Galt's Motor, anyone?

[TuringAI]

Check this out! Someone invented a way to get chaotic forces to operate a specific way on a piece of machinery!

http://www.physorg.com/news195819314.html

Yeah, it doesn't violate entropy, but it certainly does mean something. This 'back action' effect may make us change the way we think about so called 'randomness'.

[Marc K.]

Check this out! Someone invented a way to get chaotic forces to operate a specific way on a piece of machinery!

The motion isn't random. All of the balls fall in a downward direction due to gravity!!! As one guy in the comments says: it is like harvesting the energy of raindrops.

And the machine doesn't work as advertised: toward the end of the video the paddles turn backwards. But it shouldn't be surprising that if you limit the motion of a machine to one direction and then throw a bunch of balls at it, it will turn only in that one direction.

[TuringAI]

The motion isn't random. All of the balls fall in a downward direction due to gravity!!! As one guy in the comments says: it is like harvesting the energy of raindrops.

And the machine doesn't work as advertised: toward the end of the video the paddles turn backwards. But it shouldn't be surprising that if you limit the motion of a machine to one direction and then throw a bunch of balls at it, it will turn only in that one direction.

I didn't say random. I said chaotic. Randomness implies lack of identity. Chaos simply means that something is very sensitive to initial conditions and APPEARS random.

As for turning backwards at the end, I believe that only suggests there is a limit to the amount of energy one can harvest this way, but that doesn't mean that with a little work one can't harvest SOME energy, enough to make the initial work worth it.

[SapereAude]

Thought provoking.

Thanks for posting it.

[Tensorman]

This experiment means nothing. Apparently the suggestion is that the balls emulate thermal particles in a gas, but nothing could be further from the truth. The movement is far from random, in fact it is a primitive model for the functioning of a water wheel: you pump up water that falls then down due to gravity and you extract some of the energy you put continuously into the system. Had the experimenters never heard of a self-winding watch, a centuries-old invention?

Hitting the soft side of a vane some of the energy of the beads is absorbed, that would mean that the temperature of that soft side increases. In a real gas that would mean that the particles there would be moving faster, but the whole analogy with thermal particles is false and Feynman's conclusion isn't in any way falsified.

[Vik]

I didn't say random. I said chaotic. Randomness implies lack of identity. Chaos simply means that something is very sensitive to initial conditions and APPEARS random.

I thought random meant "without pattern", as in APPARENT disorder? e.g. when I can't *deterministically* predict the outcome based on limited available information? (I'm talking about statistical contexts where the relative probability of the occurrence of each outcome can be approximated or calculated because of the finite cardinality of the set of possible outcomes)

[Vik]

This experiment means nothing. Apparently the suggestion is that the balls emulate thermal particles in a gas, but nothing could be further from the truth. The movement is far from random, in fact it is a primitive model for the functioning of a water wheel: you pump up water that falls then down due to gravity and you extract some of the energy you put continuously into the system. Had the experimenters never heard of a self-winding watch, a centuries-old invention?

Hitting the soft side of a vane some of the energy of the beads is absorbed, that would mean that the temperature of that soft side increases. In a real gas that would mean that the particles there would be moving faster, but the whole analogy with thermal particles is false and Feynman's conclusion isn't in any way falsified.

Well said! Feynman was talking about nano-wheels, not enormous paddles.