Question Need help with Perpetual motion Science fair?
I need help with my science fair project it is on Wilkins' Magnetic Perpetual Motion Machine if somebody would please write me a good reason why this will not work and in very high detail i will be very happy thank you.

Best Answer It comes down to the magnets strength only has a strong influence the closer a steel ball gets to it. This device is going on the premise that it takes less energy to roll a weight up the ramp and that the energy will spike up if you let gravity pull it almost straight down. This is the concept using some arbitrary numbers: If you have a 1kg steel ball on the bottom of a 10 meter long incline and the height of the incline is 1 meter, then it will only take 1/10th the amount of energy to roll the ball up the ramp. The force to raise a 1kg ball one meter high = 1 kg * 1m * 9.8 m/s^2 = 9.8 Newton. The amount of work is mathematically force x distance so 9.8N * 1 meter = 9.8 Joules of work in raising the ball one meter vertically. By putting the ball on the ramp with a 10% grade means it only needs 1/10th the force to push that 9.8N ball up the ramp , which is 0.98N So wilkins looked at it like that. He thought if you put the ball on the ramp and you had a magnet with, say a 5.0 Newton pull on it, that the magnet could pull on the ball which only requires a 0.98N pull to roll it up the ramp. And then once the ball got to the top of the ramp, pure gravity would take over and the ball which has 9.8N of gravitational force at the top of the ramp, would drop down thru the hole , since the magnet only has a 5 N pull and the gravity has a 9.8N pull. It's almost credible except for the force to get that ball to roll up the ramp. It does only need 0.98N to roll up the ramp, but when that 5.0 N magnet is 10 meters away from the ball, the magnetic power falls off as the 1/SQUARE of the distance, not in a linear way. What this means is if you move the ball 10 meters away from the magnet it is 10 times the distance away from the magnet, but for the magnet you have to square the distance to measure the magnet fall off in power. Of course 10 squared is 100. So this says that the magnet at 10 meters away only has 1/100th the power as it does at 1 meter to the ball. So if the ball needs 0.98N to roll up the ramp, at the beginning of the ramp there is only 1/100th of that 5N magnet power available at that distance which is 5/100 =0.05 N of force. And since you need .98N to get the ball moving up the ramp, the magnet doesn't have enough pull to get the ball moving up. But if you tried to outwit that and just use a much bigger magnet which would exceed that force, it still wouldn't work. Suppose you used a magnet with 100N of force. At a distance of 10 meters the magnet would exert a force of 1/100th * 100N = 1 newton of force. So now you have 1 newton of force pulling the ball up the ramp because it only takes 0.98N to roll it up. But now the problem is at the drop point for the ball. The ball at the drop point still only has a 9.8N force from gravity to drop it down, but the magnet has a 100N force. This is much stronger than the gravity force the ball would get from dropping, so the ball is just sucked right up to the magnet instead of dropping.

Question Could a perpetual motion machine exist in space?
The reason perpetual motion machines don't work is because friction takes away some of the force and eventually stops the machine. Now if we were to take a magnetic train into space and got a way that it didn't fly away, would the train never stop until brakes were applied? The train doesn't touch the tracks, it levitates over them because of magnetic polarity. Is this actually possible?

Best Answer An "almost perpetual motion" machine could exist in space. A good example is the moon, which has been in motion around the earth for billions of years without losing (much) energy. If you have a magnetically levitated train that would ride horizontally on a track that's lifted above the atmosphere, then it would indeed go indefinitely far with a little push. But it still wouldn't be TRULY perpetual. Even the pressure of light photons produces enough friction to slow things down eventually. And light photons are everywhere: even in the "dark" of space, any region that is above absolute zero (which means: EVERY region) is bathed in photons, because any source of heat at all will create some.

Question Is it possible to create a perpetual motion machine?
I was thinking about planet-sized machines. If you could make something big enough, would it have enough gravity and/or a magnetic field large enough to power a generating unit at it's center?

Best Answer friction, viscosity, & air resistance/drag. if you can completely and perfectly avoid those things, then yes, the motion will be perpetual. the problem is however that you cannot avoid those things, try as you might.... cheers