Comment by glenstein
3 days ago
>It was a clock that was powered by daily changes in barometric pressure.
That sounds awesome, but it also sounds like it's conflating two things: (1) the physically impossible perpetual motion of popular understanding, e.g. machine that operates at 100% energy efficiency in perpetuity from an initial one-time energy input and (2) a machine with automatic passive energy draw from ambient sources, but with the usual inefficiencies familiar to physics and engineering.
Sounds like Drebbel did (2). Which, don't get me wrong, absolutely rocks. But I certainly wouldn't want to use (2) to advertise a moral that even laws of thermodynamics were just yet another fiction from untrustworthy institutions, which seems like the upshot you were landing on.
Drebbel patented his device as a "perpetuum mobile." However, the definition of a perpetual motion device as a "machine that operates at 100% energy efficiency in perpetuity from an initial one-time energy input" — well, that idea came hundreds of years later.
Obviously, Drebbel was on the scene long before the laws of thermodynamics... so my upshot is definitely not that we should reconsider entropy because of his patent!
I suppose my upshot is that scientific establishments absolutely can expel excellent people for the wrong reasons. "Everyone knows" that perpetual motion is impossible... I'm actually a little surprised that you didn't understand my point — but you instead concluded I was a crank trying to attack entropy? Oh well, it happens, it's the internet, I don't blame you.
Another historical tidbit: the Royal Society of Hooke, Newton, etc all loved Drebbel's works. No wonder: Drebbel had a staring role in Francis Bacon's New Atlantis which was the model for the Royal Society.
The history books you're talking about were presumably written hundreds of years later (e.g. the 19th century), which would mean thermodynamics had been established. So I don't think they would have scrubbed him on the grounds that his perpetual motion machine was a threat to their orthodoxy.
So I'm not sure what the the upshot was of suggesting he was "scrubbed from the history books because everyone knows perpetual motion is impossible" if it wasn't implying some kind of institutional conspiracy that wrongly dismissed "perpetual motion", which only works if you treat (1) and (2) the same.
Moreover we're discussing this in 2025 and in this context we normally mean (1), and it was in response to a comment about (1) that you entered Drebbel's invention as if it belonged to that category.
They scrubbed him on the grounds that he was an alchemist and charlatan. He wasn’t the only one to claim he had created a perpetual motion device in those centuries before thermodynamics was discovered. The French patent office banned perpetual motion submissions in 1789. I just don’t know if any other perpetual motion devices that worked — back when people didn’t know the difference between what you call (1) & (2) — (1) a modern definition of perpetual motion framed against thermodynamics and (2) a common notion of perpetual motion.
Drebbel’s patent: > “We have received the petition of Cornelis Jacobsz. Drebbel, citizen of Alkmaar, declaring that, after long and manifold investigations, he has at last discovered and practiced two useful and serviceable new inventions. The first: a means or instrument to conduct fresh water in great quantity, in the manner of a fountain, from low ground up to a height of thirty, forty, fifty or more feet, through lead pipes, and to raise it upward by various means and in whatever place desired, continually to flow and spring without ceasing. The second: a clock or timekeeper able to measure time for fifty, sixty, even a hundred or more years in succession, without winding or any other operation, so long as the wheels or other moving works are not worn out.”
I mean, I don’t blame people for being skeptical! Neither do I blame people that discount claims like “perpetual motion” or “theories of everything”— after all, they are associated with cranks and charlatans. But I do blame those that dismiss them entirely, out of hand. This was the case for Drebbel, when several 19th century reviewers lumped him with all the Alchemists and called them all frauds.
Now, Drebbel had the opportunity to demonstrate that his inventions worked — without stage trickery. Furthermore, his ideas and mechanical theories also bore other fruit.
To the OP, I don’t understand UM or the critique. If the theory is good, it will lead to some interesting output.
(Aside: GPT5 seems to have become much better at sourced humanities research, though it still has limitations. See how it pulled material for me: https://chatgpt.com/share/68a79d89-d194-8007-a8fa-c367cbf3fd... )
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> (1) the physically impossible perpetual motion of popular understanding, e.g. machine that operates at 100% energy efficiency in perpetuity from an initial one-time energy input
That's easy to make. If you spin up a wheel in the vacuum of space, it's going to keep spinning forever.
If doing it in space is not allowed, then you have to allow machines that take advantage of terrestrial conditions such as drawing energy from ambient sources.
>If doing it in space is not allowed, then you have to allow machines that take advantage of terrestrial conditions such as drawing energy from ambient sources.
Well yeah, that's (2), not (1), so no one's disallowing those.
Edit: And although it's kind of moot, I'm not sure what the relationship is between space and ambient draw such that disallowing one would necessitate allowing the other.
If you're not allowing the machines to be tested in space (no environmental factors) nor on earth (environmental factors), then there's nowhere allowed to test or make such a machine. So a perpetual motion machine becomes impossible because there is nowhere in the universe where they are accepted.
Is it possible for a man to run 100m in less than 10 seconds? If he's not allowed to run on any kind of surface. So now we've proven that it's impossible to run 100m in less than 10 seconds?
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>If you spin up a wheel in the vacuum of space, it's going to keep spinning forever.
Even interstellar space is not 100% vaccuum. So it will slow from the occasional contact with matter. No doubt it would take a very long time, though.
Right. And also efficiency is about its interaction as part of a system, which is the difference between perpetual motion, and perpetual motion machine.
In 1598, physics had not yet developed to the point of articulating modern thermodynamics.
All the more reason not to treat his invention as if it belongs to that modern category.
But there wasn’t a difference in categories at the time — yet, at the time, perpetual motion was still treated as impossible.
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