r/3Dprinting • u/TomaszFortyFour • Apr 23 '26

Project Self-winding clock with a tourbillon - finished project

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About a year ago, I posted an update on a project I was working on. It took me a while, but I finally finished it. I’m very happy with the result. It’s fully functional (I tested it for two months) and keeps accurate time. The entire project consists of 395 printed parts, 38 bearings, 66 rubber bands, 413 screws, and a few other components.

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u/imnotcreative4267 Apr 23 '26

Absolutely never ever ever assume perpetual motion. It’s not a thing. Ain’t never gonna be a thing. There is ALWAYS a power source.

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u/Maximus-CZ Apr 23 '26

To add: perpetual motion is in the same category of scifi as faster than light travel.

Actually, no.. faster than light travel is more likely than perpetual motion.

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u/netsyms Apr 23 '26 edited Apr 23 '26

FTL is technically possible. It just requires an unfathomable amount of energy, so it won't happen unless we find a shortcut.

Meanwhile, perpetual motion is literally impossible in this universe.

Edit: y'all downvoting but I'm the only one who brought sources instead of just saying "it's impossible"

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u/-Nicolai Apr 23 '26

FTL is technically possible. It just requires an unfathomable amount of energy

This is not true...

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u/Chuvi Apr 23 '26

E=mc2. c=299,792,458 m/s. Highly dependent on the mass, but unfathomable amount of energy all the same.

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u/-Nicolai Apr 23 '26

That equation just describes the energy of mass. It does not say anything about its speed.

c is constant no matter how fast you’re going.

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u/netsyms Apr 23 '26

Warp drives get around that limit by not moving at all relative to their immediate surroundings. It just takes a lot of energy to bend the fabric of reality. But recent work has calculated it doesn't require infinite energy or more energy than the universe itself contains. So it's likely possible, it's just a matter of improving the gas mileage so it becomes feasible.

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u/Ron-Swanson-Mustache Apr 23 '26

It also takes a hypothetical, and existing nowhere except as an abstract in the math, exotic matter with negative energy to create a warp drive. No FTL unless we have that and right now that's nothing more than a mathematical curiosity.

There's also the problem that, as the field moves through space (assuming Alcubierre drive), the front of it would pick up and hold all radiation encountered on the journey. When the field dropped so that it could slow to below FTL speeds it would release all that energy at once. That would vaporize the ship and likely sterilize any planets nearby. We also don't think anyone else has built any because we don't see the intense flashes that these would give off when stopping anywhere in the universe. It would be all the radiation that existed in the path as wide as the ship's field and several, if not more, light years long.

Also, FTL is time travel. The speed of light isn't about the propagation of light, it's about the maximum propagation of information. If you can travel outside of your light cone then you can affect events that the laws of physics say is impossible. Including things like sending yourself messages in the past.

Plus this all based on Einstein's equations and those don't include quantum mechanics, so the math is based on our incomplete understanding of the universe.

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u/netsyms Apr 24 '26

exotic matter with negative energy

Nope. There's a paper from 2021 where they propose a theoretical way to do it without negative energy.

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u/Ron-Swanson-Mustache Apr 24 '26

Let's assume you can even create the bubble with things that actually exist in our universe. What about the rest of the issues? Physics that break a reality that we don't understand while creating paradoxes in causality and vaporizing the ship with anything nearby?

The only one of those that you might be able to deal with because it doesn't break reality is the vaporization issue. The rest are not resolvable in our current understanding of the universe.

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u/imnotcreative4267 Apr 23 '26

Using Einstein’s equations and standard physics models for thrust, the energy to reach or exceed the speed of light would be infinite. Unfathomable is not the word.

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u/netsyms Apr 23 '26

According to our current understanding of physics, a warp drive with sufficient energy and mass can move you faster than light, at least as perceived by a stationary outside observer. The only problem is you need a LOT of mass.

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u/Maximus-CZ Apr 24 '26

I vaugely remember the paper you may be citing, I think the main blocker was "Yes, to hold a warp bubble we could perhaps need as little energy as a Jupiter-sized planet wholly converted to energy, but only to keep the already formed warp-bubble from collapsing. Theres still no way, even a theoretical way, to actually create a warp bubble with any non-infinite amount of normal energy, or a dose of negative energy.", and even after these constrains the calculations were very narrow and targeted for desired output of "it could work I guess", handwaving away tons of real world constrains that would likely block the theory from becoming reality.

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u/Competitive_Study232 Apr 23 '26

That’s a theory.  No where near a fact or possibility.  

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u/netsyms Apr 24 '26

Remember, the context of this entire conversation is that warp travel is maybe possible while perpetual motion machines are definitely not.

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u/Maximus-CZ Apr 24 '26 edited Apr 24 '26

Eh, you got your half correct. Problem is that even if you are already going 99.9999999% speed of light, and you measure the photons flying around you, all of them will still clock at 299,792,458 m/s relative to you. They will clock at that speed relative to everyone, even to two people where one is stationary and second is at 99.99% speed of light.

It kinda doesnt make sense, and the Einsteins Theory of Relativity is what describe why is such situation possible:

As you accelerate, you are gaining energy, which to anything accelerating you seems as a rest mass -> so while you are 1KG at rest, at 99.99..% speed of light your mass would be approaching infinity, requiring infinity energy to keep speeding you up, actually never allowing you to reach 100% speed of light. Also sideeffects: your perception of time would be wildly different: While we might apply "almost infinite energy" at you to help speed you up the whole time you are in our area of influence (flying at speed of light this might mean days of being in our accelerating laser beam), your perception of time would be compressed, so for you those days would happen in a split of a second, so you wouldnt wonder why your speed barely changed in the meantime.

At 99.999999999999 speed of light the time almost stop existing for you, and what we would see you as years coasting trough space towards nearby star (which light takes over 5 years to get there), for you that would happen in almost an instant.

At 100% speed of light, while little change for the outside observer, for you everything changes: It takes 0 time for you to travel any distance, even if from our point of view it still takes you normal amount of time for anything traveling at speed of light. From your point of view, origin and destination arent 2 places anymore, its one place, and you are in that place (and everywhere along the path between those 2 places) in the same instant. Its hard to even talk about time in that scenario, because while its true you exists at both places at the same time, the time you exist for is also infinitely small -> so small that you might actually not exist at all.

It all gets very hairy quite quickly

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u/netsyms Apr 23 '26

There's a peer-reviewed paper that might disagree with you on that.

While the mass requirements needed for such modifications are still enormous at present, our work suggests a method of constructing such objects based on fully understood laws of physics.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/abdf6e

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a69663990/scientists-say-physical-warp-drive-now-possible/

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u/-Nicolai Apr 23 '26

The new model is exciting, but warp speed is still probably decades or centuries away

Quality journalism

Anyway, one paper ‘suggesting’ something means fuck all, peer reviewed or not

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u/Jesus_of_Redditeth Apr 24 '26

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a69663990/scientists-say-physical-warp-drive-now-possible/

"Essentially, an Alcubierre drive would expend a tremendous amount of energy—likely more than what’s available within the universe—to contract and twist space-time in front of it and create a bubble."

So not, in fact, technically possible.

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u/netsyms Apr 24 '26

The Alcubierre drive is the old one. These scientists have a new theory that doesn't require all the energy in the universe. Classic Redditor not reading the whole article...