Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> gravity-powered light bulbs
> 
>   That sounds like a perpetual motion machine. Unlikely. :P

I guess it depends on what causes gravity. Maybe gravity isn't constant. 
I read one fictional story where the physicists discovered that gravity 
is caused by the spontaneous destruction of mass and created by the 
spontaneous creation of mass.  So places where there was lots of mass 
had more gravity, because it was more likely there would be a subatomic 
particle disappearing, and why the rest of the universe had a nice 
sparse sprinkling of random hydrogen atoms. :-)

Or maybe gravity-powered light bulbs would just be a more direct way 
than, say, tidal bore generators; a gravity-powered bulb might make the 
earth lighter or orbit slower or something.  Or maybe it would only work 
if the bulb was moving up or down. :-)

Gravity is pretty weak anyway. It takes the whole earth to hold you 
down, and just a little layer of electrons to hold you up.  I read if 
you took all the electrons off a 1cm cube of aluminum, and held them 1 
meter away, the force between the two would match the weight of a cube 
of iron 76 miles on a side. Vast difference in power, which is one of 
the reasons it's so hard to do quantum gravity experiments.

Plus, of course, maybe conservation of energy isn't true. That's the 
sort of thing a ToE has the chance to support or disprove. :-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     Remember the good old days, when we
     used to complain about cryptography
     being export-restricted?

Post a reply to this message