[HN Gopher] Optical-Cavity-Induced Current
___________________________________________________________________
Optical-Cavity-Induced Current
Author : graderjs
Score : 64 points
Date : 2021-09-10 06:05 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mdpi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mdpi.com)
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Cool! Free electricity!
| mrfusion wrote:
| Any thoughts on where the energy comes from?
| _Microft wrote:
| Reference [24] seems to be important.
|
| _" The source of these optical modes could be the quantum vacuum
| field, which gives rise to the Casimir force [18,19,20,21], the
| Lamb shift [22], and other physical effects [23]. It was argued
| that the use of energy from the vacuum field does not violate
| fundamental laws of thermodynamics [24]."_
|
| Despite the importance of the question of ,,where the heck does
| the energy for that come from", they give it surprisingly little
| space in the paper.
|
| [24]
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Extracting+E...
| nine_k wrote:
| If it's just incoming photons, a photovoltaic element that does
| not need doped monocrystalline silicon might be a valuable
| find.
| plutonorm wrote:
| Maybe this is dark matter. All those civilisations out there
| plugged directly into the background juice of the universe make
| it more 'grabby', slowing the rotation of galaxies. I always
| put my mad ideas out onto the internet because if they prove to
| be true then I have bragging rights.
|
| I'm still reading through ref 24 - that's the one that
| immediately grabbed my attention. Anyone know if the authors
| have some authority in the subject?
| oofabz wrote:
| What is the practical application of this? Free energy?
| plutonorm wrote:
| yup.literally free energy.
| [deleted]
| tantony wrote:
| There's a video version:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tGRhTXKh8A
|
| I will remain skeptical until it is independently reproduced and
| verified and gets demonstrated at scale.
| varjag wrote:
| Yup. The presentation (and the paper) are very light on math,
| argue by analogies and dismissive about USPTO's rather
| reasonable policy to discard inventions contradicting 2nd law
| of thermodynamics. The author is undoubtedly a technical person
| but gives off the vibe of someone trying to casually wing it
| into quantum physics.
|
| Since am not a physicist myself I could well be proven wrong
| tho. In that case this reply gotta end up infamous!
| atlas_hugged wrote:
| I'm not a physicist but even I can tell this dude isn't either.
| My quack alarms were ringing within seconds of watching this
| video, but I watched the whole thing anyway to see if I was
| judging too harshly and he actually had discovered something
| notable. This guy spent more time attacking scientists, peer-
| review, and just generally the process of science itself than
| actually just showing some damn proof. You would think one
| would be showing video demonstrations of this unbelievable
| effect. He tempers his claims by saying that it scales with a
| larger area and it produces less power than a solar panel of
| equivalent size and I thought... ok, let's say I'm completely
| wrong and this guy just invented a "solar panel" type of device
| that can be used without visible light yet produces less
| energy... I suppose that could still be fairly useful depending
| on the application. Bravo, well done if that's the case. Go
| ahead and make one or 10 panels or whatever and set it up in an
| empty warehouse with a 24/7 video feed and show it continuously
| charging an electric car, or powering a tv, or hell even
| powering a light bulb. I'll retweet. I'll be a customer even if
| it's just for fun checking out this new dangled tech. No, he
| suddenly starts talking about how he could potentially create
| coin cell sized battery of infinite power among other far
| fetched sounding claims. Say what??? Maybe my quick math is off
| by several orders of magnitude but this threw off so many quack
| alarms that it's just way beyond belief. I hope and pray that
| I'm wrong and the rather modest initial claim is somehow
| correct even if it's for reasons he doesn't understand. Yes, it
| is ok to not understand why something works, as long as it gets
| you results. Who cares what anyone thinks? Start a tiny energy
| company out of pocket with however many panels you can make.
| Sell electricity and profit from it. Go nuts. Get rich.
| Eventually people will realize whether they like it or not that
| you have something worth looking at. Look, I totally get that
| most scientific discoveries start off with a statement of:
| "huh, that's weird"... but that doesn't mean you get to declare
| that the whole world is against you. "They" are not just
| jealous. "They" are not just afraid of violating current
| understandings of science. Scientists incorporate new
| understandings fairly regularly. Sure a couple people might be
| jealous they didn't figure something out first, but that
| doesn't mean every scientist on earth is out to get you. Holy
| hell this turned into a rambling rant. I apologize. It was just
| a stream of thought that I don't care to edit at this point.
| I'm sorry this came across so rude. Make me a customer sir.
| I'll joyfully put a sock in it if you succeed.
| nynx wrote:
| The description seems reasonable, but given how many times
| "zero-point energy" has been shown not to be harvestable, it's
| unlikely that this is the time it worked.
| tantony wrote:
| This may turn out to be another EMDrive. But the implications
| of this claim being true are too great to ignore and warrants
| further investigation.
|
| I wonder what it would take in terms of expense/equipment to
| do an independent verification.
| rbanffy wrote:
| It's a bit like the FTL neutrinos. We knew it couldn't be,
| but the data showed otherwise, so they got to check
| everything down to the cable connections.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| The EMDrive is a better example, I think. The OPERA
| people knew from the start that they likely had an
| "uncontrolled systematic" and their measurement was
| likely to be wrong, so very few people got excited. The
| EMDrive got a lot of people excited over a minor error in
| a very difficult measurement. In both cases the general
| "science" public picked up on it, inappropriately, but in
| only one of the two cases were the flames fanned by the
| research team. (Compare also the Pioneer anomaly [0].)
|
| I do suspect this is just another EMDrive. Interacting
| with the vacuum to shift energy around is well-known
| (again, see Hawking radiation [1]), but holding on to it
| overall for long enough to violate the uncertainty
| principle (the one for the E-t commutator) doesn't work.
| And I don't think you can hold it just long enough to
| reverse entropy... though that doesn't sound prima facie
| impossible. Making a measurement incorrectly, though... I
| do that every day I'm in the lab.
|
| Addition: Also, the MDPI journals are kinda-sorta just
| one step up from trash-tier, at least in my mind, so I
| don't pay much attention to work that can only manage to
| get in to one of them.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
| ...at least I think it's in there somewhere. Otherwise
| grab Griffiths!
| tantony wrote:
| They also got published in an APS journal - "Physical
| Review Research"
|
| https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/abstract/10.1103/Phys
| Rev...
|
| However, I do not know how reputable that particular
| journal is.
| tinco wrote:
| Do I understand correctly that this is an effect that had not
| been predicted by any theory? And they assume it could be caused
| by some quantum effect but they have not worked out a full theory
| on it, I presume because that's simply not their ballgame.
| plutonorm wrote:
| It seems to have been predicted by the lead author, who has
| then got a third party to manufacture and verify the device's
| function. I believe the function of the device is predicted
| from theories surrounding the Casimir effect.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-11 23:00 UTC)