Woodworker Matthias Wandel built an impressive slinky escalator machine that helps keep the toy in motion for extended periods of time. Matthias Wandel/YouTube For decades, the question of how to keep ...

Perpetual motion devices are either a gag, a scam, or as in the case of this particular toy that [Big Clive] bought on AliExpress, a rather fascinating demonstration of a contact-free inductive sensor ...

On November 12th, 1717, clockmaker and mechanic Johann Bessler placed a 12-foot diameter, strange-looking wheel into a room. With a tender push, he started the contraption rotating, then confidently ...

Perhaps the most persistent nonsense in physics: the perpetual motion machine. Bad ideas come and go in physics. But there’s one bit of nonsense that is perhaps more persistent than all others: the ...

Nothing lasts forever. This is good life advice, and it also happens to be an important feature of our physical universe. Natural philosophers considered and discarded the idea of ‘perpetual motion’ a ...