Low Hanging Fruit: Ed A’s Perpetual Motion 3: Final Conclusion
And last, but not least, here is the final experiment in this program. The “rotation effect” is shown to occur with just a non-magnet weight hanging from a thread.
I want to thank all commenters for their discussion and suggestions in the examination of this truly “low hanging fruit” claim of Perpetual Motion.
Performing the correct kinds of Control Experiments is absolutely critical for proper conclusions to be drawn from experimentation. Only by _ruling out_ all possible other causes for one’s demonstrated effect, may one genuinely claim “proof” of an hypothesis in an experiment of this kind.
This falsifies the claim that the effect is due to the interaction between the Earth’s magnetic field and the rotation of the Earth affecting the dangling magnet.
Furthermore, another control experiment, suggested by several viewers and forum posters, is performed using a magnetic pivot point bearing and a non-twisted suspension fiber. This one didn’t work out as well as we thought it might; it turns out that the magnetic pivot point actually has more friction than the good ballbearing that I used in the previous video.
However, that notwithstanding, no tendency to rotate was detected with the non-twisted Stren 10lb test monofilament fishing line in this experiment or the previous one with the better bearing system.
So I conclude that the claims of Ed A that this system represents: A) a perpetual motion device; and B) an interaction with the Earth’s rotation and/or magnetic field; are both proven to be wrong. The system behaves as an ordinary torsion pendulum when suspended by a non-twisted fiber and no tendency to rotate in one direction was observed unless suspended by a sewing thread.
(The magnet does tend to orient to N-S because of the Earth’s field but there is no tendency to rotate. The rotation comes from the twist in the thread and the weight of the suspended object.)