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
No matter how you arrange the magnets, and even if you get rid of friction (which you can in theory but not in practice), and even if all the magnets are perfectly uniform so there’s no irregularities in the fields or anything that causes waste…it still won’t work.
Like /u/d2factotum says, magnets only pull (or only push if you turn them around). You can create an unbalanced setup where the magnets want to turn the turbine *at first* but if you do that there will be an orientation where the turbine is stable…it’ll turn to that position then stop. And if you create a perfectly balanced setup then there’s nothing to turn it in the first place.
If you crank through all the math of all the magnets pushing and pulling on all the different parts of the turbine, you’ll discover that the total energy output in a full rotation is…zero. It doesn’t matter how you arrange anything, it’ll always come out to zero, so you can never continue to extract energy by it spinning forever.
Latest Answers