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Bad school projects
I don't now if there is already a thread like this, if so sorry.
So I talked with my brother today (he's 9. class, I guess 10. after your school system) and he told me something which underlines what I said a few weeks ago about copying everything for wikipedia.
So these to pupils were supposed to make a Project on "pumped storage hydro power station". Now look on wikipedia if you really want to know how it works. But basically it lets water down through pipes to a second lake at the bottom in the day. At night it pumps the water back up again. So they were having there copied text as a PowerPoint presentation and were talking and talking. You could see that they copied it all because they couldn't' say some words correctly.... And now comes the real part: they said more or less quote: "they build these because it takes less energy to pump it up than you get from letting it down". Now that is stupid, but it gets better.
In their last physics class they were saying that you cannot make energy and only transform it. The teacher even said it was impossible (as far as physics go) that you could produce energy. My brother now raises his hand as and says that that's impossible. They say: "not in this case". Ouch! He answers: "as far as I know there is only one case of physics" and shuts up. Even the teacher (who is pretty lazy) says that then everyone would build these magic machines everywhere. They say: "you would need to many mountains for that". Then they show a diagram of the energy used to pump it up and the energy gotten from letting the water down. You can clearly see it uses more energy that it produces. They use this as proof that it makes energy. Now even the teacher says that it cannot make energy and they persist on saying it makes energy.
Leaving class, still believing it make energy, my brother asked them what they got. A "B+" ! That's whats wrong with school;)
So I talked with my brother today (he's 9. class, I guess 10. after your school system) and he told me something which underlines what I said a few weeks ago about copying everything for wikipedia.
So these to pupils were supposed to make a Project on "pumped storage hydro power station". Now look on wikipedia if you really want to know how it works. But basically it lets water down through pipes to a second lake at the bottom in the day. At night it pumps the water back up again. So they were having there copied text as a PowerPoint presentation and were talking and talking. You could see that they copied it all because they couldn't' say some words correctly.... And now comes the real part: they said more or less quote: "they build these because it takes less energy to pump it up than you get from letting it down". Now that is stupid, but it gets better.
In their last physics class they were saying that you cannot make energy and only transform it. The teacher even said it was impossible (as far as physics go) that you could produce energy. My brother now raises his hand as and says that that's impossible. They say: "not in this case". Ouch! He answers: "as far as I know there is only one case of physics" and shuts up. Even the teacher (who is pretty lazy) says that then everyone would build these magic machines everywhere. They say: "you would need to many mountains for that". Then they show a diagram of the energy used to pump it up and the energy gotten from letting the water down. You can clearly see it uses more energy that it produces. They use this as proof that it makes energy. Now even the teacher says that it cannot make energy and they persist on saying it makes energy.
Leaving class, still believing it make energy, my brother asked them what they got. A "B+" ! That's whats wrong with school;)
Comments
The core problem with the PMM is that by applying any sort of load to the machine you would add resistance. So, even if you had your machine in a zero gravity area with no friction, not even air resistance, once you tried to tap into the machine to pull energy out of it you would be applying a load.
I'm surprised no one turned in the "lamp powered by a solar panel" project where you use the solar panel to collect the light given off by the lamp to power itself. Given that solar panels are only now approaching a 40% efficiency rating we can all see how this would not work.
Ohm's Law is the law. The only way to create an "infinite energy machine" would be to find a material that had a negative resistance rating. AFAIK no such thing exists.
(Appologies to Mr. Period for the bad run-on sentences.)
The next day, selected people had to read their papers out loud. While one student was reading his, he stumbled over a sentence... and was promptly corrected by another student. Later in his reading, a different student corrected him. Over the course of the exercise, I determined that probably 80% of the class had copied the exact same encyclopedia article verbatim as their "paper."
The nun teaching the class was denser than dolomite, and didn't catch on even after more than one kid read the exact same paper.