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 ...

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 ...

On Sept. 20, 1913, rumors were running rampant around North Dakota that J. W. Kennedy, of Mandan, North Dakota, had invented just such a machine. A news clipping about J.W. Kennedy and his perpetual ...

My favorite shelf in the home library is where Raymond Roussel, the Comte de Lautréamont, E.T. A. Hoffmann, Leonora Carrington and other writers form a brilliant phalanx of eccentricity and marvel. I ...

For decades, the question of how to keep a Slinky in perpetual motion has befuddled scientists and toy owners alike. Now, one man may have the answer to ensure the Slinky fun never stops. Matthias ...

Perpetual motion is impossible, but Japan has managed the illusion of perpetual debt for 20 years. Perpetual motion--a machine which produces more than it consumes indefinitely, without any visible ...

Why AI is taking on impossible challenges. How a perpetual motion machine can power an AI. Why we have to put an explicit explanation about an April 1st article so that the search engines don’t ding ...

Editors note: This story has been updated to properly credit the concept of the gigan to the poet Ruth Ellen Kocher. Eliot White sees poetry in the impossible, beauty in failure and the infinite in ...

With Steorn's track record, you'd think that the company wouldn't be in such a hurry to put its "free energy" technology under a microscope. Then again, maybe once it has your €399 (roughly $550) your ...

Let's start with a water wheel in still water with an electric generator hooked up to it. Let's say it has a ratchet wheel so it can only turn in one direction. I want to calculate the probability ...