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KNOW MORE · DOOR #1: THE EVIDENCE · 10 August 2026

I love the story of the perpetuum mobile. The perpetual motion machine. It is the ultimate ghost story for engineers and the graveyard for every inventor who refused to accept the limits of the material world.

I wrote about this obsession in my first book, Climate Crisis Unmasked. In that book, I was a strict, unapologetic Cartesian. I laid out the brutal, unyielding mathematics of the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics. Energy cannot be created. Entropy always wins. The perpetuum mobile is a dead end. The universe is a closed system, and we are merely burning through its finite battery. Case closed.

Or so I thought.

A few months ago, I traveled back to my ancestral roots. I was not there as a technologist or an investor. I was there conducting a site study for my upcoming novel, The Salt Covenant. I spent time with the elders, listening to the oral histories that have survived centuries of colonization, displacement, and deliberate erasure.

Among the stories of kings and migrations, I heard a very specific, recurring myth about my forebears. They spoke of a time when their greatest builders and pilots did not just construct machines of wood and iron. They spoke of engines built to operate in another dimension, drawing power from that unseen realm, and returning to ours, fully fueled, to move mountains and cross oceans.

The Cartesian technologist in me, the man who has spent thirty years in server rooms, boardrooms, and venture funds, wanted to smile politely, categorize it as beautiful mythology, and move on.

But the futurist in me paused. And the man who carries the blood of those builders could not let it go.

I decided to revisit my rigid Cartesian view. I decided to ask a dangerous question: What if the perpetuum mobile is not a violation of physics, but simply a misunderstanding of the boundaries of the system?

The reason modern science declares the perpetuum mobile impossible rests on a single foundational assumption: we assume we are operating in a closed system.

In a closed system, energy cannot enter or leave. A machine will therefore wind down through friction and heat loss, entropy. Build a wheel that powers itself forever inside a sealed box and you will fail. The mathematics forbids it.

But what if the universe is not a closed box?

What if the “other dimension” my ancestors spoke of is not a spiritual metaphor, but a literal description of an open thermodynamic system?

Modern physics already gestures at this. We now know that some ninety-five percent of the universe is dark matter and dark energy, substances we cannot see, touch, or currently measure, yet whose gravitational fingerprints shape the cosmos. We know that quantum field theory describes the “vacuum” of space not as emptiness but as a medium boiling with zero-point energy and virtual particles.

My ancestors had none of the mathematics of quantum mechanics. They had something else: millennia of observation, intuition, and a worldview that never artificially divorced the seen from the unseen.

When they spoke of an engine drawing power from another dimension, they were describing an open system, a technology that taps an ambient, unseen reservoir (what we might now call the quantum vacuum, the zero-point field, or a higher-dimensional manifold) and converts it into usable work in our three dimensions.

Is that a perpetuum mobile? No. It is an ambient energy harvester. It does not create energy; it draws it from a reservoir we have simply been too blind to measure.

This returns us to the original question: is the perpetuum mobile a dead end, or are there people out there breaking the physics?

If “breaking the physics” means violating the conservation of energy in a closed system, the answer is no. The universe does not negotiate with hubris.

But if it means shattering the Cartesian illusion that we have already mapped every energy source available to us, then yes. They are out there. And they are not building wooden wheels with magnets. They are working at the bleeding edge of human knowledge:

The Quantum Vacuum Engineers. Researchers probing how to extract usable work from zero-point fluctuations. They are not breaking thermodynamics; they are enlarging the definition of the “system” to include the quantum vacuum.

The Metamaterial Scientists. Physicists engineering materials that bend light, heat, and sound in ways classical intuition forbids, in effect manufacturing localized “open systems” where energy flows in directions classical physics calls impossible.

The Biological Harmonizers. Bio-engineers studying how organisms like the extremophiles of deep-sea vents harvest energy from thermal gradients and chemical disequilibria at near-perfect efficiency, nature’s own mastery of the open system.

These scientists are doing exactly what my ancestors did. They are looking past the visible horizon. They refuse to accept that the material world is all there is. They are building engines that draw from the unseen.

Why should this matter to a board, an investor, a CEO?

Because Cartesian reductionism, the belief that you understand a system by breaking it into its smallest visible parts, gave us the industrial revolution, and it also gave us the climate crisis. It taught us to treat the Earth as a closed extraction zone. It taught us to ignore the unseen externalities, carbon in the atmosphere, microplastics in the ocean, social decay in the supply chain, until they collapsed the system.

The future does not belong to the reductionists. It belongs to the system thinkers, to those who understand three things:

The map is not the territory. That our current instruments cannot measure an energy source, or a market dynamic, or a social shift, does not mean it is not there.

Look for the open systems. Stop optimizing closed systems to the point of collapse. Start hunting the ambient, unseen inflows, renewable ambient energy, untapped human capital, invisible network effects.

Respect the ancestral intuition. Sometimes the oldest myths are the earliest datasets, encoded in story because the mathematics had not yet been invented.

I came back from that site study for The Salt Covenant with a single, stubborn realization.

The perpetuum mobile is a dead end only if you insist on building it inside a closed box. Open the box, be brave enough to admit the universe is vastly larger, deeper, and more interconnected than our present physics can measure, and the frontier is wide open.

My forebears knew this. They built their engines in the unseen dimensions and brought the power back to ours.

It is time we stopped mocking the myth and started building the instruments to measure it.

— Jude

This is “Know More” | Door #1: The Evidence — a weekly letter on power, technology, and the human future. If this resonated, subscribe below, and forward it to one leader who needs to see it.

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The Perpetuum Mobile and the Other Dimension

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