Conversation with Jeffrey Werbock 2019-08-12

Jeffrey Werbock: There is already a real perpetual motion system, our universe. It is being studied by cosmologists and physicists.

Nathan Coppedge:

But that is not true in the same sense that a normal human being would mean it. The universe, semantically, is a perpetual motion machine, but so what? That says nothing inherently about how the properties of energy are expressed. And, if it says nothing inherently about how the properties of energy are expressed, eventually someone will use semantic slight again and determine that some of the energy is gone. I find too often that scientifically-minded people will ignore eventualities simply by claiming ignorance of any way of extending information. Scientists say the universe is expanding, that dark matter or antimatter or something destroys matter, that the Higgs boson is an extremely rare particle, that most of the universe consists of largely empty space that is extremely cold, that suns gradually burn out and humans are the result of an absurdly rare evolutionary process under rather lucky conditions, etc etc — eventually someone will conclude the universe is dying unless we have some logical symbol like perpetual motion to represent the immortality of the universe. Saying the universe is perpetual simply because heat dissipates is not a very strong argument. I would take a more desperate position before I would conclude that I need to invent perpetual motion: I would conclude first that there is an absurdly rare window in which anything exists at all, universe or not. But a scientist can never see that I am being more conservative to do rare things with rare things, rather than die of an unformed opinion. I am tired of scientifically-minded people making the lazy-man move to reject new evidence based on the foundation that they have already rejected the context of deliberation. Perhaps when you say that the universe is a dying perpetual motion machine you should try being a little more intellectually rigorous, and maybe you will get very different results. I’m not saying you need to believe in God (I’m not sure I do), but at least for godsakes you could believe in winning the lottery, and what that means for everything that doesn’t. It sounds to me like from the science point of view entropy is about like drinking coffee, but I think in physical terms that is absolutely inaccurate. And I find a bit further along in the analysis perpetual motion is going with the evidence, not on the basis that it is winning the lottery, but on the basis that physics won the lottery.

Nathan Coppedge's correspondence