James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

Remember that zany Irish company Steorn, who claimed to have built a working perpetual motion machine that could produce clean, free energy out of a few magnets and some plastic discs? Well, they're ...

Perpetual motion machines. A century and more ago, they were a hot ticket. Ebenezer Punderson Avery, a Connecticut man who lived in Great Barrington in the 1780s before relocating to New York, ...

Perhaps the most persistent nonsense in physics: the perpetual motion machine. Bad ideas come and go in physics. But there’s one bit of nonsense that is perhaps more persistent than all others: the ...

Perpetual motion machines are impossible, right? They violate the laws of thermodynamics. And yet people have been trying to engineer one for centuries. YouTuber gzumwalt posted a video of what looks ...

A wheel weighted with swinging mallets. A cylinder rotating in a sealed, water-filled container. A siphon that transfers liquid back and forth in a seemingly endless loop. These may sound like the ...

Perpetual motion machines can do work indefinitely with zero energy input. If one existed, it could turn a wheel or raise water, thereby generating energy without needing fuel of any kind—a useful ...

Putting a supposed perpetual motion device to the test to see if it truly works as claimed ...

This experiment puts a supposed perpetual motion device to the test. We break down how it works, what physics says should happen, and whether the motion can actually last without an external energy ...