Machines that produce energy instead of consuming it – the perpetuum mobile. The researcher who will one day create this device will hold the “master key to everything” in his hand

Even before the age of scarce resources, researchers were already working on the construction of such a device. Scholars and engineers from Leonardo Da Vinci to Nicola Tesla brooded over the perpetual motion machine. This vision has occupied researchers for centuries.

Everything possible has already been tried. Even today – the German Patent Office is bombarded again and again with new designs. Drawing energy from nothing – an incredible utopia!

Four hundred years before the discovery of the laws of energy, Da Vinci declared perpetual motion machines to be “chimeras”, an illusion. He turned his back on research, leaving it behind for posterity – in the world of mysticism and utopia.

A machine – mythology, somewhere between reality and fantasy – earth and universe

The laws of thermodynamics state that nothing can produce more energy than it consumes. Either these physical laws are wrong or the construction of a perpetual motion machine is impossible. Here it becomes clear what the discovery of a perpetual motion machine meant: Our physics would have to be rewritten!

In the age of dwindling oil wells, we urgently need a perpetual motion machine

Such a machine would solve quite a lot of our problems in one go. And especially future problems. The population of the earth is growing.

Very few earthlings want to return to one of the other epochs of human life with low energy requirements.

That is why futurology is being conducted and urban development is being addressed. Our great cities of tomorrow have an immense energy demand that grows with them.

Will someone please hand us the perpetual motion machine? – if it weren’t for thermodynamics

Utopias – here the overcoming of thermodynamics – magically attract scientists. What if they did? They ask, like nosy kids.

Obsessed with being able to overcome the laws, they continue their research. They try to extract energy from nothing, from the vacuum, just like Da Vinci and Nicola Tesla once did.

Disciples from all over the world regularly refer to Nikola Tesla

1930 Tesla allegedly presented a car with a perpetual motion machine. There are no reliable sources for this. In the writings and patents of Tesla there is no description of such a generator. But the notes on his experiments suggest that he was researching a perpetual motion machine. At a congress in 1881, he spoke to US electrical engineers about how people would one day “tune the actual clockwork of the universe itself”.

This was followed by further experiments by researchers, such as Joseph Newman from Lucedeale in Mississippi in the 1980s, whose magnetic machine was declared a flop by the National Bureau of Standards.

Revival of the zero point energy – exploration of “dark energy

Satellites that transmit to the earth today suggest that a total of three-quarters of our universe consists of “dark energy”.

So far physicists have not been able to explain or calculate this dark energy. But at least they have proven their existence in experiments. Two teams of astronomers discovered “accelerated expansion“, which is the accelerating expansion of the universe, during an observation in 1998.

Where does the power that can cause this come from? This force is called “dark energy”. It is the link between world and cosmos, between the world and mythology. It is the energy that a perpetual motion machine could make real. The term “dark energy” was introduced by Michael S. Turner.

Bad news – we are far from being able to harness this energy

On earth this energy does not exist so to speak. For the time being, it is nothing more than a much discussed subject in cosmology.

A perpetuum mobile would be a revolution. And in such a way that we would have to rewrite all our physical laws.

If we were to bring this energy to earth, it would turn our universe and our world upside down.

Nothing would be the same. We held the master key to everything. That – at least – is safe.