alt.energy.renewable

Quadibloc wrote:
>
>Guy Macon wrote:
>
>> Bret Cahill wrote:
>
>> >The Foucault pendulum would do the same thing.
>>
>> No it wouldn't. A Foucault pendulum does not extract any
>> energy from the earth's rotation. To understand why,
>> imagine one at one of the poles. Now imagine stopping
>> the earth's rotation. From a reference frame "fixed in
>> space" (a point where the starfield no longer appears
>> to rotate is close enough), the motion of the Foucault
>> pendulum does not change at all, and thus is unaffected
>> by the earth's rotation, neither gaining energy from it
>> or losing energy to it.
>
>But the Foucault pendulum might be something we could stand on to
>extract energy not from the pendulum, but from that rotating Earth.
>Then again, it might not - one would need at least a good gyroscope,
>and remember that it will try to go in a perpendicular direction...

As I understand the physics, Zero energy can be extracted from the
rotating Earth by standing on a Foucault pendulum. Consider a
pendulum suspended above the north pole with a swing that is
aligned to the star field. Now stop the earth from rotating.
Does doing that change the swing on the pendulum? Now re-start
the earth and start extracting energy from the once-per-24-hours
apparent motion. Soon you will run out of the kinetic energy
contained in the inertial mass of the pendulum and it will have
a swing aligned with the earth. Replace the pendulum with a
gyroscope and the same argument applies. You can only get back
the energy you used to start the pendulum swinging or the gyroscope
spinning.

--
Guy Macon