Perhaps the most persistent nonsense in physics: the perpetual motion machine. Bad ideas come and go in physics. But there’s one bit of nonsense that is perhaps more persistent than all others: the ...

Remember that zany Irish company Steorn, who claimed to have built a working perpetual motion machine that could produce clean, free energy out of a few magnets and some plastic discs? Well, they're ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

A wheel weighted with swinging mallets. A cylinder rotating in a sealed, water-filled container. A siphon that transfers liquid back and forth in a seemingly endless loop. These may sound like the ...

Perpetual motion machines. A century and more ago, they were a hot ticket. Ebenezer Punderson Avery, a Connecticut man who lived in Great Barrington in the 1780s before relocating to New York, ...

Perpetual motion devices are either a gag, a scam, or as in the case of this particular toy that [Big Clive] bought on AliExpress, a rather fascinating demonstration of a contact-free inductive sensor ...

At the turn of the 20th century, the quest for a perpetual motion machine took hold of public imagination. A number of Hoosiers were among those captivated by the idea of creating a perpetual motion ...