Does this video show a working self propelled magnetic engine?

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
The bird doesn't require energy to move at first:

The initial state of the system is a bird with a wet head oriented vertically with an initial oscillation on its pivot.

The initial state is a bird that is horizontal, that is when it is "balanced". It must be put into the vertical position, that requires energy. At that point the heat engine kicks in to keep it going.

It will stop eventually.

Why? As long as you keep it supplied with water and as long as the sun shines it will keep going, with maybe a little maintenance like compensating for wear on the pivots.

What about night time? Without evaporation the heat engine will stall. It may go for a long time, but only for as long as the conditions are right.

It only moves for as long as it does because it does almost no "work", it needs to be light.

You don't understand the operation of the drinking bird. While it does help to make it light, this has nothing to do with how long it moves.

No, I understand 100% how it works. It has to be light because very little energy is gained from it. When properly balanced it only really has to overcome friction. I understand the relationship between weight and friction, as I am sure you do too. So if you could remove the friction component, I agree with you.

You could extract energy from the drinking bird, but of course you are correct that there's a limit to how much energy you can get out, and the wiki provides this information. The evaporative heat flux from the bird's head is 0.5W, but due to ineffeciencies, the power that can be extracted is only 1 microwatt. (Pretty inefficient, eh?) Since I need about 1000 watts to run my home, I'd need a billion drinking birds to make that much energy, and I don't think I can fit that many in my house, but even if I did, there would be nowhere left for me to live.

That is really all I was saying. The setup provides for very little power, it would be difficult for me to imagine it able to provide enough energy to move a heavy magnet.

Originally posted by OccamsRazor04
No, I understand 100% how it works.

Obviously you don't, or you wouldn't say things like this:

The initial state is a bird that is horizontal, that is when it is "balanced". It must be put into the vertical position, that requires energy. At that point the heat engine kicks in to keep it going.

This is completely false. I already provided a source explaining why this is false but moreover you've either never played with the birds or you don't remember what they do, because you would know the source I posted is correct if you did.

The reason it's never balanced when horizontal, is that in the horizontal position, the fluid runs into the base, making the base heavy, putting it into a vertical position automatically.

What about night time? Without evaporation the heat engine will stall. It may go for a long time, but only for as long as the conditions are right.

What makes you think evaporation stops at nighttime? Whether the sun is shining or not isn't a critical variable. The reason evaporation would stop in my area is from a lack of water and as I said you'd need a mountain stream or adequate rainfall and storage tanks to keep the water supplied without pumps, so lack of water could be a problem (like an extended drought perhaps?), not nighttime. Evaporation could slow down if humidity got close 100%, but it doesn't get to 100% in my area. However I've lived in other areas where this happens occasionally, which might stop it. And obviously it won't work outside if the temperatures cause the water to freeze and prevent it from evaporating, but this could happen even if the sun is up.

The setup provides for very little power

I'm glad we agree on that! So I guess we'll have to keep looking for another energy source.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


I would show how your post proves my assertion correct, but it offers no value to the conversation. So I am dropping it, we can agree it offers next to no power and end it there

ETA: I am at work and I use that as my excuse. The bird does indeed start vertical. No idea why I read vertical and thought horizontal.

Also I might as well add water does not stop evaporating at night, but the rate slows noticeably, meaning power generation would slow by the same amount.

originally posted by: XL5
I would have loved for it to work, I would have instantly started to scale it up alot and do something with it. That said, I think the first video on page one holds alot more promise, it works (logically) all up to the sticking point. I just don't have that many of the same magnet type and strength, if I did, I would build it and give some one here the vid of it working or not.

I personally think a PMM should work. We have ways of turning light on and off electrically using polarizers (pockels cell and 1/4wave polarizer) and it does not take much power at all to do it either. If we had the same thing for magnets, we would have free energy and PPM's or, at the very least, a new way of storing power in magnets.

Rise time of Pockels cells is only 3 to 5 ns so they are quite versatile for many applications. Can't seem to find much history about them other than the Pockels effect was credited to Friedrich (C)arl Alwin Pockels in 1893.

a reply to: dashen

I went down the same rabbit hole. Unfortunately if any of these devices were attached to an electric-generating motor, they would not perpetuate. The magnetic induction produced by this movement creates an equal and opposite force in the electric-generating motor, which would stop the perpetual motion.

I can't find a video of this experiment, but if you drop a magnet through a solenoid (an electric coil similar to the coil in an electric motor) the magnet will drop slower than a non-magnetic object passing through the solenoid. This is because the induction produced by the magnet going through the coiling causes a reverse force as described above. It is this force that would prevent these machines from creating energy ad infinitum.

I wish it could work though

a reply to: cooperton


Time crystals and atomic clocks run in perpetual motion but they don't violate thermodynamics since they are open quantum systems that don't create any heat or do any work. Still very useful for frequency control.