Part 11 (1/2)

Some physicists have taken this idea even further, to the very lienceour universe

In the Guth/Fahri picture, an advanced civilization can create a baby universe, but the physical constants (eg, the ths of the four forces) are the same But what if an advanced civilization could create baby universes that differ slightly in their fundamental constants? Then the baby universes would be able to ”evolve” with tihtly different froeneration

If we consider the fundamental constants to be the ”DNA” of a universe, it ht be able to create baby universes with slightly different DNA Eventually, universes would evolve, and the universes that proliferated would be those that had the best ”DNA” that allow for the flourishi+ng of intelligent life Physicist Edward Harrison, building on a previous idea by Lee S universes The universes that dominate the multiverse are precisely those that have the best DNA, which is co advanced civilizations, which in turn create more baby universes ”Survival of the fittest” simply means survival of the universes that areadvanced civilizations

If this picture is correct, it would explain why the fundamental constants of the universe are ”fine-tuned” to allow for life It simply means that universes with desirable fundamental constants compatible with life are the ones that proliferate in the h this ”evolution of universes” idea is attractive because it ht be able to explain the anthropic principle problem, the difficulty with this idea is that it is untestable and unfalsifiable We will have to wait until we have a co before we can y is far too primitive to reveal the presence of these parallel universes So all this would qualify as a Class II impossibility-impossible today, but not in violation of the laws of physics On a scale of thousands to millions of years, these speculations could becoy for a Type III civilization

14: PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINES

Theories have four stages of acceptance: i this is worthless nonsense; ii this is interesting, but perverse; iii this is true, but quite unimportant; iv I always said so

-J B S HALDANE, 1963

In Isaac Asimov's classic novel The Gods Themselves, an obscure chereatest discovery of all tiy for free The ireatest scientist of all tiy ”It was Santa Claus and Aladdin's lamp of the whole world,” Asimov wrote The company he forms soon beco the oil, gas, coal, and nuclear industries out of business

The world is aith free energy and civilization is drunk with this newfound power As everyone celebrates this great achievement, one lone physicist is uneasy ”Where is all this free energy co from?” he asks hiy co in fro our universe to a parallel universe, and the sudden influx of energy into our universe is setting off a chain reaction that will eventually destroy the stars and galaxies, turning the sun into a supernova, and destroying the Earth with it

Since recorded history, the holy grail for inventors, scientists, as well as charlatans and scam artists has been the fabled ”perpetual motion y An even better version is a device that can create y than it consumes, such as the Electron Pu years, as our industrialized world gradually runs out of cheap oil, there will be enory Soaring gas prices, falling production, increased pollution, at a renewed, intense interest in energy

Today a few inventors riding this wave of concern proy, offering to sell their inventions for hundreds of millions Scores of investors periodically line up, lured by sensational claims in the financial media that often hail these mavericks as the next Edison

The popularity of perpetual motion machines is widespread On an episode of The Simpsons, entitled ”The PTA Disbands,” Lisa builds her own perpetuala teachers' strike This proet in herein this house we obey the laws of thera Episodes I and II, and Ultiraure proy is so precious, then precisely what is the likelihood of our creating a perpetual motion machine? Are these devices truly impossible, or would their creation require a revision in the laws of physics?

HISTORY VIEWED THROUGH ENERGY

Energy is vital to civilization In fact, all of huy For 999 percent of hu afor food Life was brutal and short The energy available to us was one-fifth of a horsepower-the power of our own muscles analyses of the bones of our ancestors show evidence of enor burdens of daily survival Average life expectancy was less than twenty years

But after the end of the last ice age about ten thousand years ago, we discovered agriculture and do our energy output to one or two horsepower This set into reat revolution in huy to plow an entire field by himself, travel tens of rain from one place to another For the first tiy, and the result was the founding of our first cities Excess energy meant that society could afford to support a class of artisans, architects, builders, and scribes, and thus ancient civilization could flourish Soon great pyrae life expectancy reached about thirty years

Then about three hundred years ago the second great revolution in hu of le person soared to tens of horsepower By harnessing the power of the steam locomotive, people could now cross entire continents in a few days Machines could plow entire fields, transport hundreds of passengers thousands of e life expectancy by 1900 had reached almost fifty in the United States

Today we are in the reat revolution in human history, the infor population and our ravenous appetite for electricity and power, our energy needs have skyrocketed and our energy supply is being stretched to the very lile individual is now ranted that a single car can generate hundreds of horsepower Not surprisingly, this dereater sources of energy, including perpetual motion machines

PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINES THROUGH HISTORY

The search for a perpetual motion machine is an ancient one The first recorded attehth century in Bavaria It was a prototype for hundreds of variations to come for the next thousand years; it was based on a series of snets attached to a wheel, like a Ferris wheel The wheel was placed on top of a net on the wheel passed over the stationary net, it was supposed to be attracted then repelled by the largerperpetual n was devised in 1150 by the Indian philosopher Bhaskara, who proposed a wheel that would run forever by adding a weight to the ri the wheel to spin because it was unbalanced Work would be done by the weight as it inal position By iterating this over and over again, Bhaskara claimed that one could extract unlins for perpetual motion redients: a wheel of sole revolution without the addition of any energy, producing usable work in the process (Careful exay is actually lost in each cycle, or that no usable work can be extracted) The co of the Renaissance accelerated proposals for a perpetual ranted for a perpetual motion machine By 1712 Johann Bessler had analyzed son of his own (According to legend, his reat renaissance painter and scientist Leonardo da Vinci becah he denounced the them to the fruitless search for the philosopher's stone, in private he , perpetual al pu skewer over a fire

By 1775 soproposed that the Royal Acadeer accept or deal with proposals concerning perpetual motion”

Arthur Ord-Hume, a historian of these perpetual motion machines, has written about the tireless dedication of these inventors, working against incredible odds, co them to the ancient alchemists But, he noted, ”Even the alchemistknehen he was beaten”

HOAXES AND FRAUDS

The incentive to produce a perpetual reat that hoaxes became commonplace In 1813 Charles Redheffer exhibited aunliy for free (But when Robert Fulton exaut belt driving the machine This cable was in turn connected to a ineers, too, got swept up in the enthusiasm for perpetual motion machines In 1870 the editors of Scientific American were fooled by a azine ran a story with the sensational title ”Greatest Discovery Ever Yet Made” Only later did investigators discover that there was a hidden source of energy for Willis's perpetual motion machine

In 1872 John Ernst Worrell Kelly perpetrated theinvestors of nearly 5 million, a princely sum back in the late nineteenth century His perpetualforks that he claimed tapped into the ”ether” Kelly, a round, would invite wealthy investors to his house, where he would aine, which whizzed around without any external power source Eager investors, amazed by this self-propelled machine, flocked to pour money into his coffers

Later sorily accused hih he died a wealthy ators found the clever secret of his machine When his house was torn down concealed tubes were found in the floor and walls of the basement that secretly delivered coized by a flywheel

Even the US Navy and the president of the United States were taken in by such a ee invented a liquid ammonia machine The vaporization of cold aases that couldonly the heat of the oceans themselves The US Navy was so enthralled with the idea of extracting unliy from the oceans that it approved the device and even demonstrated it to President James Garfield The problem was that the vapor did not condense back into a liquid properly; hence the cycle could not be completed

So many proposals for perpetual motion machines have been presented to the US Patent and Traderant a patent for such a device unless a working model is presented In certain rare circu obviously wrong with a ranted The USPTO states, ”With the exception of cases involving perpetual motion, a model is not ordinarily required by the Office to demonstrate the operability of a device” (This loophole has allowed unscrupulous inventors to persuade naive investors to finance their inventions by clainized their machine) The pursuit of the perpetual motion machine, however, has not been fruitless froh inventors have never produced a perpetual y invested in building such a fabled machine has led physicists to carefully study the nature of heat engines (In the same way, the fruitless search of alcheold, helped to uncover some of the basic laws of chemistry) For example, in the 1760s John cox developed a clock that could actually run forever, powered by changes in ates in air pressure would drive a barometer, which would then turn the hands of the clock This clock actually worked and exists even today The clock can run forever because energy is extracted froes in atmospheric pressure

Perpetual motion machines like cox's eventually led scientists to hypothesize that such ht in to the device froy was conserved This theory eventually led to the First Law of Thery cannot be created or destroyed Eventually three laws of thermodynamics were postulated The Second Law states that the total amount of entropy (disorder) always increases (Crudely speaking, this law says that heat flows spontaneously only from hotter to colder places) The Third Law states that you can never reach absolute zero

If we coay, then the three laws can be rephrased as follows: ”You can't get so” (First Law) ”You can't break even” (Second Law) ”You can't even get out of the game” (Third Law) (Physicists are careful to state that these laws are not necessarily absolutely true for all time Nevertheless, no deviation has ever been found Anyone trying to disprove these laws ainst centuries of careful scientific experiments We will discuss possible deviations fro achieveedy as well as triureat Ger Boltzmann, committed suicide, in part because of the controversy he created in for these laws

LUDWIG BOLTZMANN AND ENTROPY

Boltze, forestlike beard His formidable and ferocious appearance, however, belied all the wounds he suffered in defending his ideas Although Newtonian physics was firmly established by the nineteenth century, Boltzorously applied to the controversial concept of ato scientists (We soions of scientists who insisted that the atoimmick, not a real entity Atoms were so impossibly tiny, they claimed, that they probably didn't exist at all) Newton showed that mechanical forces, not spirits or desires, were sufficient to deterantly derived ases were made of tiny atoms that, like billiard balls, obeyed the laws of forces laid down by Newton To Boltzas was like a box filled with trillions of tiny steel balls, each one bouncing off the walls and each other according to Newton's laws of reatest masterpieces in physics, Boltzmann (and independently James Clerk Maxwell) mathematically showed how this si nes and open up a new branch of physics called statistical mechanics

Suddenly many of the properties of matter could be derived froy must be conserved when applied to atoy; that meant that an entire chay The conservation of energy could now be established not just via experimentation, but from first principles, that is, the Newtonian motion of atoms

But in the nineteenth century the existence of atoms was still hotly debated and often ridiculed by prominent scientists, such as philosopher Ernst Mach A sensitive and often depressedrod, the focus of the often vicious attacks by the anti-ato that could not beatoms To add to Boltzmann's humiliation, many of his papers were rejected by the editor of a prominent German physics journal because the editor insisted that atoms and molecules were strictly convenient theoretical tools, rather than objects that really existed in nature

Exhausted and e himself in 1906 while his wife and child were at the beach Sadly he did not realize that just a year before, a brash young physicist by the name of Albert Einstein had done the i the existence of atoms

TOTAL ENTROPY ALWAYS INCREASES

The work of Boltzmann and other physicists helped to clarify the nature of perpetualthem into two types Perpetual motion machines of the first type are those that violate the First Law of Thery than they consume In every case physicists found that this type of perpetual y, either through fraud, or because the inventor did not realize the source of the outside energy

Perpetual motion machines of the second type are more subtle They obey the First Law of Thery-but violate the Second Law In theory, a perpetual motion machine of the second type produces no waste heat, so it is 100 percent efficient Yet the Second Law says that such a machine is impossible-that waste heat must always be produced-and hence disorder or chaos in the universe, or entropy, always increases No ht be, it will always produce so the entropy of the universe

The fact that total entropy always increases lies at the heart of hu to the Second Law, it is far easier to destroy than to build Soht take thousands of years to create, such as the great Aztec Empire in Mexico, can be destroyed in a edy band of Spanish conquistadores, armed with horses and firearms, completely shattered that empire

Every time you look in athe effects of the Second Law Biologists tell us that the aging process is the gradual accuenes, so that the cell's ability to function slowly deteriorates Aging, rusting, rotting, decay, disintegration, and collapse are also exa on the profound nature of the Second Law, astronoton once said, ”The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supre the laws of Natureif your theory is found to be against the second law of ther for it but to collapse in deepest huineers (and clever charlatans) continue to announce the invention of perpetual motion machines Recently I was asked by the Wall Street Journal to comment on the work of an inventor who had actually persuaded investors to sink millions of dollars into his machine Breathless articles were published in major financial newspapers, written by journalists with no background in science, gushi+ng about the potential of this invention to change the world (and generate fabulous, lucrative profits in the process) ”Genius or crackpot?” the headlines blared

Investors threw enormous bundles of cash at this device, which violated the h school (What was shocking toto swindle the unwary-this has been true since the dawn of ti was that it was so easy for this inventor to fool wealthy investors because of their lack of understanding of elementary physics) I repeated to the Journal the proverb ”A fool and his money are easily parted” and P T Barnum's famous dictuly, the Financial Times, the Econoe feature articles on various inventors touting their perpetual motion machines