Jean Taisner (or Taisnier) (

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, 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 ...

: ''Johannes Taisnerius''; 1508, Ath,

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 Valois-Burgundy ruler of the Netherlands, Mary, wife of Maximilian I of Austr ...

– 1562,

Cologne Cologne ( ; german: Köln ; ksh, Kölle ) is the largest city of the German western state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and the fourth-most populous city of Germany with 1.1 million inhabitants in the city proper and 3.6 millio ...

) 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 though ...

, 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 treatise ...

and a treatise on the fall of bodies by Gianbattista Benedetti. The work describes a magnetic-based perpetual motion machine 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. ...

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