Roll on the 20th June

[Chad]

@all

guys just for one second.. imagine that on the 20th Archer shows a working device as he promises!, what will your responses be?.

I mean if he proves what he says he can do, then somebody else has made a mistake or overlooked something, so who would the mistake belong to...Newton?

Chad

[legendre]

I think the problem is that magnetism is a rather complex topic. Strictly mechanical "overbalanced" wheels can be disproven easily, with a drawing, a few arrows, numbers and calculations. But how do you calculate a magnetic field which is moving through other magnetic fields and show what forces are acting at which point?

This is why Finite Element Analysis (FEA) exists.. Reduce a sea of infinite points to a real and manageable number of nodes.

Guess you'd need lots of paper, or a simulator. Do you have one? I don't

Here, I've got a couple extras.. I'll just go ahead and give you one! ;-)

FEMM - Finite Element Method Magnetics

Mmmm.. make that two..

Vizimag - Visualize Magnetic Fields

Don't say old Leg never did anything for you! :-)

-L

[Glassglue]

@all

guys just for one second.. imagine that on the 20th Archer shows a working device as he promises!, what will your responses be?.

I mean if he proves what he says he can do, then somebody else has made a mistake or overlooked something, so who would the mistake belong to...Newton?

Chad

Sorry, as I've alluded to before, I just don't have that much imagination.  What he is claiming to be able to do is so fundamentally impossible that it is unimaginable, and would change much more than what he conceives of.

Archer will probably swell with pride when he reads that, but then he will have forgotten again that he hasn't yet done it (no, I don't believe he conveniently destroyed that first little wheel any more than I believe in a flat earth).  His has so totally misconstrued and misunderstood physics and Newton that if he did actually manage somehow to prove them wrong he would not be capable of understanding just how it was that they were wrong, as he never understood them in the first place.  Seriously, forget magnets, he doesn't understand how a simple lever works.

[legendre]

dirtdiggler,

I glue a magnet on to the ceiling, place a peice of steel on the floor under the magnet, steel flies up in the air, sticks to the magnet.  but no work was done, cause a magnet lifted the steel, and we all know that magnets can't do work.  Right??

Right. In fact, it was you who did the work when you raised the magnet to the ceiling. In doing so, you stored Potential Energy in the attracting relationship between the magnet and the steel. When you release the steel, that PE converts to KE and eventually heat, noise and vibration on impact.

Generally speaking, magnets themselves are not sources of energy and thus cannot be made to do useful work.

-L

[dirt diggler]

The way I see it, the magnet did not do the work of lifting the steel.  The steel did.  The magnet polarizes the surrounding vacuum such that when the steel is placed within this polarized vacuum spin field, it reacts by moving toward the magnet.  The only role for the magnet was the polarization of the surrounding vacuum, which is not doing work... its what it is.  If it did not do this, it would not be a magnet.  An electron isn't doing work by generating a negative charge force.  If you place a simple bar magnet on a CRT display with either the N or S pole touching the glass, you will see a pattern form.. now twist the magnet without lifting it from the screen.. does the pattern change?   No, because the field is not tied to the magnet, it is the deformation (polarization) of the surrounding vacuum.

Ah yes, now it makes so much more sense.  the flat peice of inanimate steel laying flat on the floor all of a sudden does a massive amount of work, that has nothing to do with the magnet on the ceiling.
got it, perfectly clear now   but if i lifted it up there by hand, then work was accomplished.  yes I see it now, magnets can't do anything.