Perpetual Motion
- Father, father! I created a perpetual motion machine!
- Really? Show me!
- See, these parts travel this way… and then they come back!
- And what keeps them moving?
- It’s this one here!
- But that one is using energy…
- That’s just a side effect of how I created the machine. Everything will keep on working when this part runs out of energy.
- I see… And what happens when this block gets to this point?
- When they get here, this other bit brings them back to the beginning.
- I see… and how can you be sure that it’ll run forever?
- It will! There’s nothing to make it stop! It will run forever!
- I guess we can wait and see…
They both sat and marveled at the child’s creation.
- So what have you learned with this so far? Are perpetual machines possible?
- Kind of… They are possible, but they are a bit dull…
- How so?
- There’s no way of taking the energy out of them. Everything’s reabsorbed.
- Well, that’s not the point of these machines.
- Yeah, but I kind of wanted that to happen. Still, it was fun. I can’t wait to present it at school!
- Indeed! You know what you need? You need names! For the moving parts and for the machine as a whole.
- Oh, I thought of that already!
- OK, so what do you call them?
- I call these moving parts “planets”! The machine is called “universe”!
