Leafing through the pages of old science fiction or referring to modern science fiction literature, we constantly come across a wide variety of machines and mechanisms, watching with interest their actions and reactions and watching how they contact each other or communicate with humans and other living beings. But the strange thing is that among all this incredibly complex, ingenious and reliable technology, there is absolutely no place for a perpetual mobile. Sometimes it even seems that the authors of these books deliberately eschew the problem of perpetual motion. At first glance, this seems completely incomprehensible, especially if we take into account that the creative imagination of science fiction writers has almost never been limited to the framework of reality. After all, I was not afraid, for example,Karel Čapek in his novel "Krakatit" create an explosive of monstrous destructive power, entrusting it to people, and in the play "R. U. R." - for the first time in world literature - even to introduce a new character - a humanoid robot machine.
In our space age, authors writing in the genre of science fiction have got their hands on a number of tools that even the most daring dreamers of the past hardly dreamed of. The plots, characters, the very atmosphere of the works of Ray Bradbury, Clifford Symak, Robert Abernathy, Lewis Paget and many, many others are strikingly different from the world of adventures of the 19th century. While the early science fiction writers sought to transform and improve our world only within the framework of their modern technical capabilities. Present authors are not only not afraid to revive things and objects of the surrounding world, endowing them with mighty power and supernatural abilities, but even risk giving them the fate of people. This is the natural result of the development of technology on our planet - the machine has become an equal partner of man.
The fantastic submarines and huge airships, which once shook the imagination of the reading public, were propelled by mysterious energy sources, today they modestly recede into the background before the possibilities that the transition to the use of nuclear energy promises to man. At the same time, our globe becomes too boring and uninteresting for the heroes of modern science fiction - after all, nuclear starships and rocket planes, propelled by anti-gravitational forces unknown to modern science, have reduced the distance between neighboring planets to several weeks or even days of space flight. The crews of tomorrow's spacecraft travel without any harm through the vastness of the Universe, literally saturated with deadly radioactive radiation - nuclear energy miraculously saved the designer of the future from all problems,almost insoluble for its current predecessor. Mysterious forces that, if necessary, often helped out the authors of old science fiction novels, have now been replaced by a new deus ex machina - a huge energy lurking in atomic nuclei.
Since nuclear energy has become a completely ordinary, easily accessible and self-evident tool in modern science fiction, perhaps that is why none of today's writers even thinks of looking for a solution to complex technical problems with the help of perpetuum mobile. In other circumstances, a perpetual motion machine, perhaps, could be a suitable topic for some science fiction story or novel. However, next to such a powerful, amazing source of energy, which is the atomic nucleus, the question of perpetual motion simply loses its meaning: after all, the very concept of an ideal machine becomes extremely outdated and banal, and such an idea, of course, can no longer count on success with the present sophisticated reader.
Relatively recently, a laser was invented - an instrument in which directional radiation is concentrated into a narrow beam with an extremely high energy density: for comparison, let's say that the power per square centimeter of the laser beam cross section may well rival the power of Niagara Falls. True, today hardly anyone will undertake to predict all the possibilities that this new source of energy promises us, the frequency of electromagnetic oscillations in which is billions of times higher than the frequency of ordinary radio waves. But even with a laser, the perpetuum mobile does not stand up to any comparison, since any of its variants, be they the most complex and super-original, will still be doomed to contradict the simple and indisputable laws of physics. At the same time, we all perfectly understandthat compliance with these laws is one of the most important conditions for readers' interest in science fiction.
Those writers of past years who found the limits of our Earth tight - Jules Verne, Herbert Wells, and Karel Czapek - dreamed all their lives to penetrate into distant times, to unimaginable distances, in order to thereby overturn the prevailing ideas of man about infinity. They were prompted to this by the thousand-year experience of mankind, the eternal aspirations of people to expand the horizons of science and technology, acquire new knowledge, and also recognize other, higher values in man himself. This must be why the reader was following the adventures of their heroes with such keen interest, how they make discoveries, invent new machines - in general, they live a tense, full of anxiety and excitement life. At the same time, the current authors, and the readers themselves,perceive the content of today's science fiction as more or less close, consciously planned reality. It is clear that in this reality there can hardly be a place for such a purely unreal object as a perpetual motion machine.
A perpetual motion machine is a machine that has never been and will never be built
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More than two hundred years ago, in 1775, the highest scientific tribunal of Western Europe, the Paris Academy of Sciences, spoke out against the unfounded belief in the possibility of creating a perpetuum mobile. By that time, many indisputable proofs of the impracticability of perpetual motion had already accumulated, proofs associated with the names of the most authoritative natural scientists and philosophers. The Renaissance epoch with its desire to revive antiquity, its philosophy, science and art has long passed, however, even today we well remember the names of outstanding people of the Renaissance era and their glorious predecessors. All of them are very close to the majority of modern scientists who got acquainted with their philosophical views or reflected on mathematical theorems or the laws of mechanics derived by their ancient colleagues. And it doesn't matterthat time erases in the memory of descendants many details and subtleties of their writings - after all, one name of each of them is enough to evoke in us a quivering thought about geniuses who lived hundreds, or even thousands of years ago, before whose ideas doctors and philosophers, lawyers bow down to today and educators, scientists and engineers. Because they all understand: true knowledge is eternal, true wisdom is eternal.
Studying the problems associated with the invention and creation of perpetuum mobile, we mentioned only the most famous of these people: any addition of new names to the general picture, perhaps, would not change. At the same time, no matter how far into the past we look, even in those epochs when the idea of a perpetual motion machine did not arise at all, we still come to the instructive conclusion, confirmed by history, that the scientific worldview has always been quite alien to the idea of ideal machines. which, even in much later times, often deceived and misled more than one inventor or scientist.
Historians usually consider 1492 to be the beginning of the New Age, the year Columbus discovered America. But today, many, as if forgetting that most of the ancient architectural monuments of the magnificent treasures of the Renaissance and Baroque were built by the architects of the modern era, associate only a relatively narrow circle of technical achievements with this period of human history. Of course, in relation to this time line, we obviously allowed ourselves an obvious anachronism when we talked about medieval magic and alchemy. However, this was admitted by us quite deliberately, since the level of development of these "sciences" was determined by those little scientific principles that were so typical precisely for the Middle Ages, with its religious symbolism and superstitions. Therefore, speaking of alchemy, it would probably betoo far-fetched and more than unnatural to associate it with the era of the New Time, when mankind managed to make so many amazing discoveries.
In the view of modern man, the Middle Ages is inseparable from the brutality of the Inquisition, the persecution of advanced views and ideas, and the death penalty even for minor offenses. In this sense, the Middle Ages are notorious, and the very word "medieval" has become, as it were, a symbol of backwardness. The submission of the human desire for knowledge of nature and its laws to rigid church doctrine was the most characteristic feature of the Middle Ages, which determined a very special, one-sided understanding of facts by science of that time. If we evaluate our approach from this point of view, then in fact we were not much mistaken, in some places in our historical survey we pushed the boundaries of the Middle Ages behind the historical time barrier marked by the landing of Columbus in America. In addition, in the final analysis, it was medieval philosophy that was receding into the past that gave one more impetus to the reflections of the modern era about eternal motion and the possibilities of its implementation in practice.
If, turning the pages of this book again, try to start comparing drawings of different perpetuum mobiles, not paying attention to the time and place of their creation, one can come to the conclusion that the inventors of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were dealing, in essence, only with those constructive elements, which later became known to us from later times; however, some of their ideas were well ahead of their time. Thus, hydraulic turbines arose from old antique water wheels, and a modern steam turbine was born from Geron's eolipil. The same is the fate of many other machines that delighted our ancestors with the boldness of engineering solutions and subsequently went through a long and difficult path of development, which often changed them beyond recognition. At the same time, the main objects of our research - perpetual motion machines - in their main features remained unchanged, since whole generations of inventors inherited old technical ideas and solutions with incomprehensible persistence. The very idea of a perpetuum mobile has also remained almost unchanged over several centuries, only occasionally departing from the frozen medieval principles. This circumstance in itself already serves as proof that the idea of perpetual motion and its realization in earthly conditions kept humanity in a vicious circle, from which there was no path to qualitatively new results, to a higher stage of development. Not a single inventor of a perpetual motion machine in the entire history of the development of the idea of perpetuum mobile never waited for the moment when, following Archimedes, he could confidently exclaim his legendary "Eureka!"All the experience and opportunities acquired by humanity over the past 200 years tell us that the problem of perpetual motion is perverse in its essence. In addition, let's not forget that this area of research has often served as a refuge for various adventurers and deceived inventors who pursued mainly goals far from science. And it is no coincidence that the words "perpetual motion machine" along with understandable human curiosity always evoke in us a feeling of just distrust. And it is no coincidence that the words "perpetual motion machine" along with understandable human curiosity always evoke in us a feeling of just distrust. And it is no coincidence that the words "perpetual motion machine" along with understandable human curiosity always evoke in us a feeling of just distrust.
Those who have taken up this book hoping to read in it about fantastic inventions carried out by people with extraordinary, supernatural abilities, must be disappointed. There was never anything mysterious about the problem of perpetuum mobile, and although the people involved in it sometimes experienced some adventures, the perpetual motion machine had nothing in common with the real, creative, Julesvern's fantasy. After all, intelligent, purposefully working researchers have always chosen less romantic, but more reliable ways to conquer nature than those along which the idea of perpetual motion, erroneous from the very beginning, could lead us.
It still remains to ask the question: why was it necessary to create a site about things that have long been hopelessly outdated and completely alien to our today's rational reality? Is it worth talking about the delusions that for a long time pushed humanity onto the wrong paths of knowledge and hindered other, more useful activities?
Modernity not only forces us to get rid of the student mistakes of our ancestors, but at the same time opens up new means and possibilities for us that go far beyond imagination. As a result, some people begin to think that with the help of these new means and ideas or, for example, new sources of energy, they will still be able to develop some new, in their opinion, completely "ideal" machines. However, unfortunately, everything around remains the same. The idea of perpetual motion, as old as the world, still turns out to be uninvolved in the new problems put before humanity by the space era that began just a few decades ago.
And although the perpetual motion machine has forever remained in our ideas only a mirage, a warning evidence of the futile efforts of many people, apparently, it will be useful to ponder over one of the fruitless human ideas both for those who have never encountered perpetual motion machines, and for those who until today of the day cherishes the hope to create over time the car of all cars - perpetuum mobile.
