So, I am not a physicist. I really tried to read up on this, Casimir Cavities and all that. I can try to understand it on the surface, but I can not even try to understand the math behind that and the quantum physical details.
In any case this seems to good to be true. As the author said, it is being compared to Black Lights claims, but with a different (more plausible?) physical explanation for the effect.
What makes this rather implausible to me, is the fact that noone has built an experimental reactor for this yet. I mean 10 um is comparably easy these days where Intel CPUs are in the 40nm area and will go 33nm soon.
So, anyone here who is good at physics and math care to give me some idea on the plausibility of this? I look at the calculations related to Casimir Forces on various pages that I googled and I get a brainfart with subsequent brain diarrhea...
Thank you
Last edited by Skipjack on Wed Feb 04, 2009 2:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.
There is some credence to what they are trying to do. Calphysics Institute under Bernard Haisch proposed several different methods to potentially produce power from vacuum fluctuations.
Yeah, I read up on some of the background and there are at least some university professors and institutes, somehow involved and some of it seems to be based on rather well accepted quantum physics theories.
However, the details are so far beyond the scope of my understanding that it could be snake oil in a quantum package and I would not know.
If you allow the metaphor.
Thats why I am asking the people here that have a better understanding of physics than I do, e.g. Art Carlson. He would sure have his fun time with this.
As I said, the thing that bothers me is the total lack of a working reactor. This stuff should be rather inexpensive to build, especially if it is only about getting measureable results, versus a working reactor. But maybe I am missing something?
Skipjack wrote:Thats why I am asking the people here that have a better understanding of physics than I do, e.g. Art Carlson. He would sure have his fun time with this.
Since you ask: the ground state is the ground state. You can't make a hydrino because the lowest energy state satisfying the well-established laws of QED is, you guessed it, the ground state of the hydrogen atom.
Same with the vacuum. There is undoubtedly a vacuum energy density. But since it is by definition the lowest possible energy state for a vacuum, you can't extract energy from it. There is no lower state for the vacuum to go to.
The Davis paper, by the way, is willing to sacrifice conservation of momentum as well as conservation of energy. I guess the former is not really a greater sin than the later.
Fair enough. Aside from theoretical arguments, I can only think of two consequences of the vacuum energy density, and therefore two ways in which it might have physical meaning (and perhaps measurability). One is the the attractive force between parallel conducting plates (which can also be interpreted in other ways). The other is dark energy, which manifests itself in the accelerated expansion of the universe. (Warning: I'm starting to get out of my depth here.)
Art Carlson wrote:
Fair enough. Aside from theoretical arguments, I can only think of two consequences of the vacuum energy density, and therefore two ways in which it might have physical meaning (and perhaps measurability). One is the the attractive force between parallel conducting plates (which can also be interpreted in other ways). The other is dark energy, which manifests itself in the accelerated expansion of the universe. (Warning: I'm starting to get out of my depth here.)
It's been a few years (decades) since I studied stochastic electrodynamics (SED) but reading Daniel Cole and Y. Zou's paper on Quantum mechanical ground state of hydrogen obtained from classical electrodynamics, they claim that the influence of Coulomb binding forces and zero point energy frequencies seems to match up with Schrodinger's wave equation for a ground state.
Of course we are dealing with the theoretical here, but if we can lower or eliminate the frequency modes, ones specifically for the ground state, it should be possible for the electron to drop to a lower energy state.
Thinking about it some more though, since the electron typically is confined to discrete energy levels in an atom, even lowering the ground state may not be enough. I guess this is why it's all theoretical at the moment and needs a lot more work.
Art Carlson wrote:
Since you ask: the ground state is the ground state. You can't make a hydrino because the lowest energy state satisfying the well-established laws of QED is, you guessed it, the ground state of the hydrogen atom.
Same with the vacuum. There is undoubtedly a vacuum energy density. But since it is by definition the lowest possible energy state for a vacuum, you can't extract energy from it. There is no lower state for the vacuum to go to.
The Davis paper, by the way, is willing to sacrifice conservation of momentum as well as conservation of energy. I guess the former is not really a greater sin than the later.
This is the problem I have with these "ZPE" schemes for generating energy. All known energy generation methods (coal, nuclear, etc.) generate useful energy as a difference between a higher and lower energy state. Since the vacuum energy is, by definition, the lowest energy state, how does one go about creating an even lower energy state than this? I don't see how this can be used to produce useful energy.
I've been sent all sorts of fanciful ideas on this topic. Only one did I think would generate any energy. It consisted of a number of loops of wire, each connected to a diode. Essentially, it was an untuned crystal set. If operated in the typical city, it would produce a trickle of power, from radio broadcasts, not ZPE. The industrial scale version of this is a rectenna for receiving space microwave power transmissions.
The supposition is, ZPE is noisy, so tapping it would require a Maxwell's Demon to catch the positive peaks. That's the function of the diode above, but I expect it would not forward bias at the energy levels envisioned.
