> Yes.  You should patent this.  Make sure to tell them right up front that
> you have invented a "perpetual motion machine".  That puts your patent
> into a special legal catagory that greatly expedites the process.

It is probably helpful to treat people who are bright eyed and bushy tailed
but uninformed as being worth educating and worthy of receiving a very small
part of your knowledge, rather than as targets for ridicule. Especially so
when they may not even be aware that they are being made fun of.

I "invented" a "perpetuum mobile" (involving a transformer to step up the
voltage to overcome losses) when I was 10 years old and my school teacher
was able to explain that it wouldn't work but couldn't tell me why. It was
at least helpful then to know that there were extra things that I needed to
know, rather than simply being encouraged to further my education by
learning the totally hard way that the idea was wholly impractical. Or being
encouraged to attempt to patent it.

FWIW, re perpetuum mobile and friends, there is no reason that energy cannot
be created or destroyed within the universe that we know. It's just that we
know that, using the mechanisms we know about it's impossible AND we are
highly confident that such effects are unlikely to be accessible by any
technique a novice is liable to stumble over. More importantly effects which
APPEAR to be PM but aren't, may lurk undetected waiting to be discovered.
Nuclear fission and fusion and the utilisation of zero point energy (eg
Casmir effect) were and are, respectively, in the same category at this
stage. Relativistic effects had the same standing in pre-Einsteinian times.
Similarly Quantum Mechanics, which nobody understands (or, according to the
Copenhagen interpretation, can understand).



            Russell McMahon

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