In the movies there is always a machine or a device that is built into the part of the ships propulsion system that makes warp travel possible.  I always have thought about this and wondered how this was possible. This then led me to start thinking questions, along the lines of, does god exist.

More  began to think about this, a famous mogul philosopher* Birbal in the court of Emperor Akbar.  The emperor imposed a question on Birbal, asking him to prove the existence of god.  Birbal then went away and began to think about this question, few days later he returned and demonstrated the existence of god, by asking the emperor if he knew how yogurt was made, he explained the process of making the yogurt was a complex process, involving maintaining good temperature, churning, cracking, fermentation, maturing and curdling the milk.  Using this as an example he went on to explain that god is always around us and us going through a process of devotional worship and commitment to god, we will eventually see and meet with god, since for one to get to the yoghurt they have to work through a complex process at the end which they are rewarded.

This is also true of electricity and magnetism, these things are all around us, we can see and feel electricity, through the light bulb we see it and perhaps not for so long, by touching a live cable through which electricity is flowing we feel it.  More I thought, I became further convinced that it is possible to  travel at warp speed and that we could do this now without having to go into space.  The tools and the equipment already exists on the planet. Yes, if you haven’t guessed it already, I am referring to the Hadron Collider.

My theory is based on breaking barriers, like the sound barrier which fighter jets and supersonic aircraft break –  once they break this barrier they almost continue traveling at a perpetual motion effortlessly, when compared with the energy they had to initially expend to break the sound barrier.  However as some would know, to break the sound barrier one has to reach that speed in the first instance and then the extra push to go through it.

I cannot see why same thinking could not be applied to the creation of a warp field which would make faster than light travel possible.  I believe we  could this by accelerating an object within the Hadron Collider, since this is the only device that I know that can generate huge speeds that would make this work possible.

The object would initially be accelerated at the maximum velocity and then a millisecond later it would be accelerated further by pushing it with further energy, then another millisecond later this push would in turn be further pushed with more energy and this process of “pushing” being constantly repeated.  This will eventually supply the object with compounded amounts of  ”push energies” every few milliseconds later.  As a result of this the object would gain enough energy to break through the light speed barrier.  Once the light speed barrier has been breached the object should as a result, be traveling outside normal space and time (within for intents and purposes I shall call the “warp field”) in a state of perpetual motion with far greater accelerations.

I firmly believe this, “warp” travel is possible and the hope that my thoughts through this forum and ideas may help to someone to take this task seriously and see it as a major challenge, ensuring and quote – “to go boldly where no man has gone before”.

I am a professional photographer – passionate about social and welfare issues.

More about my work can be found at

wisephotons – manipulating light to inspire
wisephoton blog and photogalleries
facebook
facebook asian wedding photography
twitter
flickr

*Birbal was actually an administrator, but the emperor loved him because of his wisdom

Economy of funds.

Economy of resources.

Economy of time.

Economy of whatever you feel like coming up with.

And while I’m all for saving the planet, being smart with my money, and not wasting anyone’s time (especially my own), there is one part of the economy movement that I refuse to take part in: the economy of movement.

As I mentioned back on January 6th, my New Year’s Resolution was to be healthier and lose weight.  I am doing incredibly well.  As of this morning, I am 33 pounds down in just  under 3 1/2 months.  It’s very exciting.

One of the things I discovered in my journey to being healthier is how little I move.  I don’t know who set up these guidelines, but the bare minimum of steps you want to take per day is 5,000.  A healthy day sits at 10,000 steps.  Above that and you’re doing great.  At my work, I’m lucky if I get 2,500 steps a day.  Yesterday, I got less than 1,000.  During the summer, the lower number will go up a little, but the upper one is unlikely to.  There will be more projects to drive me between my desk and my printer, but also more phone calls to answer.  This will keep me at my desk about as much as the printing will take me away.  So, ultimately, on a good day, I get a quarter of the steps I am supposed to in a nine hour period.  That’s over half the hours I’m awake.  The math here is not good.

This is one of the reasons I’ve come to dislike economy of movement so much.  I wait until I have to do three things at work and make them all into one trip, halving my possible steps.  An active body is a healthy body and I am wasting opportunities to be healthier.  Then, to top off the bad behavior, at lunch, I sit and read.  I’ve thought about walking, but my office shoes are hardly appropriate for a good walk and my office is right next to the highway.   Not the ideal walking area.

There are a few ways to fix this.  One is jogging in place, which actually isn’t that hard.  It’s not even jogging so much as stepping in place.  By doing that at the water cooler, while washing my hands, or even while standing and talking on the phone with a customer, I add a good one to two thousand steps per day.  Also, I can not save up all my walking to a few trips in the day.  I can be grateful for the fact that I forget pens habitually (except that it means I’m losing my mind), or that that one sheet of paper that slipped out of the stack floated three yards away instead of falling straight down.  Do some of these things take a little extra time?  Yes.  That much extra time as to be a problem?  No.  Not really.  And the benefits far outweigh the few seconds it takes me to add on the extra four steps to chase the piece of paper.

Getting healthy has felt amazing.  Staying healthy, now that’s something I’m looking forward to.  And it’ll happen step by extra step.

PS.  I like blogging twice a week.  I used to have such trouble coming up with subjects.  Now, I’m over-flowing!

When we got home I settled him on the couch while I made dinner for me and K. He was feeling much better but not ready to eat. A little while later I went to check on him and he was fast asleep. I tucked the blanket around him and sat down on the end of the couch. My sons are 15 and 18 years old yet I still find that it moves me to watch them sleep. It always has. He was so peaceful. All that kinetic energy at rest.

To say that T is a sound sleeper is an understatement. I recall being amazed at those kids on America’s Funniest Home Videos who would fall asleep at the dinner table or while eating a cone of ice cream. Well that is T. He has done both of those and more.

While watching him sleep I was thrown back in my mind to a sunny summer day when T was about two. It must have been our first summer at OIB. The entire family spent the morning on the beach building castles, fishing for minnows with the dip net, and jumping waves. Late in the morning T was getting cranky so I decided to head back up to feed him lunch and put him down for a nap.

I wrapped him in a beach towel and carried him over the hot sand. Since the crew was still playing hard I left them the wagon to transport the rest of the sandy kids; I carried T the short walk up the road. When I reached the house I realized that the rhythm of my steps and being cocooned in my arms had lulled him to sleep. But he was sandy from head to toe!

I decided that Mr. Sandman was going to have to be washed away – both literally and figuratively. The beach house has an enclosed outdoor shower that includes a changing area with a bench. I laid him down and began to pull of his wet bathing suit. He didn’t wake up. ?? Talking to him I picked him up and he still wouldn’t wake up. Still wearing my own suit I stepped into the stream of the warm shower. He still did not wake up.

That child slept through entire process – including a thorough hair washing to remove all the sand. I laid him back down and dried him off. Carried him up two flights of stairs. Dressed him in napping clothes and put him in the bed. Never once did he crack an eyelid. It amazes me to this day.

After all that I was wet and sandy and needed both a bath and a nap.

Although T occasionally still folds up his almost six foot frame and crawls in my lap, I miss the days when I could carry them in my arms. Their problems were simple and easily fixed. All it took was a snack. A nap. A song. A kiss and a hug. And everything was better.

Watching T sleep I felt a sudden urgency to slow down the clock. But that isn’t possible. I’m just grateful for those sweet sweet memories and those rare but precious glimpses of peace in between the perpetual motion.

Electric bassist Tim Lefebvre accompanies on all tracks. Drum and keyboard duties are split. Adam Benjamin gets the bulk of the work on Fender Rhodes and piano, with Uri Caine contributing to three songs. Antonio Sanchez has drum duty for the first five songs, with Mark Guiliana taking over the last five. Alto saxophonist David Binney joins for one song and contributes electronic sound effects elsewhere.

The title song starts as an easygoing, Sunday drive kind of piece. It quickly turns into a frantic, free-form display by McCaslin. Lefebvre and Sanchez seem to be on divergent but compatible paths – each headed toward his own destination but well within sight of each other. McCaslin plays the extremes of the tenor’s range for emphasis, but also spends plenty of time in the middle. Benjamin steps in on the Fender Rhodes, giving the middle passage a spacey feel.

Read more …

Birthday week has been great so far. I sold a watercolor painting from my Etsy shop.

Hide n' Seek - © Amanda Makepeace

I’ve also won two books, one from Goodreads and the other from LibraryThing.

Book 1:  The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer

Imprisoned for life aboard a zeppelin that floats high above a fantastic metropolis, greeting-card writer Harold Winslow pens his memoirs. His only companions are the disembodied voice of Miranda Taligent, the only woman he has ever loved, and the cryogenically frozen body of her father, Prospero, the genius and industrial magnate who drove her insane. As Harold heads toward a last desperate confrontation with Prospero to save Miranda’s life, he finds himself an unwitting participant in the creation of the greatest invention of them all: the perpetual motion machine. Beautifully written, stunningly imagined, and wickedly funny,The Dream of Perpetual Motion is a heartfelt meditation on the place of love in a world dominated by technology. (via Goodreads)

Thinking about this book inspired my latest fractal too!!

Book 2: The Ale Boy’s Feast by Jeffrey Overstreet

The king is missing.
His promises lie in ruins.
His people are trapped as the woods turn deadly.
Underground, the boy called Rescue has found an escape.

The world has been poisoned. The forests, once beautiful, are now bloodthirsty.

But the people of House Abascar will risk their lives on a journey through those predatory trees. Inspired by Auralia’s colors, they’re searching for Inius Throan — a legendary city where they can start over again.

But they journey without a king. Cal-raven has lost his faith in himself and in that mysterious creature — the Keeper who inspired him to lead. His broken heart needs a miracle.

What of those Abascar survivors still enslaved to the beastmen? As the ale boy leads them upstream on an underground river, their deliverance depends on a miracle.

And where is the wandering mage, Scharr ben Fray? He’s discovered that the world’s history is a lie, one only a miracle can repair.

Time is running out for all of those whose stories are tangled in The Auralia Thread. But miracles happen wherever Auralia’s colors are found.

How I love this series, and I’m not even religious! Let me say that again. I’m not religious. This series will touch you, no matter if you are Christian, Buddhist or Pagan. The Auralia Thread series is beautiful. I’ve been waiting eagerly for the last book in the series, but I wasn’t sure how I would get my hands on a copy. (I’m so poor!). I certainly wasn’t going to beg Jeffrey Overstreet for a copy (he supplied me with a copy of the last book, Raven’s Ladder). Then I discovered The Ale Boy’s Feast was up for grabs at LibraryThing. I thought, why not take a chance. And I WON!!

Don’t forget to stop back on Friday for the birthday festivities/giveaway/surprise.

Check out this site from Linear Technology

http://www.linear.com/products/energy_harvesting

Look at the case studies and ask for free samples to test out your theories.

Make the world self sufficient in energy one person at a time.

How do we know it is an illusion? Because it is impossible. Therefore we seek an explanation. Watch the video and see if you can decode what is going on. When you think you have it figured out, see this proposed solution to the illusion:

Is this how the Escher Waterfall machine works?

So why do people create videos like this? Or for that matter, why did someone create the Jerusalem UFO hoax?

The Jerusalem UFO at Dome Of The Rock on January 28, 2011

Perhaps it is for the money. The Escher waterfall video shown above has nearly 2 million views in less than a month. The Jerusalem UFO video has millions of views as well. If a video on YouTube has ads, it generates money for the creator. That may be all the incentive that is necessary.

More illusions:
- An incredible optical illusion – try to figure it out…
- Two Accidental Optical Illusions
- a simple change to a checkerboard bends the lines
- The Optical Illusion created by perspective, nicely demonstrated
- Bizarre optical illusion – 200 tiny squares bend a checkerboard
- Amazing Animated Optical Illusions – Plus, how to make your own
- Three great optical illusions on video
- A great optical illusion – the diamonds that change colors
- Today’s optical illusion is brought to you by the color Yellow
- Two optical illusions for your viewing pleasure
- A most impressive optical illusion
- Seven great optical illusions
- the perception of images
- A different way to think about optical illusions – many may be caused by wiring errors

If you would like to follow Brainstuff on Twitter or Facebook, here are the links:
- Follow Brainstuff on Facebook
- Follow Brainstuff on Twitter

Well than that’s the energy crisis solved.

I’ve seen pictures of physical models of Escher’s impossible structures before (generally they only look right from a very specific angle), but the flowing water in this one is… mind bending to say the least. Also the shadows and reflections and so on give nothing away, at least not to me. Very cool.

Essentially, I’m looking to use buoyancy to drive a turbine and generate electricity.  What makes this design different than others (such as a conventional water or steam turbine) is that it is a closed system that uses magnetic force to drive the internal rotor.  By using a hand pump to introduce air to the reservoir in a controlled manner, the goal is to enable a degree of perpetual motion and eliminate the need for conventional energy sources to power the generator.

Why a hand pump?  It can be used in the third world, where demand for such a low-watt power source is highest.  It’s worth noting that the only physics or chemistry training I’ve ever had was way back in high school, so I have no idea whether or not this is feasible.  That said, I’d love to hear some feedback on whether this idea might have some merit and potential.  Can you imagine the applications for a system like this if it were successful?

Monday, February 7^th, 7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

Auditorium of the Harrison Institute/

Small Special Collections Library

Beautifully written, stunningly imagined, and wickedly funny, The Dream of Perpetual Motion (St. Martin’s Press, 2010; Picador, 2011) is a heartfelt meditation on the place of love in a world dominated by technology.  DEXTER PALMER lives in Princeton, New Jersey. He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton University.  Following the reading, Dexter will sign copies of the novel, available for purchase through the U.Va. Bookstore.  Sponsored by the U.Va. Library’s Harrison Institute and Scholars’ Lab, the U.Va. Department of English and Creative Writing MFA Program.

For more information, see: http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/harrison/

We’re going to let you decide which of these two projects is a delight, and which is amusing.

The project on the left is a desktop kinetic sculpture. We like it because of its size and simplicity. A single AA battery drives the gear head motor that provides the lift for the metal balls. There are several different routes for them to take in returning to the lift wheel, each route determined by a mechanical combination of the metal spheres. This is more of a month-long build than some of the other kinetic devices we’ve seen which could take a lifetime.

The offering on the right is a perpetual motion machine. Well, it will be once that guy gets the kinks worked out. You can see him explain how he intends this works in the video after the break. We’re not betting on perpetual motion, but if we did, our money would be on something like the Steorn Orbo replica and not on this.

[Thanks Cr8ive]

Here’s how this works: the Sun’s magnetic field is extremely complicated, with lots of magnetic field lines embedded in packets of ionized gas (called plasma) that rise and fall beneath the surface.

These field lines can pierce the Sun’s surface, loop up, and then come back down to create a complete circuit (as you can see in the SDO pic above; the plasma follows the field lines and glows). All these field lines can get tangled up, like a sack full of stretched springs, and there’s a huge amount of energy that can be stored in these magnetic fields. If one of them suddenly connects with another it can release its energy, snapping other lines… and you get an enormous cascading release of energy.

Think rare earths, tantalum hafnium carbide (Ta4HfC5), and then think of China’s recent imports of copper (hoarding), but not as in the old Ph.D. in forward-looking economics kind of way, but rather that copper could simply be in the midst of a major repricing event, your “Eureka” moment if you will – for it may, one day soon, represent the required “fuel” for free, continuous, on-site, emission-free carbon-less power, otherwise known as Alternators with Hydromagnetic Engines.

http://patents.ic.gc.ca/opic-cipo/cpd/eng/patent/1085918/summary.html

Flotor (TM) power is an efficient form of next generation renewable hydromagnetic energy (patented #1085918 & trademarked) but generally dismissed by Wall Street’s limited funding of non-fossil &bio-fuelled alternative energy advocates as a perpetual motion energy machine that defies the laws of physics.

Einstein was once quoted saying, “If at first, the idea is not considered truly absurd, then there is no chance for it in succeeding.”

In short, the inventor discovered that by wrapping copper wire around an electrically-charged steel sphere, that it can induce electron formation through applying counter-natural magnetism forces by way of a spinning magnet flysphere, which spins like a suspended “counter-magnetic” beach ball inside an enclosed box, within a special encapsulated liquid volume enclosure of plasma that is filled with sand-like (rare earth) particles which react with a “pin wheel pulsation effect” once in motion, and thus creates an electrical discharge or current from the “steel & copper beach ball” on outwards, which can then be gathered and converted into direct current (DC) electrical supply, for near-endless, free energy.

“Free” power engines, once you get your spinning magnet working, and all you basically need for a magnet drive train is copper wire (disclosures: long HKU-tsx) & carbon steel (X-N)(FCX-N) for hydromagnetism to work and to provide clean, on-site, continuous, and emission-free nex/gen hydromagnetic electricity.  Requests for technical and investor prototype information development, along with any other media inquiries, are available through contacting ContraMan@Contramanfund.com.
Seeking Any Intentions,
Contra_Man

A couple side notes: Yes, that is Tax Credit #4 doing his caveman-want-animal-crackers-now impersonation in the background; and no, the two red dots reflecting in the glass of the patio door are not the glowing eyes of an evil cyborg looming menacingly behind me.

The Perpetual Motion deer. Crazy, huh? That thing is sprinting around like a 4-year old hopped up on Fun Dips, apparently running around at top speed for no other reason than to run around at top speed, just like a little kid.

And you also notice that every time it looked like the buck was about to finally catch up with Miss Hard-to-Get and have five seconds of “alone time,” the PM deer would come flying in and disrupt things, just like a little kid.

Regardless of species, kids will be kids.

(Any special candy that you remember from your childhood? Any animals you’ve videoed recently preparing to engage in carnal acts? No? Anyone who would do that should immediately seek counseling? Well, this got awkward…)

In physics, that question is equivalent to “can you spot a scam when you see one?”.  That’s because a perpetual motion machine is, by definition, a fraud.  It is a device that claims to generate useful work in a way that violates one of the most basic laws of physics: the laws of thermodynamics.  The laws of thermodynamics are extremely fundamental to physics; they belong to a set of five or so ideas that can really be called “laws”, upon which the rest of physics is built.

So if you (portrayed below by Lisa Simpson) submit an idea or invention to the physics community (portrayed by Homer Simpson) that violates one of the laws of thermodynamics, you’re opening yourself up to a world of ridicule.

If someone tells you “what you’re proposing is a perpetual motion machine” (they’ll say perpetuum mobile if they’re trying to sound snooty), they might as well be saying “you couldn’t tell a Lagrangian from a lawnmower”.  It’s a pretty strong rebuke.

In my experience, though, most physics students have a false sense of confidence in their own ability to spot a perpetual motion machine.  They think that such a whimsical contraption will have an obvious, glaring flaw that’s easy to notice because it will violate energy conservation.  “Oh, you forgot to take into account friction,” they’ll say, and then they’ll give you a short lecture on the First Law of thermodynamics.  “Energy is neither created nor destroyed,” they’ll say.

The truth, however, is that most perpetual motion machines that you are likely to encounter do not violate energy conservation.  Rather, the tricky and persistent scientific “scams” violate the much more nebulous Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says (in one of its formulations):

It is impossible for a device to receive heat from a single reservoir and do a net amount of work.

It is much easier to be fooled by proposals which violate this Second Law, which ultimately has its roots in probability rather than in the deterministic notions of energy conservation.  In my life I have been fooled on two noteworthy occasions by seemingly good ideas that violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  One idea was for a hypothetical machine to generate energy from thin air (molecules).  The other was a sure-fire gambling method.  In this post I’ll discuss both of these fraudulent schemes and why they fail, and I’ll try to explain why the Second Law of Thermodynamics can be stated like this:

It is impossible to profit, in the long run, from a truly random process.

The remainder of this post is organized thusly: First, I’ll introduce you to Feynman’s ratchet, a fairly popular thought experiment that seemingly yields a perpetual motion machine.  I won’t tell you why it fails, though, until later.  In the second section I’ll introduce you to an idea that I once thought could make me a rich gambler and I’ll explain why it doesn’t work.  Finally I’ll come back to Feynman’s ratchet and explain why it also must fail for a very similar reason.

Feynman’s Ratchet

Imagine that you manage to construct the following device.  You take a very small, very light-weight metal rod and attach some thin, paddle-like fins to one end.  Let’s say that the rod is held in place by some low-friction bearing which allows it to rotate on its axis.  If the rod/fins are sufficiently light-weight, then when they are exposed to randomly-moving air molecules some of these molecules can hit the fins and cause the rod to rotate in one direction or the other.  You, the inventor, are hoping to harness some of this rotation in a useful way, but you need the rod to rotate consistently in one direction before you can do anything with it.  So you attach the other end of the rod to a ratchet mechanism: a saw-toothed gear that interlocks with a spring-loaded lever (called a pawl).  Like this:

The ratchet, according to your design, will allow the rod to rotate easily in one direction (counterclockwise) but will not let it rotate in the other direction (clockwise).

So there you have it.  A simple perpetual motion machine.  As long as the surrounding air molecules continue to move randomly, the ratchet should continue to spin (perhaps sporadically) in the counterclockwise direction, driven by occasional collisions with high-energy air molecules.  You can even get useful work out of the ratchet if you want, for example by winding up a rope that lifts a small mass or by using the rod to drive a tiny electrical generator.

This clever thought experiment is generally known as “Feynman’s Ratchet”.  It was popularized by Richard Feynman in his Lectures on Physics, although the original explanation belongs to Smoluchowski (of diffusion law fame) in 1912.  I first heard of it as a riddle passed around by undergraduate students.

It’s not immediately obvious that such a machine should be impossible.  It certainly doesn’t violate energy conservation, nor does it rely on any “zero friction” assumptions.  Feynman’s ratchet gradually uses up the energy of the randomly-moving air molecules around it (cooling the air as it gains energy through collisions), but so long as the earth is heated by the sun it should continue to rotate and, seemingly, provide useful work.  It seemed to me, as an undergraduate, that this was a clever little device for converting solar energy to useful work.

But, by decree of thermodynamics, Feynman’s ratchet cannot work as a heat engine.  It plainly violates the Second Law, which says that useful work can only be obtained by the flow of energy from high to low temperature.  This device purports to get energy from a single temperature reservoir: that of the air around it.

Where does it go wrong?

If you’re encountering this riddle for the first time, you can try and figure it out for yourself before I tell you the answer below.  But it may help you to first consider another bogus scheme, which I stumbled upon as a high school student and thought for sure could make someone a fortune.

The perpetual motion gambling scheme

It was during high school that my nerdy friends and I first discovered the joys of computer programming.  It seemed to me then (and still seems now) a remarkable form of instant gratification: if you want to see what happens in a particular hypothetical situation, you just ask the computer to work it out for you and you get to avoid a lot of tedious and questionable theorizing.  Of course, the marvelousness of the computer can quickly lead to the programmer developing an over-reliance on its powers, and from there it’s easy to fall into a kind of intellectual laziness that gets you into all kinds of (scientific) trouble.  It’s probably this computer-born laziness that first allowed me to be fooled by the “perpetual motion gambling scheme”.

Back in 11th grade, the programming platform of choice for my friends and I was the TI-83 graphing calculator.  Our setting of choice was the back of physics class.  On one particular day, I was playing a simple blackjack program that my friend had made when I discovered that I could make money every single time I played.  What’s more, I could make an arbitrarily large amount of money, apparently only by judiciously deciding how much to bet at each hand.  I only learned much later in life that I had stumbled across a system called the “martingale strategy“.  And only very recently did I realize that hoping to profit from the martingale strategy amounts to a perpetual motion machine, and is in violation of the Second Law.

If you’re unfamiliar with the martingale strategy, it goes as follows.  Consider the simplest possible gambling game (you can easily generalize to other games, like blackjack): you place a bet and then flip a coin.  If the coin comes up tails, then you lose all the money you bet.  If the coin comes up heads, then the money you bet is doubled and given back to you.  It’s a completely fair game which, on average, should give you zero net profit.  The martingale strategy is to place an initial bet (say, $1), and then double your bet each time you lose.  In this way a victory at any given coin toss will completely compensate for all previous losses and give you a net profit of $1.  In flowchart form, it looks like this:

Notice that there’s no exit to this flow chart except at “Congratulations”.  You can’t lose!

Of course, it’s possible that you, the bettor, only have a finite amount of money to bet, which would imply another ignominious exit to this flow chart corresponding to “you have completely run out of money”.  (This was impossible in my friend’s TI-83 blackjack program, which allowed you to go into arbitrarily large amounts of debt).  But the finiteness of a person’s funds didn’t seem like an insurmountable problem to me.

Here’s how the strategy played out in my high school student imagination.  Come to the gambling table with some unthinkably huge amount of money: say, dollars.  Now follow the martingale system until you reach a profit.  The only way the system could fail is in the extremely unlikely event that the coin comes up tails ten consecutive times.  The probability of that happening is only , so, I reasoned, it can be ignored.  Once you’ve followed the chart and won your $1, start over by resetting your bet to $1.  Repeat the system ad nauseum until you’ve made all the money you want.  Go home rich and happy.

And, of course, the strategy is very flexible.  If you’re richer than my “unthinkable” thousandaire and you’re not content with a 1-in-1000 chance of losing, then you can start by coming to the table with dollars, which would imply a tiny chance of failure.  Or if you want to make money faster (with slightly higher risk), then at each coin toss you could bet (total amount of money lost) + $10 instead of + $1.  What could go wrong?

What could go wrong, of course, is the Second Law of thermodynamics.  It says (in my formulation) “you cannot profit from a random process.”  Long-time readers of this blog (thanks!) may notice that the martingale system sounds suspiciously similar to Matt Ridley‘s strategy for biasing the gender distribution: keep having children until you have a boy, and then stop.  It didn’t work there for the same reason that it doesn’t work here: a truly random process cannot be used for directed motion.

And, actually, the martingale system isn’t too hard to pick apart once you stop being analytically lazy (as I was in high school) and actually weigh the different outcomes.  Take the example where I come to the gaming table with dollars and follow the strategy from the flowchart above.  Then 1023 out of every 1024 games my strategy will succeed, and I’ll receive as my prize $1.  However, once in every 1024 games the strategy will fail, and when it fails it will fail spectacularly: I’ll lose $1023.  So if I keep playing the game long enough, on the whole I will make zero profit.

Just to make the point visually, here is a simulated string of “martingale” rounds, showing one possible evolution of the gambler’s net profit over time.

Note that at a given round, your profit is almost certainly increasing (positive slope), which is why the martingale strategy is so alluring.  If you start from zero, then you will most likely earn some money in the short term.  But given enough time, those big drops will hit you and you will find the strategy unprofitable.

Let me say this more again explicitly, as a hint to those still thinking about Feynman’s ratchet.  You cannot get directed motion out of a random process.  You can set up a system that makes a step in one direction (profit) more likely than a step in the other direction (loss), but it will always be accompanied by a change in the size of those steps so that on the whole you go nowhere.

Got it?

Feynman’s ratchet is explained after the jump

The downfall of Feynman’s ratchet

The problem with Feynman’s ratchet, as you’ve probably figured out by now, is that there is no such thing as a perfect ratchet mechanism.  What I drew above was a spring-loaded lever that is supposed to prevent the gear from rotating backward.  But in a thermal environment, where energy can be absorbed from randomly-moving air molecules, nothing is impossible.  Things only become improbable due to the high energy they require.

So it must be possible for the gear to rotate backwards (clockwise).  In this case, it requires a strong collision from some air molecules against the lever, so that the lever gets pushed up and past the tooth of the gear and the gear can slip backward.  There is a corresponding small rate at which the gear skips backward by one tooth (so that the lever snaps into place in a new location).

Of course, this backwards rotation is much less probable than a small forward rotation.  But consider that for the gear to rotate forward by one tooth, a whole bunch of small rotations must be chained together consecutively.  The net rate of all of those small rotations coming together is also be fairly small.

And, in fact, the Second Law guarantees that the rates of a forward rotation and a backward rotation are the same.  It seems surprising that this should be the case, no matter how carefully the ratchet is designed and no matter what size/shape the various pieces are.  But it is.  In the Lectures on Physics, Feynman estimates the rates of these two processes and shows that they are, in fact, equal (Chapter 46).

Of course, if you really wanted to make the machine work you could cool down the air on the ratchet side or heat up the air on the fin side, like this:

But in this case, you’ve only managed to generate work in the same way as a common steam engine: by creating a temperature difference and then using some of the heat that flows from hot to cold.  (Here you’ll need a heat pump to prevent the temperature from equilibrating with by conduction along the metal rod).

What did we learn?

And now,  like a good episode of G. I. Joe, this post concludes with a recap of the morals to be taken from it.  The first moral is the Second Law itself: it is impossible to extract directed motion from a random process (a single heat reservoir).  Anyone who claims they can do so is either mistaken or a charlatan.

A perhaps equally important lesson, though, is that it is easy to be fooled when it comes to the laws of thermodynamics.  In the last decade or two, for example, there was much controversy over the mechanism by which muscle fibers contracted, before someone realized that one of the leading proposals amounted to a perpetual motion machine.

So be aware.  Because knowing is half the battle.

Shoes: Bikila
Music: Smashing Pumpkins – Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Comfort Level: Fine. But it was a bit cold and wet!

Shoes: Bikila
Music: Arctic Monkeys – Humbug
Comfort: Fine

I don’t know if I’m not taking enough rest between runs, or because it was wet, or maybe the tempo of the music I was listening to was too slow. But I ended up doing another pretty lazy run today pace-wise.

Music: None! I was burned by the iOS 4.2 update bug. I can’t run as well without my music

Shoes: KSO. Afterwards I found some abrasion on the inside of my foot! I must have had them on too tight or something.

Anyway, I didn’t run particularly fast, but RunKeeper informs me it was technically my longest run yet, so I guess that’s good. I should try to do some more outdoor running, if only it weren’t so hot.

Shoes: KSO
Music: Metallica – Load (second half)

I tried to push myself a bit harder, running 16km/h for the first 3 km but ended up slowing down towards the end. Still, sub 20 min time so I’m happy enough.

RunKeeper

Check out the 6th kilometer, I actually managed to maintain a 15 km/h pace outdoors, which I’m pretty proud of!

Shoes: Bikila

Music: Metallica – Load

Comfort Level: Wheezing a bit, I think I had some mild asthma.  I was working pretty hard to maintain my pace.

Anyway, I think it’s a good sign.  Here’s hoping I can keep it up for longer distances later on.

RunKeeper

Shoes: KSO
Music: Bodyjar – Singles and Stuff

Comfort: Actually, I had a stitch pretty much the whole time. But I ran a little bit faster than usual because there were lots of people to overtake and I get a bit competitive.

When one is discussing time, there are several ways that it can be interpreted.  Looking at a clock and seeing it tick is one way.  The passage of time in that manner is affected by travel at the speed of light.  But the crux lies in time interpreted by molecular decay.  Whether going the speed of light or laying in bed, molecular decay (the rate your cells age and die) will not change.  So 10 years at the speed of light may only look like 2 months to the traveler, but his body will have lived for the 10 years.

But I will continue my research into travel at the speed of light and creation of the perpetual motion machine.  I shared my idea with a buddy who’s with the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics and the Princeton Physics Department, and he has some interest.

Stay tuned.