I get that the main reason perpetual motion isn’t possible is because energy loss due to friction, but that’s not the case with magnets (I think?). Why can’t perpetual motion be achieved with magnets? What can’t we make something that spins and creates energy using magnets to propel a turbine?
In: Physics
A magnet is a configuration of material that causes nearby objects to interact in a certain way. This has little to do with energy, except that it takes energy to change configuration, to make a magnet.
A magnet is like a hole on the ground with sloped sides. Magnetically attracted things are like round objects. These will roll downhill, like certain metals stick to magnets. But you have to put energy in to set the objects up on the hill in the first place. So you don’t get any free energy out.
If you could find an infinitely deep hole, or one that mysteriously never fills, and an infinite number of dense objects to roll into it, you could make infinite energy. Just tie a string to each object and wrap the other end around a generator, let the object roll down. Repeat. Same for a magnet. Infinitely large, infinite number of iron balls tied to strings. But you see how this can’t happen with magnets and for very similar reasons it wouldn’t work with a hole in the ground.
The mystery of magnetism comes from being unable to sense the cause of magnetic behavior. At the deepest level, things interact differently depending on their configuration all the time and it doesn’t wow us because the causes are easy to see.
If you somehow lacked the ability to comprehend roundness, you might believe round things are more energetic than other shapes, or capable of generating power, since round things roll downhill. But we know round things just do that because of the way their configuration interacts with the environment and there’s no mystery there. Magnets are the same way.
Magnets have other interesting properties of course, but still, it all comes down to configuration and the resulting ways things interact. Nothing about magnets generates power. They’re a configuration, like a shape, of stuff.
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