Conservation of energy isn’t just a good idea: It is the law. In particular, it is the first law of thermodynamics. But, apparently, a lot of people don’t really get that because history is replete ...

A perpetual motion machine is (as the name implies) a machine that moves perpetually; it never stops. Ever. So if you created one today and set it going, it would keep on going until the Big Freeze.

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 ...

Over the weekend I wrote an article titled Turning Your Idea into an Invention. In the article I talked about the fact that you do not need to have a prototype, but rather you need to be able to ...

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 ...

Perpetual motion—it's fun to say that. For some people, perpetual motion machines hold the secret to everlasting free energy that will save the world. To them, it's a machine that is just beyond our ...

Perpetual motion machines are impossible, right? They violate the laws of thermodynamics. And yet people have been trying to engineer one for centuries. YouTuber gzumwalt posted a video of what looks ...

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 ...

I'm not sure why I keep getting emails about perpetual motion machines, but I do. They usually go something like this: "Thank you so much for your recent post on Wired regarding perpetual motion ...

Nothing lasts forever. This is good life advice, and it also happens to be an important feature of our physical universe. Natural philosophers considered and discarded the idea of ‘perpetual motion’ a ...