The Holy Grail Of Perpetual Motion?

Here come the 'free energy' fanatics!

Magnetic monopoles.

Considered by many ‘free energy’ enthusiasts to be the holy grail of perpetual motion engines. But what the hell are magnetic monopoles? Do they actually exist? And are they really all that great?

WTF is a magnetic monopole

To start, let’s go a bit deeper into what exactly a magnetic monopole is.

In particle physics, a magnetic monopole is a particle that is an isolated magnet with only ONE magnetic pole. So instead of a magnet having the usual north and south, it would only have a north for example. This would mean a magnetic monopole has a kindof "magnetic charge", similar to electric charge particles like electrons have.

“Sounds pretty cool but what’s the big whoop Chris? So what if a magnet has one pole or two?”

Why they’re a big deal

Here’s where it gets interesting. You see, people have made charge motors for a longgg time. Usually these work by charging up two metal objects using a van de graaff generator, and then transferring electric charge to an object that can spin. Check this diagram out for reference:

You can see that positive charge is transferred to the spinning object, which then causes it to be repelled from the positive terminal. That positive charge is then attracted to the negative terminal where the charge dissipates, but then the spinning object becomes negatively charged, and the cycle continues.

Here’s a very cheap one someone made on youtube with ping pong balls:

Anyway to cut a long explanation short, with individual charges on two sides of an object, you can create movement. But electrostatic charge isn’t practical to run a motor, for the simple fact that it requires the charge to be generated in the first place.

So many free energy theorists have set out to create magnetic versions of these motors. Magnetic attraction and repulsion using magnetic forces that don’t require ‘charging up’. It sure is enticing.

But there’s a big problem with every magnetic motor design. See if you can spot it in the video below:

The answer?

They always come to a stop.

Always.

No matter what anyone tries to claim, it’s not possible to create a motor with magnets that have north and south poles. Because the spinning magnets have both a north and a south pole, the attraction and repulsion forces from the other magnets placed around the spinner will always cancel each other out. Until the spinning part reaches equilibrium and stops moving!

Damn.

Ok now where do magnetic monopoles come in?

Well in theory, if we had say, just south pole magnets on the outside and just north pole magnets on the spinner, they would repel each other… forever!

That’s the popular theory anyway.

And it’s all very exciting. But could magnetic monopoles actually exist?

Many scientists say no. And while we can find electric monopoles in the form of charged particles, we have never observed magnetic monopoles.

But that’s a bit of a mystery. Because there’s nothing to really say they couldn’t exist.

But all hope is not lost.

Because there might actually be work-arounds.

For example, one physicist pioneered the idea that you could potentially create a regular magnet that acted as a monopole. All you’d need is for the poles to be far apart… VERY far apart in fact.

With an infinitely long bar magnet, the north and south pole could be so far apart that the magnetic force at one of the poles would look like this:

And this…

(Left instead of right):

And who knows, for our applications of a motor, do we even need a perfect monopole? Perhaps we could just create very long bar magnets so the alternate poles are far enough away from the mechanism that they don’t interfere.

Drawing this out gets a bit complicated, but it could theoretically look something like this:

Sheesh that looks even worse than I imagined.

Hopefully you get the picture. In short, we’re extending the classic magnetic motor, to cater for the opposing poles that are very far away from the rotating system.

So to summarise…

Magnetic monopoles, do they exist?

As far as we can tell, no. But it’s quite possible we can get pretty close to making an artificial one.

If the long bar magnet theory doesn’t float your boat, just check out this video where scientists were able to replicate magnetic monopoles using special magnet configurations:

Now that’s cool. It feels like we’re teetering on the edge of a big discovery to me.