Sunday, November 02, 2008 Estremera: Perpetual motion By Estella A. Estremera Spider's Web
DARN!" my brain cells shouted as I checked on Sunday's newspaper last week and read my Spider's Web "Musings on power"...
Background. I have this habit of tapping in disjointed thoughts in the computer in between writing an article, just to write them down before these thoughts disappear.
In the middle of writing a Spider's Web article last week, our computer in charge peeped in to say that he has to reset the server. And so I saved my article in my computer instead of the server drive where articles should be saved and continued writing, finished the article, removed the unrelated "notes" on perpetual motion that formed part of my disjointed thoughts, saved the disjointed thought notes in another file, and then saved the final article... in MY computer.
When the server was finally up, I went on to write and edit other articles and then went home.
And so, there was last Sunday's Spider's Web with three long paragraphs in the end about Perpetual Motion, with the blurb, "Read it over and over again, it holds some precious lesson." I wanted to groan in frustration, but it was already there... the article in the server that still contained the "notes", and not the edited and clean copy that I saved into my computer (therefore inaccessible to those laying out the newspaper) and forgot to transfer to the server drive when the server was finally booted up again. That blurb was for me, the disjointed thoughts running in my mind. But since it already found print, then I have to continue on the thread, to make sense and at least convince you folks out there that I do make sense sometimes and that I'm not in the habit of mumbling about perpetual motion to myself.
It goes like this... may I not dig myself deeper into the geek tag, Amen.
It's all about physics (voila!)...
In physics, work is the transfer of energy. Thus, work is done on an object when you transfer energy to that object. Thus, energy can be defined as the capacity for doing work.
Still in physics, power is the work done in a unit of time. In other words, power is the rate of doing work.
Now... we go to power as we know it in life and not physics (that we hate!). The power that corrupts, the power that was the topic I pondered on last week (that saw the ramblings about perpetual motion, arrrgh... Geek!) The musings about power like fire may touch and eat up everything on its path but will not be able to keep on touching and eating to eternity. It will have to die down, that's the nature of fire. Fire, like power of the corrupt, may eat up everything that stands in its path but can never go on forever.
And then there's light. In physics, light is electromagnetic radiation that can be perceived by the eye. Otherwise, they're photons that go around undetected as light waves, microwaves, radio waves, etc. These photons are absorbed, released, reflected, refracted, and bounced around, whatever. But they're there, touching everything in its path but will not be truly extinguished, just transformed, released, refracted, absorbed.
Much like knowledge.
And this is where we were last week. Now what about the perpetual motion or perpetuum mobile? It has something to do with further musings on the perpetual motion of knowledge. Perpetual motion is a system that runs itself without any new energy applied.
But the first law of thermodynamics is sometimes stated as "A perpetuum mobile of the first kind cannot exist." The second law of thermodynamics is sometimes stated as "A perpetuum mobile of the second kind cannot exist."
Two laws that insist such cannot exist, and yet is there in physics, being studied because while it cannot exist, it manifests a possibility, a possibility called overunity; that state which continues to fascinate those tinkering with physics.
Like the draw of magic, overunity's elusiveness is magical simply because there is no clear definition and yet it's conceivable. Imagine systems in which more energy comes out than was apparently put in (that brings us back to power, energy, work), which in turn can bring perpetual motion. Where is the additional power coming from if it wasn't originally there and how can it continues to go on forever? Magic.
But like magic, once an explanation is found, then it is downgraded as a trick, a process. But for as long as it just flits around our consciousness, perceivable but intangible and unexplained, then it's magic, it's overunity. It's something that's getting power from nowhere, even maybe... from the divine.
The unseen beckons... and so does the possibility that the leap from light to knowledge to overunity may be the steps we have to take to be divine and that the steps doesn't have anything to do with keeping condoms out of the market and making sure that ladies don't get their fallopian tubes tied up. But I will not try to go any further lest I lose all my readers and be cursed to eternal damnation by the rest... Peace! saestremera@yahoo.com
