can in some cases prove faulty. And neither of these is anything like the delusions experienced by someone undergoing a psychotic episode.

It seems rather obvious that sensory and mental processes in the nervous system and brain, involving as they do cascades of electrochemical reactions, must take a finite time to take place. What has this got to do with physics?