4:01 am and the clock goes tick-tick-tick Musings

To help me back to sleep I try to challenge myself to thinking something.

I've worked through the perpetual motion machines, came up with a great idea, and almost convinced myself that I understood the theory of general relativity.

http://pdubyah.com/2013/11/26/4am-and-the-clock-goes-tick-tick-tick-musings/

This morning I was trying to work out what you'd see for two objects that are colliding, both of which are travelling at, for instance, 75% of the sped of light.  The closing speed would therefore be 1.5X the speed of light.

For each of the objects they would observe something approaching them at .75% of the speed of light, but if they could measure that they should know that they are closing at 150% of the speed of light?

And what would an observer view.

Anyway, putting that aside, the other thought train has been on super-powers and why I think that most of them are rubbish, the flight, the invisibility, the teleportation, the mind reading and thought control.

The latest one though, re-sizing. The ability to grow or shrink. Clearly nonsense.

Your mass couldn't change, you can't shed or gain mass. So if you shrank to say the size of a mouse, you'd still have to weigh 140lbs. There would also be a limit on the size you could shrink to, and this would be based on the 'space' that atoms meed. You can't cram more atoms into a space than will fit.

Would you turn into a black-hole?

Did I just show up my ignorance of science again?

 

..and then I dreamt of a perpetual motion machine...

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300"] Robert Boyle's self-flowing flask fills itself in this diagram, but perpetual motion machines cannot exist. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption]

A Perpetual motion machine, which is different from a free energy device.If you google you'll find all manner of weird and wonderous devices either real or imagined that are examples of attempts to construct a perpetual motion machine.

I'm not sure if there are rules to such things, other than once started should not stop. Most all of the devices on the net are extremely complex and involve many parts, centrifugal devices with swinging arms, strange chain driven things, things that reply on some weird notion of gravity and water.

The dream I had was of a very simple gadget, involving a couple of magnets a cog and a counter.

• So. The basic of my dream was that magnets when positioned pole to pole so North facing North should repel each other.


• You have one fixed and one attached to a pendulum or fixed point so that swings freely.


• When repelled the free swinging magnet swings away in an arc. Left to itself this would then eventually come to state of rest and in a neutral position, balanced between attraction by gravity and repulsion by magnetic force.


• In my dream however when the free swinging magnet is repulsed it comes to rest on a cog device, stopping it's motion, momentarily. Therefore each swing towards the fixed magnet is a discrete event.


• The cog turns by weight of gravity, and the magnet is released to perform another swing towards the fixed magnet at the bottom of the arc.


• It swings. It stops. It swings. It stops.


• In my dream there was no loss of momentum as each momentum was it's own event.

The counter was attached to the cog for entertainment and to show how many times the device has swung back and forth. In my dream there is no free energy created, and although there is friction between the pivot point and at the cog, there is an expectation of object at rest. There is no more energy being created than being used. In my dream this device seemed so obvious that it must have been tried before.

It was just a toy. An it'd get pretty boring after a while. I also undestand that wear and tear would make the construction doomed to failure eventually, but it's not a free energy device, it offers nothing in return.

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