Well i had seen a toy, which i till date don't know was it battery powered or not? and also could it be used to actually create energy (I know that it is not possible but whats the problem?)
Structure of a toy: Imagine a toy man having magnets at his feet, he is fixed to an axle and can just perform a motion in forward or backward direction, and also note that at the base of the man's feet (attached to that axle) is another magnet with same pole as that of the magnet of feet.
What was happening: What was happening was that the man was continuously performing the motion and not stopping at all.
The thing is that i saw it from a distance and so i could not know that wheter or not it used battery
Questions
Will it stop? Will it generate electricity forever if i put an turbine to at the axle
1. On Earth
2. In outer space
3. Under gravity + No Friction
Well i know the simple answers in of most of them in form of yes/no but Why?
Front View:
Best Answer
With a generator of some sort extracting energy from the system, the system will stop in all three cases. By the principle of conservation of energy, you know that the total energy neither increases or decreases through any process. If the generator extracts energy from the system, the man will slow down and eventually stop. Intuitively, this is because of resistance in the generator. Even in an ideal world without friction, turning a magnet within a coil of wire (in order to generate an EMF in the coil) requires a constant force due to the retarding electromagnetic forces on the generator. (Consider science museum demonstrations in which you turn a wheel to light a light bulb. The wheel can be really tough to turn, and that's primarily because of electromagnetic force, not just friction.)
Without a turbine, the question is marginally more interesting. In any environment with friction, the man will stop - again, since friction extracts energy from the system, it must slow down and eventually come to a halt. Only in the last case - the frictionless environment without a turbine - will the man perpetually remain in motion. Of course, this is a physically implausible situation, since any mechanical system will have at least some amount of friction.