Power from Gravity

simply because it's impossible! The work used to raise an object up is the same as the one gained when it falls back to it's initial place. Then remove lost energy because of friction and non ideality of things and you'll see you can only lose energy that way.

free energy buffs here too??!?!?!?!
its since the dawn of humanity that someone wants to use gravity as a regauging force, unfortunately this is not possible.
For you , physics nooobs , i reccomend to visit tom bearden site
and do a serch for G.Modanese and Podlektnov they are deep into antigravitic research, just few days ago the claimed to have developed a gravity beam which creates a force of 20 pounds.
This could be used also for an high performance rotary engine for extracting electricity.
i am very unfriendly rate me

I was thinking more along the lines of a spinning wheel which had an odd number of arms attached around the outside of it.

The arms would only bend one way in the opposite direction that the wheel spun, and would have a large amount of weight on the end of them. So when they went from one side to the other, as it reached the top, the arm would flop out so that it was sticking out straight, and the weight distributed far out from the wheel. When it spun around to the bottom, the arm would be picked up so that the heavy end was straight below the joint.

Does that make sense? And would it not work? Why?

EDIT: I've actually built something like this, but I had really crappy components (scotch tape, Cds, sticks, and C batteries!). I think it may have worked if the joints (tape) and axel (CD wheel thing) used less friction, and the weights (batteries) were heavier.

we already use gravity to generate power, think about "tidal power stations", ok its not the gravity of the earth, but if the moon can make tides on the earth, the earth can make 10times higher tides on the moon. all we need is to transport some water to the moon...


T2k

hehe.
It's possible to get energy not "from gravity" but using gravity.

Drop things into blackhole,and as they will accelerate they will produce x-rays...kinda like power plant on river...

so by losting things forever you produce energy.(thing that falls into black hole can't be removed back)

Also it's possible to compress earth into tiny blackhole and get a lot of energy as result :)))

seriously,work of gravitational forces are zero for any closed path. End of story.

You guys give up using just the equations? There surely must be a way to pick something up easier than gravity pushes it down. Hell, even the flopping action of my creation almost made the thing spin. If it was well balanced and had less friction, I'm almost sure it would have kept going.

Add some magnetic forces in there as a bonus, and you're set!

Quote:

Original post by Dmytry work of gravitational forces are zero for any closed path. End of story.

Well, end of story for anyone who isn't a professional physicist with access to really really expensive equipment. But who knows what the future of physics research holds. I'm optimistic. But I am over my phase of trying to do it myself with Legos... [smile]

In order to move something around in a circle, you have to move it back to where it started, which will have the same gravitational potential.

EVEN IF it were possible to create a local anti-gravity field, it would still not be possible to generate free energy from it, because the gradient moving in/out of that field would excert a force which would equalise it.

I think anyway. That's what I concluded from some dodgy thought-experiments.

Mark

Quote:

Original post by Jiia You guys give up using just the equations? There surely must be a way to pick something up easier than gravity pushes it down. Hell, even the flopping action of my creation almost made the thing spin. If it was well balanced and had less friction, I'm almost sure it would have kept going. Add some magnetic forces in there as a bonus, and you're set!

Even if you did manage to remove all friction (including air resistance) so that it continued forever (similar to a pendulum swinging in a vacuum), you're not making extra energy, you're just converting from kinetic energy to potential energy and back again, over and over.

Do any of you know how hidroelectric plants work? Well, they use the gravitational energy that is stored in the water and then transform it in electric energy.

So, we ARE using gravity energy, after all.

Well, then the water goes down. It ends up on the ocean where the SUN energy makes it turn into vapor, then it goes back to the montains, rains, and the energy is transformed back into potential energy.

In the end all the energy we use come from the sun.

gravity fields are conservative, so by definition pushing something up costs as much energy as getting it down could possibly yield.

there are two cases where i wonder how to conservation of energy holds up though:

natural magnets: i have a huge natural magnet, and a huge block of iron. let them come together, denaturalize the magnet by heating it, pull them apart and remagnetize it again. how is energy conserved here?

interference: if you create a pattern on a wall using interference, you get high intensity spots and no intensity spots. but if you were to cut a hole on a no intensity spot, the radiation would continue, diverging again into a certain amount of seperate beams which do have intensity. ?

Don't laugh. But this is what I created.

EDIT: Hmm, I kinda got the top arm wrong, though. It would still be mostly laying down.

But..if you lift a weight up under the influence of the moon's gravity, then drop it when the moon is on the other side of the earth, wouldn't that require less energy to lift the weight than the resulting energy when it drops?

Obligatory Simpsons quote:
"LISA... IN THIS HOUSE WE OBEY THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS!"

I think what you're aiming for is called perpetual motion, and is impossible. There are any number of slightly scary folk out there who claim to have invented a perpetual motion machine, or tapped into something they call zero point energy (something to do with harnessing the energy from the spinning galaxy). But usually they do this so they can issue press releases about their fantastic new energy source, soon to sweep the world and save us all from ourselves, and how we'd all be fools not to invest in them and ride the cash wave into a bright, shiny future. Basically though, you can't get something for nothing. You cannot create energy. Even if you brilliantly engineer a machine to lose as little energy as possible whilst doing it's job you will still get less useful energy out of that machine than you put in, as some of it will always onvert to heat, sound etc. Probably the closest thing you can get to it is supercooled semiconductors, which float above magnets in a really cool way when they get really cold, because they conduct so perfectly that no matter what weight you put on them they stay up. (the current induced in them by moving even an infinitesimal amount near a magnet produces a similar magnetic field strong enough to support whatever you put on them) We had a really cool physics teacher in school and so we got to play with some of this stuff. Great fun :-). Even they give up the ghost after a while though, although it would probably have taken much longer if we hadn't run out of liquid nitrogen by using all of it to smash things.

Quote:

Original post by Luctus But..if you lift a weight up under the influence of the moon's gravity, then drop it when the moon is on the other side of the earth, wouldn't that require less energy to lift the weight than the resulting energy when it drops?

Yes, and that's how tidal power works.

However, it doesn't create energy from nothing, in fact lifting the weight to a higher gravitational potential (i.e. on the other side of the Earth, 12 hours later), will take energy from the Earth's rotation and thus slow it down very slightly.

Keep doing this for long enough, and the Earth will slow down until it spins at exactly the same speed as the period of the moon's rotation, thus making tidal power useless :)

Mark

Hey, I'm not scary folk. For one, mine didn't work. And two, I'm just curious. Not trying to be famous or rich. Otherwise I wouldn't be posting about it on a forum.

EDIT:

By the way, aren't you being a bit negative? I mean how do you know it's not possible? From your math knowledge? From what everyone has told you? Why not have a little faith and try it anyway?

This is called a "perpetuum mobile".
And indeed, it is impossible.

I once read an article on these things, and some of these things look as if they can work, but they don't.

This is a great thread! Jiia, I look forward to seeing a more advanced version of your prototype ;)

But seriously all the perpetual motion devices that use 'advanced' physics probably just rely on superconductivity or similar to make them seem to do things which unintuitive to non-scientists. Given some decent giroscopes and lots of superconductor I'm sure I could make a very powerful engine?!

One serious point - if you could block gravity/magnetic fields could you then do strange things?

Sorry, I didn't mean to offend or anything, nor was I accusing you of being scary. Looking at your design it's actually fairly ingenious, but unfortuneately that doesn't mean it will work. As for where I get the knowledge to base my skepticism around, it's mostly just stuff I remember from school. The principle of conservation of energy, for example. You're in good company too, Leonardo Da Vinci drew diagrams for a few machines that he hoped would produce free energy. And yes, I accept that by believing whatever I was taught in physics I had faith that it was true - by in large. I've been told before that most highschool physics is made up of approximations, that Newton's laws aren't as accurate as what we have now, etc. Anyway, I found a site that lists some attempts and their varying degrees of success. The reason I referred to some of these people as being a little scary is that they have a disturbing habit of conning people out of money to work the last bugs out of the system and then disappearing into the distance. Needless to say I didn't inlude you in this category.