A bit of Science.

[Erranty]

I'm thinking through something, and I needed to ask about something I don't know.

Can an electric generator (like one to power a bicycle light) produce energy from being spun while in a frictionless environment?

I ask this because IF it can, then its possible not only to get perpetual motion, but exponentially increasing motion and energy.

Since there would be no resistance, you could attach an electric motor to it via chain and if the amount of energy produced by one spin gives you even the littlest bit of extra energy after powering the motor for another spin, you can actually produce an everlasting energy source that requires little to no maintenance, and the rig would need no lubricant since there's no friction.

This is all dependent on the generator working in a frictionless environment though.

[AuraTwilight]

HAHAHA wow, no, not at all.

Avoiding this thing about frictionless environments, every process will always output less energy than you input. A portion of that energy is always lost to entropy, and so perpetual motion is literally physically impossible.

[marthwmaster]

Entropy is such a downer.

[Erranty]

What if you have a smaller gear on the generator than the motor?

[N3IWVC]

changing gear sizes won't help.
think about a ten speed bike. on the lowest settings the pedals are easy to turn but you don't go very fast. when you are on higher gears you can move much faster but it becomes much harder to turn the pedals.

[S1lentOp]

The friction is what produces the energy. Your generator is equivalent to a car with no engine. You've essentially described a machine that's stripped of the one key mechanism that makes it function. I have no idea what this electric motor is going to run on because there's not going to be any electricity being put through it.

[Erranty]

The friction is what produces the energy. Your generator is equivalent to a car with no engine. You've essentially described a machine that's stripped of the one key mechanism that makes it function. I have no idea what this electric motor is going to run on because there's not going to be any electricity being put through it.

I was having the generator power the motor that's turning the generator.

[S1lentOp]

And you're going to power either of them how, again? Deciding to make this machine a catch-22 doesn't really solve the problem of your not having any mechanism to create a source of power.

[Erranty]

And you're going to power either of them how, again? Deciding to make this machine a catch-22 doesn't really solve the problem of your not having any mechanism to create a source of power.

Just the initial first charge to get it started. I'd need a way to use the power anyway, so two nodes on the outside of it would be Alternating Current style of course, allowing you to give it the initial charge, then take the surplus from it once it builds up.

[Kuukai]

Where does this surplus come from? Even assuming a perfect environment with no friction and where no energy escapes to outside the system (this is all totally impossible btw--if you really want fame for solving an impossible problem, just skip the middleman and invent the perfect environment, that's the hard part), you need to consider how the generator and motor actually work.

In both cases, I believe it involves using electromagnetism to induce either motion or a current. You have a spinning rod with a magnet at the end. The generator uses the energy of the spinning magnet to induce current. This of course affects motion of the rod, slowing it down. I mean, when you put two magnets next to each other, does one ignore the other? No, they both move. So you speed it up on the other end, generating a magnetic field in the motor using the energy you just got from slowing it down. This speeds it back up to exactly where it was, so you can slow it down again. There's no energy gained, it's a zero sum process, with the exception that that neither of these processes are going to be direct transfers of energy, I believe. I'm not very good at physics, but I'm pretty sure at both ends you're going to be sending out electromagnetic magic stuff in directions it doesn't need to go for your machine to work, and this will result in a loss of energy...

[Erranty]

Hmm. Well, alright then. It was just a theory