Back to Show
PBS Space Time
The Impossibility of Perpetual Motion Machines
Season 5
Episode 13
Bad ideas come and go in physics. But there’s one bit of nonsense that is perhaps more persistent than all others: the perpetual motion machine. No working perpetual motion machine has ever been experiment verified. All break the laws of thermodynamics.
Support Provided By
17:25
So you’ve decided to jump into a black hole...
12:51
We only recently figured out where cosmic rays are coming from.
13:28
Black hole complementarity may force us to rethink what it means to say that it exists.
20:15
To travel the stars without faster than light travel we’re going to need a generation ship.
15:36
The Moon: humanity’s first destination beyond our atmosphere.
14:28
Is our 3-D universe is just the inward projection of an infinitely distant boundary?
14:12
What if aliens are deliberately keeping quiet for fear that they might be destroyed?
14:44
The terrible singularity at the heart of the black hole may be no more.