The Closed System Video; on here

[Newton II]

Hi All,

Someone sent me a message to show the design. So here is a simple version of it. This kept me up for days, it's a mentally demeaning puzzle. On the outside it looks so simple and logical, but magnets are static and anything connected to them become static.

The small fixed magnet experiences attracting force from the bigger magnet thereby producing rotating torque in the opposite direction to that produced  by the yellow pegs.  These two rotating torques in opposite directions balance each other so the wheel doesnot move.   Wheel moves only if small magnet is lifted or detached from the wheel making it an external force.

[e2matrix]

My intuition (which seems to be valid most of the time) told me right away that could not work because both magnets are ultimately attached to the same thing.  When I see something like this I know if I take the time I could reason through it with the physics and force vectors involved but I've learned to trust my intuition as it saves me a lot of time and I'm just too lazy to do all the math

[DreamThinkBuild]

Yep build and learn.  I tried building this in 2007 and it caught me good. I tried multiple lever magnetic systems in that time frame, attached is another one.  The magnetic catapult came shortly after. The idea with this was to have a large passing magnet push a lever down on each pass and lift a pusher magnet on the outside just as the outside wheel magnet had passed it forcing the wheel forward. Trying to get levers to cooperate and some added sticky spot, I could never get it to work. The wheel has to be a heavy flywheel or it will just bump up, which lead to another design which attached a weight on top to use the slight precession from the bump to add force through gravity... I went through so many crazy designs it's hard to keep track of them all.

Hopefully by posting these failures people don't waste time like I did on them.