Patenting Your Perpetual Motion Machine | Hacker News Reader

Patenting Your Perpetual Motion Machine

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61 pointsjohbal28 comments

Here's another fun example of patenting something impossible: compressing random data. [1] Amusingly, Jean-loup Gailly's [2] post about it begins with saying that: "The US patent office no longer grants patents on perpetual motion machines..."

[1]: http://gailly.net/05533051.html

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-loup_Gailly

I've compressed all the data I have down to a single bit, but now I can't figure out how to extract it back out.

is it a 1 or a 0?

The data is confidential, so I'm afraid I can't disclose that. Wouldn't want someone else to successfully decompress it.

It was a quantum algorithm. It's in a superposition between the two values. I won't know until I look at it.

Here's another popular but impossible item: the free lunch.

Every economic proposal that promises a free lunch has a hidden cost, whether the proposer knows it's there or not.

I remember once idly watching one of those "Get Rich Quick Through Real Estate Swindling" seminars on late night TV. Just for fun, I decided to work through the blizzard of transactions the host proposed to see where the extra magic $5,000 it promised to drop in your pocket came from.

Turns out it relied on selling a sucker a bond for $X+5000 that you'd bought for $X, and convincing the sucker that $X+5000 in 10 years was worth $X+5000 today.

Oh man that's a riot. Thanks for sharing.

There are several classes of problem that really seem to bring out the patent crackpots, of which perpetual motion is the most classic. Apparently data compression is another.

The one I've personally run into is "secure" or "trusted" embedded systems. I've been contacted by a lot of people who believe that they can make a perfectly secure and trustworthy secret storage system just by building it out of an embedded Linux system. When I try to explain how a secure element is basically exactly the opposite of a Linux box, the excuses and bluster prevent me from actually making any progress in explaining.

There's a term for this: "Not even wrong." That is, so off base that "wrong" is generous!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

> There are several classes of problem that really seem to bring out the [...] crackpots

You wouldn't believe how many people on reddit have proved the Collatz conjecture or found a polytime algorithm for 3-SAT...

If a problem is hard enough and stated easily enough, it is crackpot-central.

3-SAT is one of those where it really falls down fast, because you can just ask them for a solution for some arbitrary 3-SAT problem. By their own admission, they've found an algorithm!

A polytime algorithm, even an implementation of one, does not alone make a competitive SAT-solver for any of the ongoing SAT-competitions.

Every PRNG is an excellent compression algorithm for particular kinds of random data. Actually every kind of unbounded size random data is generated by a device that doesn't contain all of the data at the start. These algorithms may not be generic, but a generic algorithm is not useful because you can always can just generate another random data set from scratch.

Pseudorandomly generated data is not random data. There is no way to compress actually random information, by definition.

> One could argue that such patents are ultimately harmless. On the other hand, it is easy to imagine such a patent being used as a perpetual fundraising machine, with the imprimatur of the USPTO lending credibility to the scam.

It is precisely the latter. This will allow the con artist to go all out advertising that their sham device is patented. It will also open the flood gates to have more kooks start patenting their nonsense.

The other agency that gets this a lot is the FDA. FDA registered means nothing, and various levels of cleared, approved and authorized are also often misinterpreted.

There are whole sites dedicated to publishing (let's be generous here) weak scientific papers as preprint stating that the peer review process has finished.

They don't tell readers the result or if peer review discovered flaws. They use this non-label to give credibility to papers that failed at credible journals.

I stumbled upon this in videos of the more intelligent anti-mRNA vaccine people that used this subtle trick to con their believers I to more strongly believing them and at the same time arm them with another well sounding argument against one of the best medical and scientific achievements in the last decades.

Also approved Health Claims on food (as regulated in the EU) are often not understood by consumers as intended by the regulation.

The literate consumer (me too often included) is imho more often than not a myth from the same pantheon as the homo oeconomicus.

Slightly related, one of the neatest desk toys that I’ve ever seen is a “perpetual motion” pendulum that has a hidden electromagnet. It bounces around playfully on your desk for weeks at a time. Was a great b-day present to my father.

Also on the topic of patents, the one for this toy expired a few years ago and the circuitry is quite easy and a fun DIY project.

Not my video but here is one in action: https://youtu.be/RUDTr99JClY

Why don't you have to demonstrate that your device works to be granted patents, that the it actually does what you claim it does? (I know that's not how the patent system works; I'm asking if anyone knows what the reasons are for why it is the way it is.)

Technically, you do have to prove an invention to be “useful” … and the USPTO examiner can require demonstration.

This should happen in a case where the described invention breaks fundamental laws of physics.

When briefly digging into the selected prior art (the Google Patents link), it’s not clear to me, non-physist, that the invention really describes a magical perpetual motion device, there are statements such as “requires flowing water source”

So no Analytical Engine patent for Charles Babbage?

Here's my explanation why perpetual motion doesn't work.

1. Whatever underlying mechanism it uses, the device eventually moves to lower it's potential energy (ball falls down, magnet moves away, pendulum swings, spring releases, etc). You can calculate potential energy anywhere in the lifecycle of the device.

2. In order to be perpetual, it has to form some kind of circle, eventually it must reach its starting point.

3. If potential energy in the starting point is X, when the device returns back to it's starting point (to close the circle) it will have the same potential energy X.

4. If you have two points in time that both have same potential energy X, the device will not move there because it would not lower it's potential energy.

It will either don't move at all, or start moving to reach some intermediate step with lower potential energy and then stays there because it would need to increase potential energy to go back to level X. But device only moves to decrease it's energy, not increase.

you can't win

you can't break even

you can't leave the game

"Perpetual motion machines" are fun, is the universe and possibly life itself a perpetual motion machine? “There is an art to flying, or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. ... Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, that presents the difficulties.” Apologies to Douglas Adams

No - the second law of thermodynamics implies that, sadly, the ride will come to a stop eventually.

As Douglas Adams says "Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, that presents the difficulties."

> A person with basic knowledge in mathematics and data compression can find the flaws immediately upon first reading.

Or with any common sense?

I thought, hey, I'll read the claims. Maybe they don't actually say "perpetual motion"?

But then claim 1's last element is:

a transmission device comprising: a rotor is connected to the first shaft with turntable and the second shaft with turntable so that the rotor rotates on it, and the rotor and the shielding device form a dynamic seal to block, the fluid pressure; at least one first fluid chamber attached to and located above the inner cavity of the rotor; at least one second fluid chamber attached to and located below the inner cavity of the rotor; a plurality of shafts attached to the rotor, wherein the first inclined support-guideway system and the second inclined support-guideway system are separated by the rotor; each shaft has two bearing on each end of the shaft and the two bearing are disposed into one of the support-guideway system having a racetrack so that the transmission device rotates along the first inclined support-guideway system having a racetrack and the second inclined support-guideway system having a racetrack; and an energy output shaft attached to and rotating with the rotor, wherein each end of the energy output shaft has a bearing that the bearing is arranged on the side of the support-guideway system to guide the rotor; wherein the upper part of the rotor shields the pressure of the fluid on the at least one first fluid chamber from the bottom using shielding device so that the at least one first fluid chamber is moveable under the gravity force in a downward direction, and the lower part of the rotor is subjected to the pressure of the fluid on the at least one second fluid chamber so that the at least one second fluid chamber is movable under the buoyance force in an upward direction, thereby the at least the first fluid chamber and at least one second fluid chamber rotating along the first inclined support-guideway system and the second inclined support-guideway system and the energy conversion device outputting energy through the energy output shaft.

Sorry. tl;dr. When I was studying for the Patent Bar, I thought I read "perpetual motion" was one of those few inventions where you still had to bring in a physical model. This patent doesn't contain the word "perpetual" but God only knows what that claim means.

Telephone interviews are a giant scam. They could easily record them nowadays, but they don't.

Not so fast? Perpetual motion of an object in vacuum is perfectly possible, it's generating extra energy (or perfect vacuum) that is the problem. Even then, on a cosmological level there is a hypothesis of dark energy that is exerted by the nature of spacetime itself. On a practical level, there are things like solar/tidal/geothermal energy that are perpetual for any human purposes even if not absolutely. And there are a lot of cases where the initial patent is completely impractical and only derived works come to serve useful purposes. Should an inventor of a clever device only a step away from a useful function be not recognized? I would rather have these than slider lock UI patents.

So perptual motion is possible of the energy comes from the outside like when I hook up a motor to the electrical grid?

Doesn't that kind of defeat the idea?

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