Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech are you? So I thought I would do a tech stuff tidbits about perpetual motion and why that is based upon our understanding of the universe. Impossible and the sad fact of the matter is y'all. Originally I was thinking about referencing a guilty Pleasure song I love Faith Hill's This Kiss, because in my mind there was the line, it's perpetual motion. Here's the thing that's not in that's not in the song. The line is it's centrifugal motion, It's perpetual bliss. And I conflated those two lines in my head. So I guess what I'm saying is that I don't really have a reason for doing this episode. You don't understand how distraught I am over this, Like I build episodes around dad jokes and references, and I just I feel all at sea. But I think it is widely understood among most people that devices like perpetual motion machines or the related concept of free energy devices are based upon an understanding of the universe. Impossible, they cannot work. But why can't they work? What fundamental obstacles block such things from working? Why can't we have a device that can continue to operate under its own power indefinitely, or one that wants set in motion can actually generate more energy than it requires to continue to run. Why is that impossible? Well, on this show we often talk about laws, and usually the laws I talk about are the human made kind, the laws like in the EU that protect personal data of citizens there, or the law in the state of Montana that bans TikTok. But some laws are greater than anything humans have put in their legislations. Some laws are universal, or at least appear to be, And among those are the laws of thermo dynamics. Now there are four laws of thermo dynamics, the zero law, the first, second, and third law. We don't even need all four. We just need laws one and two to squish perpetual motion machines. That is, assuming that we aren't wrong about these basic laws of physics, or that there's not some sort of like quantum exception out there, and maybe there is. The quantum world is a very unusual and strange place. Even without Bill Murray. That's an ant Man Quantumnia reference. I don't know how many of we all saw it. Didn't do so well. Not a great movie anyway. You can think of thermodynamics as the branch of physics that pertains to different types of energy and how those types of energy relate to one another, and the concept of work within a system. Now, sometimes this is a fairly easy concept to understand. If we're talking about an isolated system, one that's a system unto itself, it can actually be pretty easy to see how the laws of thermodynamics apply. But if we're talking about the real world, where systems can and do connect to other systems or even be encompassed fully within another system, sometimes those connections are a little bit harder at the spot, and that ambiguity creates opportunity for mistakes or misunderstandings or illusions or sometimes outright chicanery and rahap scalionism. But let's start with those two laws. Law number one tells us that energy can be nice either created nor destroyed. This is also known as the law of conservation of energy. So energy can convert from one form into another. That's possible electricity could convert into heat, for example, but that doesn't mean the energy was destroyed. It just changed from one form to another. It's sort of like how potential energy with maybe say a ball at the top of a ramp, turns into kinetic energy when the ball is released, but you don't lose energy. It's just been converted from one form into another. And that explains why you might notice that you're putting more electric juice, as it were, into a system. Then you get out on the other end. Let's say that you have a meter that tells you how much electricity is moving through the system once it gets to the end of it, and you realize, oh, it's lower than the amount of energy I put into it. And that's because somewhere along the way, some of that electricity was converted into something else, and therefore you don't have as much electricity at the end. The system as a whole still has the same amount of energy, it's just some of that has been changed into a different form. That's another important part of this, though, is that energy can actually enter or leave a system if it's not fully isolated from everything and nothing ever really is so if we don't notice it that energy is coming into a system, it may appear to us that the system is running under its own power, or if the energy is leaving the system, but we can't easily see it, we might not understand why it winds down and stops working. Now, that first law is a doozy when it comes to perpetual motion machines and free energy devices, because that law tells us you cannot get more energy out of a system than already existed within it, or that you have put into that system. So a perpetual motion machine, if it were possible, would be unable to generate electricity and continue to move indefinitely. It would have to operate under a set of rules where you know, it was not losing any energy, because if it did lose energy, ultimately the system would break down. It would stop working. So some of the energy the machine uses to move turns, you know, maybe into electricity. Let's say it's a generator, but that would mean that the energy that's being used to keep the system going is leeching out of it, and eventually you reach a point where there's not enough energy left for the system to continue to operate. And we're talking about basic machines here, so we'd be talking about kinetic energy. Eventually, enough of the energy would be leached out of the system that you wouldn't have the kinetic energy necessary to keep the system moving. So let's imagine an example. Let's say we have a wheel. Let's say we've got this wheel and we position it vertically right, so the wheel it's like a bike tire with the bike standing up. And we've mounted this wheel on an axle. And let's say that when you turn the wheel, it turns the axle, and the axle has on the end of it a couple of permanent magnets attached to it, and these magnets move past a conductive wire. Well. The laws of electromagnetism tell us that a fluctuating magnetic field, such as that created by rotating magnets, will induce electricity to flow through a conductor if it's within range of that magnetic field. And this is how basic electric generators work. Right, some mechanical component causes magnets to move or causes conductors to move relative to some magnets, and this induces electricity to flow through the system. Now, we just have to get the wheel to start turning right, and if we can find a way to get it to turn and keep turning by itself, well, it would then mean that the axle would be rotating and would continue to generate electricity. Boom, we've got our free energy. So maybe we would try a really old idea. Bascara's wheel is what it's called. It was proposed by a twelfth century mathematician named Bascara the Second in India what is modern day India. He suggested a wheel that would include some curved spokes in the wheel, sort of like ribs on the inside, and they kind of curve so they create little cups. And this means that you have different chambers within the wheel, and you would fill those chambers partially anyway with a liquid. He proposed liquid mercury, which of course is liquid at room temperature. And he proposed that as the wheel would spin, the mercury inside these chambers would naturally flow to the lowest point of that chamber, which means your wheel would be unbalanced. You would have a heavier side on one side of the wheel. It would be overbalanced. And Bascara thought that if you started such a wheel spinning, the flowing mercury would create the torque that would allow the wheel to continuously spin. You would just have to get it going, and then once it was going, it would just keep going forever. That was his thought. But here's the thing. If you actually were to build Bestcars wheel in reality and try it out, you would notice that that doesn't happen. It actually kind of swings a little bit. And there are a couple of reasons for this. One is that the wheel ends up weighing a bit more on one side than the other. But that also changes the center of mass, so the center of mass of the wheel would no longer be the center point of the wheel itself would actually be off a little bit, and it would mean the wheel would act more like a pendulum than it would a wheel. Also, in order to keep the wheel to continue to spin, you would really need a way to change those spokes dynamically, to essentially change the radius of the spokes, And to do that, it would mean that you would have to impart some energy to make those spokes change, right, You'd have to have some mechanism to do that, and that would require energy to do which means you would be inserting more energy into the system, and that means that's not a perpetual motion machine. I mean, that's essentially the equivalent of the wheel starts to slow down, so you give it another push. There's no real difference here. It's just that occasionally you would have to inject energy into the system to keep it going, which means it's not a perpetual motion machine at all. Okay, So with our hypothetical example with that electro magnet, we would see that while you could start the wheel spinning, it would ultimately slow down and stop and stop generating electricity. As a result, if you could somehow continue its spinning and generate electricity in the process, then it would violate that first law of thermodynamics. It would be creating energy and you can't do that. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we're gonna talk about law number two and why that also has a part to play with the impossibility of perpetual motion machines. But first let's think our sponsors. We're back, so we're up to law number two of thermodynamics. Like I said, these are the two laws that actually really pertain to what we're talking about here. So the second law of thermodynamics gets into the concept of entropy, which gets a little bit complicated. Also, like entropy can mean different things in different contexts, which makes it a little confusing. If one person is thinking of one definition while another person is thinking of another, they can create a difficulty there. But really, one of the things the second law explains is that if you bring two systems together so that they interact with one another, eventually they will reach a thermodynamic equilibrium. So the easiest way I can think of to explain this is by talking about temperature. That's just one example, but we can it's it's easy enough one to think about. So let's say we've got two things of different temperatures. Let's say we've got a giant block of ice and it's at freezing so it's at zero celsius, and we've got a vat of boiling water that's at one hundred degrees celsius in isolation. These systems are in thermodynamic equilibrium with themselves, right. They are at equilibrium as far as temperature goes anyway throughout the material, but they are not an equilibrium with one another. And so if we then combine these two systems, we I don't know, pour the boiling water on top of the block of ice. That boiling water would transfer heat to the block of ice, until eventually you would end up with a pool of water that's at a single temperature somewhere between freezing and boiling. The two systems have entered acted with one another and have reached thermodynamic equilibrium. You would not continue to have one section that's freezing in one section that's boiling. Moreover, you cannot have a situation in which a colder body spontaneously transfers heat to a warmer body. That's just not the direction that heat will transfer. It has to go from warmer to colder. It can't go colder to warmer, so the block of ice can't make the boiling water even hotter. That's not possible with perpetual motion machines. This really comes into play when we start talking about stuff like friction. Any machine with moving parts is going to generate friction, that resistance of one body moving against another. Friction converts kinetic energy into heat, and that heat will dissipate from the source. So that means you're always losing energy from your system. You're not destroying the energy but you are losing it. It is leeching out of your system into the surrounding environment. So as the system continues in motion, it generates friction. The friction is lost in the form of heat, or rather energy is lost in the form of heat because of friction, and you just gradually see the energy meter of your device decrease till it can no longer have enough energy to operate, so it will come to a stop. Now, all that being said, it has not stopped people from trying to find a way around these laws of physics to create a perpetual motion or free energy device. They're all sorts of examples, some of which were well intentioned and sincere attempts to create perpetual motion devices or free energy devices, some of which were scams from the very beginning. There are countless videos on sites like YouTube where you can see devices that appear at first glance to be perpetual motion. But I guarantee you that in every single case that there's either a limitation where the device will eventually stop working on its own, or there's an external source of energy that's powering the device that is not in easy view. I'm reminded there was a sort of a teeter totter perpetual motion video that went viral a few years ago. I remember I had a couple of like golf balls on it, as I recall, and the golf balls were supposedly providing the energy to tilt the teeter totter from one side to the other and that would continue to go forever. But it was clear that there was some other mechanism operating on the teeter totter, because the whole thing would tilt at different points even if the balls weren't where they needed to be to impart the energy that the inventor claimed it was doing. So in other words, it was not a real perpetual motion machine. It was a trick. But you know, sometimes people just create something that's really remarkable that on a casual glance, looks like it could be perpetual motion, but upon further investigation, it isn't. And it's not that they were trying to trick you. It's just they came up with a really clever kind of mechanism. So I would say that the Beverly clock falls into that category. It looks like it's a perpetual motion machine, but it isn't. A man named Arthur Beverly designed this clock in the nineteenth century. It looks a little bit like a grandfather clock. And here's the remarkable thing. It only needed to be wound once. It was wound in the nineteenth century, and it hasn't been wound since, at least not by people. So if you were to visit the University of Otago in New Zealand, you could see for yourself the clock is still ticking, or at least it would likely still be ticking. It would depend upon the day you were there. And it certainly sounds like if you only ever needed to wind the clock once, that there must be some sort of perpetual motion thing going on here. But no, it actually relies on an external source of energy to replenish what it expends mechanically. Now, in this case, that energy takes on the form of atmospheric temperature and to a lesser extent pressure. So inside this clock there is an air tight box, and as the box warms up, it expands, and as it cools down it contracts. So the expansion of this box puts pressure on a diaphragm that in turn will lift a one pound weight, and if that one pound weight is lifted by an inch, that creates enough of well potential energy, and then as the weight drops, kinetic energy to power the mechanism of the clock itself. So in other words, as long as there are changes in temperature sufficient enough to lift this weight up by an inch, the clock will stay wound by itself and you don't have to touch it. It doesn't need a six degree change in temperature in celsius in order for this to work, and most days that's fine, Like the coldest part of the day is usually at least six degrees celsius off from the warmest part of the day. But every now and then you get days where there isn't that big of a difference, and then the clock doesn't get reset properly. So the clock actually has stopped a few times since it was first wound, but it's never been rewound because the temperature does that for the clock. So again, at a casual glance, you'd say, oh, this is perpetual energy. It was, it was a perpetual motion. It was wound once and it keeps on going. But in fact it's dependent upon this external source. So just as if you were to have a device that looks like it works on its own, but it turns out you've got it plugged into the wall. Well, the wall is clearly the external source of energy. You don't have a perpetual motion machine, then you just have a machine. Same sort of thing with the Beverly clock, except it uses temperature, not electricity from the wall. Still a very clever device. And again I'm not suggesting that Arthur Beverly was trying to hoodwink anyone. He just created a really interesting clock and I think it's neat. But yeah, just a quick reminder, perpetual motion probably not possible if our understanding of the universe is flawed, and we know there are gaps in it. If it's flawed enough, then maybe one day we will break through and find a way to crack that. But it's highly unlikely. So whenever you see any claims about perpetual motion or free energy, be incredibly skeptical. It would require phenomenal evidence to prove that in fact it did qualify. And that is a text of tidbits on perpetual motion and the first two laws of thermodynamics. I guess I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech are you? So I thought I would do a tech stuff tidbits about perpetual motion and why that is based upon our understanding of the universe. Impossible and the sad fact of the matter is y'all. Originally I was thinking about referencing a guilty Pleasure song I love Faith Hill's This Kiss, because in my mind there was the line, it's perpetual motion. Here's the thing that's not in that's not in the song. The line is it's centrifugal motion, It's perpetual bliss. And I conflated those two lines in my head. So I guess what I'm saying is that I don't really have a reason for doing this episode. You don't understand how distraught I am over this, Like I build episodes around dad jokes and references, and I just I feel all at sea. But I think it is widely understood among most people that devices like perpetual motion machines or the related concept of free energy devices are based upon an understanding of the universe. Impossible, they cannot work. But why can't they work? What fundamental obstacles block such things from working? Why can't we have a device that can continue to operate under its own power indefinitely, or one that wants set in motion can actually generate more energy than it requires to continue to run. Why is that impossible? Well, on this show we often talk about laws, and usually the laws I talk about are the human made kind, the laws like in the EU that protect personal data of citizens there, or the law in the state of Montana that bans TikTok. But some laws are greater than anything humans have put in their legislations. Some laws are universal, or at least appear to be, And among those are the laws of thermo dynamics. Now there are four laws of thermo dynamics, the zero law, the first, second, and third law. We don't even need all four. We just need laws one and two to squish perpetual motion machines. That is, assuming that we aren't wrong about these basic laws of physics, or that there's not some sort of like quantum exception out there, and maybe there is. The quantum world is a very unusual and strange place. Even without Bill Murray. That's an ant Man Quantumnia reference. I don't know how many of we all saw it. Didn't do so well. Not a great movie anyway. You can think of thermodynamics as the branch of physics that pertains to different types of energy and how those types of energy relate to one another, and the concept of work within a system. Now, sometimes this is a fairly easy concept to understand. If we're talking about an isolated system, one that's a system unto itself, it can actually be pretty easy to see how the laws of thermodynamics apply. But if we're talking about the real world, where systems can and do connect to other systems or even be encompassed fully within another system, sometimes those connections are a little bit harder at the spot, and that ambiguity creates opportunity for mistakes or misunderstandings or illusions or sometimes outright chicanery and rahap scalionism. But let's start with those two laws. Law number one tells us that energy can be nice either created nor destroyed. This is also known as the law of conservation of energy. So energy can convert from one form into another. That's possible electricity could convert into heat, for example, but that doesn't mean the energy was destroyed. It just changed from one form to another. It's sort of like how potential energy with maybe say a ball at the top of a ramp, turns into kinetic energy when the ball is released, but you don't lose energy. It's just been converted from one form into another. And that explains why you might notice that you're putting more electric juice, as it were, into a system. Then you get out on the other end. Let's say that you have a meter that tells you how much electricity is moving through the system once it gets to the end of it, and you realize, oh, it's lower than the amount of energy I put into it. And that's because somewhere along the way, some of that electricity was converted into something else, and therefore you don't have as much electricity at the end. The system as a whole still has the same amount of energy, it's just some of that has been changed into a different form. That's another important part of this, though, is that energy can actually enter or leave a system if it's not fully isolated from everything and nothing ever really is so if we don't notice it that energy is coming into a system, it may appear to us that the system is running under its own power, or if the energy is leaving the system, but we can't easily see it, we might not understand why it winds down and stops working. Now, that first law is a doozy when it comes to perpetual motion machines and free energy devices, because that law tells us you cannot get more energy out of a system than already existed within it, or that you have put into that system. So a perpetual motion machine, if it were possible, would be unable to generate electricity and continue to move indefinitely. It would have to operate under a set of rules where you know, it was not losing any energy, because if it did lose energy, ultimately the system would break down. It would stop working. So some of the energy the machine uses to move turns, you know, maybe into electricity. Let's say it's a generator, but that would mean that the energy that's being used to keep the system going is leeching out of it, and eventually you reach a point where there's not enough energy left for the system to continue to operate. And we're talking about basic machines here, so we'd be talking about kinetic energy. Eventually, enough of the energy would be leached out of the system that you wouldn't have the kinetic energy necessary to keep the system moving. So let's imagine an example. Let's say we have a wheel. Let's say we've got this wheel and we position it vertically right, so the wheel it's like a bike tire with the bike standing up. And we've mounted this wheel on an axle. And let's say that when you turn the wheel, it turns the axle, and the axle has on the end of it a couple of permanent magnets attached to it, and these magnets move past a conductive wire. Well. The laws of electromagnetism tell us that a fluctuating magnetic field, such as that created by rotating magnets, will induce electricity to flow through a conductor if it's within range of that magnetic field. And this is how basic electric generators work. Right, some mechanical component causes magnets to move or causes conductors to move relative to some magnets, and this induces electricity to flow through the system. Now, we just have to get the wheel to start turning right, and if we can find a way to get it to turn and keep turning by itself, well, it would then mean that the axle would be rotating and would continue to generate electricity. Boom, we've got our free energy. So maybe we would try a really old idea. Bascara's wheel is what it's called. It was proposed by a twelfth century mathematician named Bascara the Second in India what is modern day India. He suggested a wheel that would include some curved spokes in the wheel, sort of like ribs on the inside, and they kind of curve so they create little cups. And this means that you have different chambers within the wheel, and you would fill those chambers partially anyway with a liquid. He proposed liquid mercury, which of course is liquid at room temperature. And he proposed that as the wheel would spin, the mercury inside these chambers would naturally flow to the lowest point of that chamber, which means your wheel would be unbalanced. You would have a heavier side on one side of the wheel. It would be overbalanced. And Bascara thought that if you started such a wheel spinning, the flowing mercury would create the torque that would allow the wheel to continuously spin. You would just have to get it going, and then once it was going, it would just keep going forever. That was his thought. But here's the thing. If you actually were to build Bestcars wheel in reality and try it out, you would notice that that doesn't happen. It actually kind of swings a little bit. And there are a couple of reasons for this. One is that the wheel ends up weighing a bit more on one side than the other. But that also changes the center of mass, so the center of mass of the wheel would no longer be the center point of the wheel itself would actually be off a little bit, and it would mean the wheel would act more like a pendulum than it would a wheel. Also, in order to keep the wheel to continue to spin, you would really need a way to change those spokes dynamically, to essentially change the radius of the spokes, And to do that, it would mean that you would have to impart some energy to make those spokes change, right, You'd have to have some mechanism to do that, and that would require energy to do which means you would be inserting more energy into the system, and that means that's not a perpetual motion machine. I mean, that's essentially the equivalent of the wheel starts to slow down, so you give it another push. There's no real difference here. It's just that occasionally you would have to inject energy into the system to keep it going, which means it's not a perpetual motion machine at all. Okay, So with our hypothetical example with that electro magnet, we would see that while you could start the wheel spinning, it would ultimately slow down and stop and stop generating electricity. As a result, if you could somehow continue its spinning and generate electricity in the process, then it would violate that first law of thermodynamics. It would be creating energy and you can't do that. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we're gonna talk about law number two and why that also has a part to play with the impossibility of perpetual motion machines. But first let's think our sponsors. We're back, so we're up to law number two of thermodynamics. Like I said, these are the two laws that actually really pertain to what we're talking about here. So the second law of thermodynamics gets into the concept of entropy, which gets a little bit complicated. Also, like entropy can mean different things in different contexts, which makes it a little confusing. If one person is thinking of one definition while another person is thinking of another, they can create a difficulty there. But really, one of the things the second law explains is that if you bring two systems together so that they interact with one another, eventually they will reach a thermodynamic equilibrium. So the easiest way I can think of to explain this is by talking about temperature. That's just one example, but we can it's it's easy enough one to think about. So let's say we've got two things of different temperatures. Let's say we've got a giant block of ice and it's at freezing so it's at zero celsius, and we've got a vat of boiling water that's at one hundred degrees celsius in isolation. These systems are in thermodynamic equilibrium with themselves, right. They are at equilibrium as far as temperature goes anyway throughout the material, but they are not an equilibrium with one another. And so if we then combine these two systems, we I don't know, pour the boiling water on top of the block of ice. That boiling water would transfer heat to the block of ice, until eventually you would end up with a pool of water that's at a single temperature somewhere between freezing and boiling. The two systems have entered acted with one another and have reached thermodynamic equilibrium. You would not continue to have one section that's freezing in one section that's boiling. Moreover, you cannot have a situation in which a colder body spontaneously transfers heat to a warmer body. That's just not the direction that heat will transfer. It has to go from warmer to colder. It can't go colder to warmer, so the block of ice can't make the boiling water even hotter. That's not possible with perpetual motion machines. This really comes into play when we start talking about stuff like friction. Any machine with moving parts is going to generate friction, that resistance of one body moving against another. Friction converts kinetic energy into heat, and that heat will dissipate from the source. So that means you're always losing energy from your system. You're not destroying the energy but you are losing it. It is leeching out of your system into the surrounding environment. So as the system continues in motion, it generates friction. The friction is lost in the form of heat, or rather energy is lost in the form of heat because of friction, and you just gradually see the energy meter of your device decrease till it can no longer have enough energy to operate, so it will come to a stop. Now, all that being said, it has not stopped people from trying to find a way around these laws of physics to create a perpetual motion or free energy device. They're all sorts of examples, some of which were well intentioned and sincere attempts to create perpetual motion devices or free energy devices, some of which were scams from the very beginning. There are countless videos on sites like YouTube where you can see devices that appear at first glance to be perpetual motion. But I guarantee you that in every single case that there's either a limitation where the device will eventually stop working on its own, or there's an external source of energy that's powering the device that is not in easy view. I'm reminded there was a sort of a teeter totter perpetual motion video that went viral a few years ago. I remember I had a couple of like golf balls on it, as I recall, and the golf balls were supposedly providing the energy to tilt the teeter totter from one side to the other and that would continue to go forever. But it was clear that there was some other mechanism operating on the teeter totter, because the whole thing would tilt at different points even if the balls weren't where they needed to be to impart the energy that the inventor claimed it was doing. So in other words, it was not a real perpetual motion machine. It was a trick. But you know, sometimes people just create something that's really remarkable that on a casual glance, looks like it could be perpetual motion, but upon further investigation, it isn't. And it's not that they were trying to trick you. It's just they came up with a really clever kind of mechanism. So I would say that the Beverly clock falls into that category. It looks like it's a perpetual motion machine, but it isn't. A man named Arthur Beverly designed this clock in the nineteenth century. It looks a little bit like a grandfather clock. And here's the remarkable thing. It only needed to be wound once. It was wound in the nineteenth century, and it hasn't been wound since, at least not by people. So if you were to visit the University of Otago in New Zealand, you could see for yourself the clock is still ticking, or at least it would likely still be ticking. It would depend upon the day you were there. And it certainly sounds like if you only ever needed to wind the clock once, that there must be some sort of perpetual motion thing going on here. But no, it actually relies on an external source of energy to replenish what it expends mechanically. Now, in this case, that energy takes on the form of atmospheric temperature and to a lesser extent pressure. So inside this clock there is an air tight box, and as the box warms up, it expands, and as it cools down it contracts. So the expansion of this box puts pressure on a diaphragm that in turn will lift a one pound weight, and if that one pound weight is lifted by an inch, that creates enough of well potential energy, and then as the weight drops, kinetic energy to power the mechanism of the clock itself. So in other words, as long as there are changes in temperature sufficient enough to lift this weight up by an inch, the clock will stay wound by itself and you don't have to touch it. It doesn't need a six degree change in temperature in celsius in order for this to work, and most days that's fine, Like the coldest part of the day is usually at least six degrees celsius off from the warmest part of the day. But every now and then you get days where there isn't that big of a difference, and then the clock doesn't get reset properly. So the clock actually has stopped a few times since it was first wound, but it's never been rewound because the temperature does that for the clock. So again, at a casual glance, you'd say, oh, this is perpetual energy. It was, it was a perpetual motion. It was wound once and it keeps on going. But in fact it's dependent upon this external source. So just as if you were to have a device that looks like it works on its own, but it turns out you've got it plugged into the wall. Well, the wall is clearly the external source of energy. You don't have a perpetual motion machine, then you just have a machine. Same sort of thing with the Beverly clock, except it uses temperature, not electricity from the wall. Still a very clever device. And again I'm not suggesting that Arthur Beverly was trying to hoodwink anyone. He just created a really interesting clock and I think it's neat. But yeah, just a quick reminder, perpetual motion probably not possible if our understanding of the universe is flawed, and we know there are gaps in it. If it's flawed enough, then maybe one day we will break through and find a way to crack that. But it's highly unlikely. So whenever you see any claims about perpetual motion or free energy, be incredibly skeptical. It would require phenomenal evidence to prove that in fact it did qualify. And that is a text of tidbits on perpetual motion and the first two laws of thermodynamics. I guess I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to your favorite shows.