Jean Taisner (or Taisnier) (

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

: ''Johannes Taisnerius''; 1508,

Ath Ath (; nl, Aat, ; pcd, Ât; wa, Ate) is a city and municipality of Wallonia located in the province of Hainaut, Belgium. The municipality consists of the following districts: Arbre, Ath, Bouvignies, Ghislenghien, Gibecq, Houtaing, Irc ...

Habsburg Netherlands Habsburg Netherlands was the Renaissance period fiefs in the Low Countries held by the Holy Roman Empire's House of Habsburg. The rule began in 1482, when the last House of Valois-Burgundy, Valois-Burgundy ruler of the Netherlands, Mary of Burgu ...

– 1562,

Cologne Cologne ( ; german: Köln ; ksh, Kölle ) is the largest city of the German western States of Germany, state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and the List of cities in Germany by population, fourth-most populous city of Germany with 1.1 m ...

) was a musician, astrologer, and self-styled mathematician who published a number of works. A publication of his entitled ''Opusculum perpetua memoria dignissimum, de natura magnetis et ejus effectibus, Item de motu continuo'' is considered a piece of

plagiarism Plagiarism is the fraudulent representation of another person's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as one's own original work.From the 1995 '' Random House Compact Unabridged Dictionary'': use or close imitation of the language and thought ...

, as Taisner presents, as though his own, the ''Epistola de magnete'' of

Peter of Maricourt Petrus Peregrinus de Maricourt (Latin), Pierre Pelerin de Maricourt (French), or Peter Peregrinus of Maricourt ( fl. 1269), was a French mathematician, physicist, and writer who conducted experiments on magnetism and wrote the first extant treati ...

and a treatise on the fall of bodies by

Gianbattista Benedetti Giambattista (Gianbattista) Benedetti (August 14, 1530 – January 20, 1590 in) was an Italian mathematician from Venice who was also interested in physics, mechanics, the construction of sundials, and the science of music. Science of motio ...

. The work describes a magnetic-based

perpetual motion machine Perpetual motion is the motion of bodies that continues forever in an unperturbed system. A perpetual motion machine is a hypothetical machine that can do work infinitely without an external energy source. This kind of machine is impossible, a ...

consisting of a ramp, a magnet stone and an iron ball. Peter of Maricourt had earlier noted such a system which made use of the strength of the magnet stone. This runs into trouble because the path integral of force on a closed loop in a magnetic field is zero (see

History of perpetual motion machines The history of perpetual motion machines dates at least back to the Middle Ages. For millennia, it was not clear whether perpetual motion devices were possible or not, but modern theories of thermodynamics have shown that they are impossible. D ...

Sources

Catholic Encyclopedia: Pierre de Maricourt
Roman Catholic priests of the Habsburg Netherlands 16th-century Latin-language writers People involved in plagiarism controversies {{RC-clergy-stub