Article about quasi-perpetual motion technology
Randell Mills, founder of BlackLight Power, claims to have invented a reactor that makes hydrogen atoms drop to an energy state below ground level, which causes them to release "100 times as much energy as you’d get by just burning the hydrogen." IEEE Spectrum interviewed several physicists about it, and they say it's poppycock. Nevertheless, the company developing the technology has received $60 million in funding.
“This is scientific nonsense—there is no state of hydrogen lower than the ground state,” says Wolfgang Ketterle, an MIT scientist and a Nobel Prize laureate in physics. “Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and it’s had time enough to find its ground state.”BlackLight Power says it's developing a revolutionary energy source—and it won't let the laws of physics stand in its wayAnthony Leggett, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and also a Nobel laureate, says that quantum mechanics is “consistent with just about everything we know about atomic physics, so the onus is firmly on anyone who wants to discard it to prove his case.” He adds, “I don’t see that [BlackLight] has got anywhere near doing this.”
But turn to Randell Mills, the founder, chairman, chief executive, and president of BlackLight Power, and he’ll tell you that this lower-energy hydrogen, which he calls hydrino, is very real indeed.
“We produce hydrino on demand,” he tells IEEE Spectrum, adding that his team has isolated and characterized hydrino’s properties using spectroscopy and has even created hydrino-rich materials it can provide for analysis.
the latest
latest episodes
what's up with Bussard's project these days? They needed $200M. Superficially,looks like BlackLight is selling that which springs eternal - too bad that ain't energy.
here's another
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-12/machine-might-save-world
@1 Are you sure? It sounds like hot air and bullshit, but you can turn a turbine with one and get methane from the other...
Besides, when this thing collapses we'll see some nice sparks fly.
for the 1800's version of this try a search of
John Keely-1827-1898.."keely motor..
tanstaafl
@takuan I'm an avid Polywell amateur and am working on building a Neutron emitter based on all the wonderful stuff available at this forum: http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php
http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/viewtopic.php?t=965 may have more information for you.
Ex astris!
If you're really interested in this you can download blacklight power's book explaining "Classical Quantum Mechanics." for free on their website.
When I was in graduate school (for physics) we used to joke about Blacklight Power. It's pretty clear that their theories are bullshit, but they've made it sound so technical their grants get approved anyway. With the economy the way it is, maybe more scientists should adopt their business model.
-George
Brings to mind an end-of-the-universe scenario I read about in which energy levels which are thought to be stable turn out to be only metastable. Basically, everything we know would either disappear or change radically, including us.
Also, anybody remember these asshats?
http://www.steorn.com/
Seems like maybe BlackLight has (had?) a competitor.
Cold Fusion Redux!
thanks Phil! I'll definitely read that. (I wonder if a mass produced tabletop Farnsworth Fusor could be marketed to grace the desks of the moneyed and connected as a cool toy and get them thinking about investing?
#11 @Takuan LOLz. Only if you were included in the wills of the aforementioned moneyed and connected. The amount of neutrons produced by a decent-sized Fusor could potentially give you cancer if not adequately shielded.
However - that plasma ball is really a sight to behold, and if I didn't have dependents I'd say that it'd be a good death, dying after seeing the first light of a real, working net-power fusion reactor.
FWIW, Polywell != Farnsworth IEC. See this well-written wikipedia article for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
I really, really love this stuff. Am hopefully going to go back to school for my Ph.D. at the UWMadison Plasma Physics lab. They're doing some great stuff over there.
Blacklight is indeed nothing but pure snake-oil. It should be telling that I can say I first found out about them some years ago when their site and claims got passed around as an in-office joke; (Department of Chemical Physics - which means we're folks who know something about this)
In short it's utter bullcrap. The theoretical arguments would go something like this:
#1 - Physics as we know it, doesn't support their claims.
#2 - They've attempted to re-invent quantum physics to do so - which is pretty dang big warning flag in itself
#3 - Their theoretical justification is simply wrong, and in parts non-sensical. IIRC, the first mistake I found in their derivation was assuming the radial part of the solution to the Schrödinger equation for the Hydrogen atom (an undergrad level problem, btw) was not quantized.
I think I saw a more comprehensive rebuttal on ArXiv somewhere, if someone's interested. The practical arguments are simpler:
#1 - Thermodynamics makes it incredibly improbable. You're telling me the gazillions of hydrogen atoms in the universe have remained in an _excited energy state_ over eons of time?!
#2 - Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, as the adage goes. They don't have it.
#3 - Why haven't any reputable physicists endorsed them?
#4 - Money is NOT an argument. As illustrated recently in the case of Bernie Madoff who raised 1000x times that money for a fund who's financial credibility no better than this company's scientific credibility.
Funnily enough I was looking at the Steorn forum earlier! :D
well, Phil,you uh - "anticipate" me. Damn. Cat's out of that bag..... Think man! there must be a way to accelerate donations.
This is way more absurd than Cold Fusion. Cold Fusion was at least superficially feasible within the context of what we know about nature. It didn't necessarily imply that loads and loads of other physics that is well established and experimentally confirmed should be wrong. A lower ground state for Hydrogen implies just that.
Sigh.
Here we go again.
Stop paying attention to anything that claim to be scientific but has no peer reviewed papers would be a good starting point to stop this.
Since we're talking Physics...
Takuan, is that a Schrödinger's cat? If so, we could put it back in the bag, and restore its quantum state!
Yes, and I can point you towards some pills that will make your penis twice as big. They work too!
alas, I am uncertain. defintely not a Siamese though, they make me itch.
This was covered here once,for those who missed it:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606
hey Phil! What do you think of #2?
#15: "accelerate donations"... That's it- the "Bux Accelerator"!
Thanks everyone, I'm off to the patent office!
re #2 it's possible, however the talk I'm seeing is calling for something like 1 µsecond of precision for firing the pistons. Mechanical stuff is great for the every-day low-energy go-boom energy generation we use now, but hoo boy, that kind of accuracy would be an engineer's nightmare. Scotty could do it, though. See this discussion for some slightly biased talk about the concept:
http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/viewtopic.php?t=90
Also re #20, sadly I am allergic to cats, and while that has never stopped me from having a cat as a pet, it did make me sneeze a lot in the Quantum classes in college.
thanks Phil, that forum is going to give me some good reading!
Slow news day?
I think the world needs another James Randi just for energy making machines.
I know it's a little off-topic, but whatever happened to Thane Heins and his "Perepiteia?" It was an interesting story -- humble tinkerer loses his wife over his obsession, but he perseveres and impresses MIT scientists -- but no one's done any follow-up since early 2008.
I'm reading a biography of Einstein (Walter Isaacson) and I just reached the point where rebuttals to Einsteins early outlines of General Relativity are coming in from scientists across Europe. Einstein gleefully proclaimed relativity "has at least been taken up with the requisite vigor". "I enjoy controversies. In the manner of Figaro: 'Would my noble Lord venture a little dance? He should tell me! I will strike up a tune for him.'"
If only science still worked like this.
Blacklight sounds like a typical "free energy" scam company.
Trying to fully grasp the fundamentals of the polywell reactor, meanwhile, nearly caused my head to catch on fire.
Sooner or later somebody will figure out how to convert Dark Energy into something usefull...
Though Dark Energy and Dark Matter seem to mostly be the physicist's way of preserving the (theoretical) Laws of Conservation in the face of the fact that the detectable-by-any-known-means universe is calling their bluff.
I had a run-in with the Blacklight/Hydrino/Millsian folks on Wikipedia. I proved (to my satisfaction and several others who took the time) that Mills abandons Maxwell's equations (in favor of wishful thinking) in the very first substantive chapter of his "Classical Quantum Mechanics" opus. (Chapter 3, on the free electron.)
The Millsians would have you believe that they're in agreement with classical electrodynamics, and it's only quantum mechanics they disagree with. That's nonsense. Even Maxwell would have seen the holes in their theory.
"IEEE Spectrum interviewed several physicists about it, and they say it's poppycock.
Let this be a lesson to all you physicists out there. In this Universe, we obey the second law of thermodynamics!
@18 - Since the cat was let out-of-bag, you have altered its quantum state by observing it and cannot make a determination as to what its state was when it was in the bag. Unless of course the bag was writhing around, which, of course, could be the cat in a state of quantum decoherence. Confused?
No, it all makes perfect sense. If hydrino is hydrogen that's under ground, then it must be Zombie Hydrogen!
By the way, do they give any clue to the shape of the orbital of that below-ground electron? I bet it's pretzel-shaped.
Palindromic @ 28: Science still does work like that and you're a fool to think Blacklight would be an example of otherwise.
To begin with: Einstein's mathematics were correct and his theory logically coherent.
Blacklight isn't another Einstein. It's not even another example of "N rays" of Blondlot, to take a contemporary example of self-deluded crackpottery.
Blondlot, at least, had done a significant amount of real work.
The only way to get this sort of energy output is through Aggravated Prioxon Emissions. And for a stable A.P.E., you need funcible capable of maintaining a regulated quandringular equilibrium (without the typical resultant Karnoff variations, natch.)
But I'm working on an end-around that basically feeds the K-variations BACK INTO themselves. No Karnoff's, no irregularity. Which means a regulated funcible and a stable A.P.E. Which is basically free energy.
Seriously, I'm THIS close. Just another ten million dollars or so for research and I'm totally there.
It's a strange way to run a scam isn’t it? They're NOT asking for anyone’s money, they've had the results duplicated at an independent lab, they offer assistance to anyone to duplicate the power generation, and now they’re going commercial with delivery of actual power generation equipment with all the legal liabilities that entails. So perhaps one of you armchair geniuses can explain how this scam is supposed to work.
one post?
how the scam works:
claim you can generate more energy than the laws of physics says you can, using the jargon of physics.
"receive $60 million in funding"
claim you are going commercial any day now
any day now
still working on it
just around the corner
hold on now
almost there . . .
For the Polywell hopefuls, I'm sorry to kill your dreams but Dr. Todd Rider at MIT pretty much investigated all (known) avenues that the Polywell may take and it just won't work. The problem is the damn Bremsstrahlung losses are going to bite you in the ass. The magnetic field required to contain the ions is too great and can't compare to the gravitational field that stars have.
For more information read Dr. Todd Riders PhD thesis and his further notes
http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11412
http://www.fusor.net/board/view.php?site=fusor&bn=fusor_future&key=1181660470
*hopes for a cyanide process* (read the thesis to understand)
When can I buy a moller air car?
I've been following Randy Mills/Blacklight power for over a decade and he is the *REAL DEAL*, he has had the old RCA labs for over that time power. BIG OIL, etc doesn't want you to follow/believe this.
He is on to something...
@42 -- Ahh... I see, it's a conspiracy, gotcha.
I blame crappy science reporting in the popular media for this. Journalists love taking some physics study or another and screaming, "OMG everything we know is wrong!!!" Probably because they think it's the only way to make something like quantum physics seem interesting to a broad audience.
At some point, people just shrug their shoulders at stuff like hydrino and figure everything we know is wrong once again.
i'm not a physics genius, but does lower than ground state somehow mean that its slowed down soooo much, that... its started moving again? what? in the other direction?
i thought the uncertainty principle meant you always had zero point fluctuations anyways. if you hit zero you'd know the speed and velocity.
Hydrino, schmidrino; I've been running my car off the stuff for years, and what you don't use as fuel, you can drink.
No, wait. . . I'm thinking of gasoline and water, respectively.
Sorry.
wtf?
i know exactly where their headquarters is. i drove by it today on the way to work. they're located in Cranbury, NJ.
I should stop in and say hello.
the Rider paper in #40 was 1995. When were the after-project results examined by Bussard in the Google presentation?
I hear this will power the Freedom Ship.
I call it Flubber!
Gorgon --
"For the Polywell hopefuls, I'm sorry to kill your dreams but Dr. Todd Rider at MIT pretty much investigated all (known) avenues that the Polywell may take and it just won't work"
This assertion gets trotted out fairly often (esp. by proponents of the competition, tokamak fusion), but in truth it's a bit dated.
Rider's paper made a lot of assumptions that were probably unjustified, or at least oversimplified, which later papers have shown. For instance, he assumes square wells, but a paper by Chacon, Miley, and others found that doing the full bounce-averaged Fokker-Plank modelling for more realistic parabolic wells gave large Q values, in contradiction to Rider's conclusions.
Polywell fusion may not work, but if it doesn't it will likely be for reasons other than those in the Rider paper.
There's a discussion of the topic here.
http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/viewforum.php?f=3&sid=8b1646217504b8114224f82da61620f8
It's worth pointing out too that we do know for sure tokamak fusion will not produce power economically within 50 years, if ever. Even the most advanced designs have a plant power density well below that of fission plants. It's a technology without a customer as long as fission fuels last, which is at least 1,000 years.
Oh, and yes, fractional electron states are pretty hokey; if he'd really achieved a breakthrough of that magnitude, physicists and chemists everywhere would be reproducing his results and he'd be accepting a Nobel (deservedly, unlike Al Gore). Best case, Mills has found a moderately novel chemical reaction, that most likely will not produce a tenth as much power as he claims.
so what's this popular press carrot dangling then?
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,599211,00.html
@45
This has nothing to do with speed. A lower energy state means that (in an analogy that is so useful as to be totally wrong ) If hydrogen is a rock on a hill then normal physics says the rock has rolled to the bottom because the universe is very old. The crap thay are selling is that they can dig a hole in the ground. At a low enough energy cost to use the falling rock to dig the hole. Utter Bullshit.
@#45
I'm not a physicist, just a fan of physicists, and from reading some physics for lay-people books, I understand electron ground states to be something like this:
Each atom has electrons smeared around in particular orbits. These orbits are particular and not arbitrary, because electrons can only travel in orbits that correspond to integers of their wavelength. Why? Because like all particles, electrons are also waves, and and cannot be in orbits that have a fractional remainder of their wavelength left over once they have made one orbit.
Electrons can jump from one allowed orbit to another, and never exist anywhere in between. bigger orbits take more energy, and electrons lose angular momentum as they orbit, so they tend to jump to lower orbits unless hit by things (generally photons) that give them more energy again. Once they get to the orbit with the smallest integer relation to their wavelength, they can't go any closer to the nucleus, they have hit the ground state, where they naturally stay unless something gives them enough energy to jump back to a bigger orbit. Hydrogen has one electron, which will tend to fall to the ground state.
When scientists had not yet figured out that electrons get stuck at their ground state (which required the realization that their orbits are quantized and not arbitrary), it was a mystery how atoms continue to exist at all. Just using the classical physics of Newton and Maxwell, the calculations showed that the electron loses momentum and is quickly pulled into the nucleus by the proton's positive charge.
Quantized electron orbits, including the idea that the ground state is as close as the electron can get to the nucleus, explains how atoms exist, why light spectra have their particular patterns, why the periodic table is periodic, and more. It is an idea that powerfully explains so much, and is part of the standard model that has been tested to greater accuracy than any other human knowledge.
To say you figured out how to make electrons go below their ground state would mean that you figures out some theoretical failure of the most accurate theory of physics we have. This should be published (and could be easily. the conspiracy required to keep it from being published would have to be mind boggling on the scale of infinite Voltrons) and would quickly make headlines.
It should be expected that we do not believe these claims until there is published and confirmed tests or people start making lots of cheap energy we can get some.
I recommend Leon Lederman's "The God Particle" for an understanding of this topic, if any non-science people what to learn about it without having to do math.
Also I have a hunch what Feynman would say about this.
I'm not supporting him or any other "free energy", "perpetual motion" stuff, but...
Why can't people come up with new ideas?
It amazes me how any scientist just goes ballistic when anyone else pisses in their koolaid (so to speak). I'm not saying math and science can't prove these people wrong, but at one point in time everything we know now had not been known.
Things like radiation, electricity, a/c and d/c power, all had to be learned and experimented with. Why can't there be something "new" and different?
And if someone actually responds, then can you explain gravity for me?
new ideas are fine, but they have to BE an idea.
Not sure if anyone is really "going ballistic" as much as simply saying there's no reason to think these claims are true.
I guess some scientists and fans of science may get grumpy about these things because they've seen how the lack of public understanding of science is used to promote things that are simply not true. And really, it does get annoying.
Sure, in the history of science, there is always resistance to new ideas because scientists are human after all and some of them (particularly the old ones) are attached to current understandings. However, once the new ideas show enough proof that they give a better explanation than the old ideas, science adapts. Old ideas get challenged, and if they are wrong they are eventually discarded. The flip side of this is that the same goes for new ideas - they are challenged, and if they are not proven then they are discarded. At this point in our understanding of how the universe works, you should expect to be challenged if you make new claims that are very different than what we think we have confirmed already. The skepticism is, for the most part, healthy - don't give the new ideas any slack, stick to the old ones until the folks with the new ideas deliver the goods. The goods in physics being positive results in tests that can be repeated by skeptics who will then get the same results.
Gravity is a squeezing or stretching of space itself (and time itself) by the presence of mass. Mass bends space-time. The bigger the mass, the bigger the bend. Bends in space-time exert force on mass, telling it where to go. The earth (a big mass) creates a dip in space-time, contracting space, which pulls you towards the center of the earth. The surface of the earth prevents you from getting any closer to the center (unless you dig). Hence, you stick to the surface of the earth unless something pushes you off (temporarily, in the case of your muscles pushing you off, a.k.a jumping).
I recommend the section on relativity in Brian Green's "The Elegant Universe" for a good understanding of gravity.
@ bcsizemo -- Gravity is a result of the curvature of spacetime. There are plenty of new and different things. Dark energy is one. No one has a clue what it is. New things have to fit in with the old things we know so dark energy will eventually fit in with everything else.
If you read the post above by brooklyntwang it should be clear that an electron's ground state is when it is closest to a proton. So how could you have an orbit below ground state? That would mean it would collide and release energy. You also can't have fractional frequencies. How can the freq of an orbit be fractional? It doesn't make any sense.
It's a con. It is amazing that even in a field as well understood as physics is it is still possible for con artists to ply their trade. It's a testament to human gullibility I suppose. How much more dubious then are the "too good to be true" claims made in the other sciences?
the people fronting the money aren't physicists.
BCSizemo:
Well, I think you misunderstand any hubbub from physicists (I was trained and functioned as a physicist for 10-12 years).
Let me first of all say that it's not -impossible- that these folks are getting unexpectedly large amounts of energy out of whatever they are doing.
However, whenever someone starts invoking nonsensical physics (rather than saying, "we don't know for sure why this is happening) then you begin to smell a rat.
And then, how many such claims ever pan out to yield something useful? (Answer: Never.) Remember, if this thing was doing what it claimed then it would be useful whether they understood it or not: The cost required to extract the energy should be far less than other methods to generate power. If it can do this, then people will start using it. If not, it will be forgotton.
But to be honest, humans know so much about this area of physics that we can safely say that the era of someone working in isolation and coming up with something completely novel (using novel physics) is long behind us, contrary to what Hollywood movies tell us.
These days, whenever I see such a claim I don't even bother reading any more about it: It's never worth the effort.
#53,
Notice they say "commercial-scale" power production, not "commercial cost." Tokamak power will cost around 10x conventional power sources.
Tokamak fusion is a great science project, but it's not the answer to our energy needs.
It's always a great day when scientists have punch-lines.
The perpetual human desire to get something for nothing.
That's right, we know everything about matter and the universe. Doesn't quantum mechanics have real scientific sounding terms like "charmed" and "strange?" Sounds like we still have a thing or two to learn, like what causes gravity? What does a magnetic field consist of? What keeps the "electron" going around perpetually? What keeps matter together, seeing as how it is mostly empty space? There is a lot of seemingly (relatively) perpetual motion happening in the universe, why not tap into it?
"Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self-evident." - Arthur Schopenhauer
The fact that you still have to learn things about your parents does not make true my affirmation that they are lizardpeople from Vega. If you refuse to accept that, are you close minded? Are you refusing to accept new ideas? this is pretty much the case here, we know quite a few thing about the Universe, and we know it h many surprises, but we know also that some of the claims people make are simply not true. Besides, this is a very old claim, that surfaces every now and then, with identical results: Nothing. Would you pay that much attention to those who claim your parents are lizardpeople from Vega after last year some other claimed they were reptilefolks from Arcturus and the year before that dragonmen from Trantor?
Scientists are willing to change their minds, hell, that's how science works. We are happy to understand how things work, learning from mistakes makes us understand better, new facts are damn exciting. And free energy would be awesome, as it would be that my parents had a warp capable spaceship under the house.
@65
Ah yes, just like the name "imaginary numbers" means all semi-modern math is guesswork.
That is, "not at all".
@#65
There are plenty of things science doesn't understand yet, true. And they are exciting things for us to be trying to figure out. However, none of the things on your list are things we haven't figured out yet. I strongly encourage you to read some of the great books like Elegant Universe by Brian Green, Big Bang by Simon Singh etc. that help non-scientists like me understand what we have and haven't figured out yet. Many people coast along with "science is sometimes wrong, and new ideas are often not accepted, and we don't know everything" as a reason to not listen to the amazing things scientists HAVE figured out so far. Also, what people don't realize is that the new ideas that overturn the old ideas are not negating the confirmed results of previous knowledge, they are using new explanations to refine the calculations to a greater degree of accuracy than the old ideas, but usually the old ideas still roughly hold for the situations they were invented to explain. Quantum physics and relativity do not mean Newton and Maxwell should be thrown out - they both reduce to classical physics on human scales, within a certain margin of error. Future breakthroughs will come in forms that refine to greater accuracy than our current models, not make our models wrong in the tests we have used so far.
what causes gravity?
mass stretching space-time
What does a magnetic field consist of?
fields don't consist of anything, they are simply changing values in space for certain properties. I know, its hard to get your mind around, because they can still produce particles.
What keeps the "electron" going around perpetually?
The quantized orbits as described above, it can't fall in because the ground state orbit is the lowest integer value of frequency it can orbit at. Electrons can leave the orbits though. Electricity is electrons riding along from atom to atom.
What keeps matter together, seeing as how it is mostly empty space?
The electron orbital clouds create non-zero probability for the electron to be at any place in the orbital. Even though two atoms are mostly empty space, they can not intersect because the negative charge of their two electron clouds pushes them away from each other. Yes, you are solid only because of the negative charge of the *probability* of electrons around the atoms.
There is a lot of seemingly (relatively) perpetual motion happening in the universe, why not tap into it?
There are lots of scientists working on more efficient ways of using energy. When they actually figure something out, we will know by A)The issue having peer review and exciting debate in science journals even though some old scientists will not accept it or B)The availability of the technology, which will make headlines.
The quote that every truth passes through three stages doesn't mean those stages are wrong. Replace ridiculed with challenged, opposed with reviewed, and you have something that is very important. That process is how we separate the more true ideas from the less true ideas. Right ideas and wrong ideas go into the process, and the right ideas make it to the third step.
Can anyone take a stab at answering this quantum flavored question: So, if I understand it correctly, at the quantum level, particles will react dependent upon there being an observer (wave or particle) and supposedly this somehow relates to the existence of our Universe. How did the particles know what to do back when we were just hominids walking around ancient Africa with no means of observing them?
@ Apryason:
Doesn't quantum mechanics have real scientific sounding terms like "charmed" and "strange?
Words like proton (first thing) and electron (amber) are just as inane, except they happen to be hidden in Greek. When you run into new concepts, you have to make up new words.
What keeps the "electron" going around perpetually?
The problem is, electrons don't go around perpetually. They exist around the nucleus, but need not have any extra energy or even angular momentum. This is part of the quantum mechanics we do understand.
See, one of the most important parts of quantum mechanics is the correspondence principle: new theories have to give the same values as classical theories in cases where the latter work. We might not know everything, but it's obvious that doesn't mean we can throw out what we do know.
@65
Not knowing everything does not mean we know nothing.
Put simply, it's like lasing a stick of dynamite.
@71: I have no idea what you're trying to illustrate, but I like the imagery nonetheless. :)
The lizardpeople from Vega called and are pissed they got dragged into this debate.
The lizardpeople from Vega also reply that "observing" at the quantum level is the same as "interacting". Silly monkeys.
Geez!
hydrino = dark matter
rubbing to bits of dark matter together gives you dark energy
You store the dark energy in tubes
Release said dark energy at raves...as blacklight!
zomg (ps look at my teeth dude!)
@ #12 (yes, I'm citing to way back)
Whenever I think of Wisconsin and nuclear physics (not often, admittedly), I think of Nick from Michael Apted's brilliant "[n]-Up" movies.
Oscillation Overthruster
@#69
to expand on #73
take an orbiting electron, for example. It's position, and a bunch of other properties, can only be expressed as a set of probabilities - the electron has a 5% probability of being here, 15% probability of being there, etc. at a given moment in time. The strange thing is that there is no "actual" path of the electron. In our usual experience, with rolling dice for example, the die has a probability of which side it will land on, but while it is in the air, there is a specific path it will take that is its only actual path, leading to one side or the other, and the probabilities are simply due to the fact that we aren't sure which exact path the die is actually taking. The specific path determines the side it lands on. An electron in its orbit cloud does not have an actual path, it is "smeared" across all the possibilities (hence it is more like a "cloud" than a planet in orbit around the sun). Send electrons one by one through a thing with two holes, and the resulting pattern of where they go on the other side of the holes is the pattern you get as if they were all going through at the same time and bouncing off each other. The range of all possible probabilities determines where each one goes, as if each electron knew there were two holes.
When you want to study the electron on its way around the orbit or on its way through one of the two holes, however, you have to interact with it. To see things you have to have something bounce off them. In the case of our eyes, it's photons hitting our eyes after bouncing off things. So to find the electron, we do something like shoot photos at it and we see it based on the photons bouncing off. The photon has to interact with an electron in this process, and in doing so, the photon will change the electron's set of probabilities. Besides giving the electron more energy and changing its path, the photon interacts with the electron at a certain point, which means the probabilities for the electrons position a that moment change to 0 for everywhere else. Poof goes the cloud of smeared electron.
But before the photon came along, the electron existed in all possibilities at once, smeared across them. The idea with Schrodingers cat was that if you kept a larger system (like a cat) isolated from interacting with anything, it would be in a smeared out quantum state until someone tried to observe it using photons or other particles. Include in the isolated system something that gives nonzero probabilities for the cat's life or death, and the cat is smeared into both both possibilities simultaneously. Schrodinger came up with this example because he thought at the time that the idea of a particle being simultaneously in all states of probability was ridiculous and he was trying to show the paradox of it, that could lead to such nonsensical possibilities as a cat that is alive and dead. As Neils Bohr said, if you are not outraged by quantum mechanics, then you did not understand it."
There is not scientific consensus about what it means that particles can be in a quantum state of being all possibilities siumltaneously, or what is happening when the interaction collapses all the probabilities into one outcome. But it has at least been shown that the universe does not let whole cats exist in such a state. All it takes is one photon or other particle to interact with a system to collapse the wave of possibilities, and its practically impossible to have a system larger than a molecule exist for more than a split second before its going to interact with some kind of particle. Space is full of particles.
So particles know what to do without human observers. The universe keeps things going in and out of quantum states all the time with all the interactions going on.
Wait until people find out about my plan to generate massive amounts of cheap energy using Dilithium Crystals, they'll be lining up for miles.
To observe something means interacting with the thing. In the everyday world we can make the interactions so small that the effect is negligable (light bouncing off a bowling ball will not measurably change it's course), in the quantum realm, the observation will always be an interaction on par with the effect observed (the same light bouncing of an electron is a significant event), so the observation will always influence the outcome of the experiment.
Whether a shaved ape in a lab coat watches the instrument is irrelevant.
@#68
Maybe I should clarify. Why does the magnet stay stuck to the fridge year after year? Gravity is always trying to pull it down. Isn't the magnet doing work to stay stuck? What is the power source? To make an electromagnet do the same thing, I need an electric power source.
Sorry, I'm just the son of a Harvard Ph.D. (physical chemistry) but I didn't get that education so I think too much... When I asked him the above question he kind of hesitated and said that energy was used to make the magnet so you can't get any more out of it than what was used to magnetize it. Given the life of a permanent magnet I find this explanation hard swallow. My "Monster Magnet" from the 60's still works. I could put that on the fridge but it would stick out too much.
@#80
Your confusion about the fridge magnet scenario is probably do to your mind equating gravity and magnetism as forces. You may think - all that gravity, tugging on the magnet all these years, it must have to put out so much magnetic energy to overcome that much gravity.
The surprising fact (which still makes phsysicsts scratch their heads to this day) is that gravity is much, much, much weaker than electromagnetism. If you use a little magnet to pick up a paperclip, that little magnet is pulling on the paperclip harder than the gravitation of the entire earth. Gravity is extremely weak compared to electromagnetism. A magnet will lose its force over the years, but it can be a long time before a decent magnet loses enough for gravity to compete with it.
@#82
BrooklynTwang -
That still doesn't answer my question. Magnetism may be strong compared to gravity, but it is still doing work. If I stuck a fifty pound permanent magnet to a vertical steel plate (or the underside of a horizontal one) I bet it would still be there many years later. Holding up that much weight is a lot of work. A magnet may lose strength over the years, but how much? Is the energy used to create a permanent magnet more or less than it expends over its lifetime holding itself to a vertical (or below a horizontal) ferrous surface against it's own weight? Has anyone ever done this calculation?
Big horseshoe magnets are sometimes sold with a "keeper," a steel plate that goes over both poles. Doesn't this wear out the magnet?
I don't equate electromagnetism and gravity. They are both forces that act on matter, though. Work must be done to overcome either one.
I've been "scratching my head" over this question for years. Nobody has given me a sufficient answer.
@#83
Sorry I didn't get to what was confusing you. I haven't heard about any particular data on the work done by a magnet over its lifetime vs. the energy to make the magnet, but it's a very safe bet that the energy to make the magnet is greater than the work the magnet does over its lifetime.
now this article is no longer on BB front page, and the superfun science thread will come to a close
A "safe bet" is no substitute for data. I will attempt to find the data, otherwise I should go back to school and use this as a course of study towards a thesis of some sort. Right now I am busy as a television engineer and an assistant winemaker so I don't know if I will take the time to do that.
Yes, now that this is buried in the archives we can avoid asking heretical questions for a while.
If I stuck a fifty pound permanent magnet to a vertical steel plate (or the underside of a horizontal one) I bet it would still be there many years later.
It would fall off eventually.
Various companies have claimed to make perpetual motion machines using permanent magnets. They run for a while, then eventually stop.
What is the power source?
The power source is the alignment of the atoms that creates the magnetic field. It takes energy to order them, and they will gradually disorder as they do work.
One thing that tends to confuse people is that a magnet at rest does no work. If you stick a magnet onto a surface, it doesn't have to do any additional work to stay there, gravity or no. It only has to do work moving toward or away.
@#87
"It would fall off eventually." When? I need some data. "Eventually" is about as helpful as "safe bet."
"If you stick a magnet onto a surface, it doesn't have to do any additional work to stay there, gravity or no."
Are you saying there is some kind of "temporary glue" involved? Gravity is pulling on it nonetheless. I have to do work to remove it. As I hold the magnet close to the ferrous surface, it is attracted to it and I must do work to keep it from touching. When the magnet finally contacts the surface, isn't it attracted to the iron atoms below? How does it "know" to stop working? If I put a layer of plastic between the magnet and the iron, does the magnet wear out quicker because it is still trying to reach the metal underneath?
Where can I get information on this? So far Google searches are useless. I can't believe that there is no data on this. Does anyone have a source? Has this ever been studied?
@#88 Mechanical work is the change in kinetic energy caused by an external force. The magnet has the same kinetic energy the whole time it is sitting on the fridge, therefore no work is done on it.
You said you wanted to Google for more info on this, just google "mechanical work" and "kinetic energy."
@#89
Sorry, I don't buy it. If I turn off an electromagnet, it slides off the fridge. Work IS being done. Gravity is pulling the magnet. The magnet is using a force to stay stuck to the fridge. The relative strength of the magnet vs. gravity isn't the the issue. The permanent magnet is always "switched on" unless you want me to believe in some sort of "quantum glue."
I sent an email to a permanent magnet manufacturer's website asking how much energy it takes to magnetize a permanent magnet and if anyone has ever studied this.
Apryason @#90:
Definition of work: Force integrated over distance. If the force is constant, it's force times distance, like they teach in high school.
When the magnet is not moving, no work is being done. If you turn off the electromagnet, the thing slides off the fridge, gaining kinetic energy, and yes, that requires work. That's potential energy turning into kinetic energy. That potential energy was given to the magnet when you picked it up (performing the same amount of work) and stuck it to the fridge.
When you stuck it to the fridge, it accelerated towards the surface due to the magnetic field, which performed work. It then struck the surface and that energy was lost as friction/heat. So, with regards to gravity, the magnet was at the top of a hill, ready to fall down (literally) and gain kinetic energy. But with regards to magnetic force, the magnet is sitting nicely at the bottom of a potential-energy valley. For a strong enough magnet, that valley will be 'deep' enough to overcome the peak that it's sitting at with regards to gravity, so it won't fall down.
No energy is required to keep it sitting there - it's already in the lowest energy state for its position.
@#90
So now I have two answers. The first is that a magnet can use no more energy than was put into it when it was magnetized, the second is that when a magnet is hanging onto a surface it is expending no energy.
"No energy is required to keep it sitting there - it's already in the lowest energy state for its position."
I still have a hard time with that explanation. The magnet still has weight. It still wants to fall, but the magnetic field is keeping it "glued" to the ferrous surface without doing any work. I still don't believe it. It is not the same as a rock or some other inert material on a level surface.
So, as soon as the magnet makes contact with a metal surface, isn't it also attracted to the iron underneath the surface? Doesn't it "want" to move towards it?
What happens in this experiment: I connect a cable or string of some sort to a magnet and anchor the other end on a fixed point, then put up a steel plate close enough to the magnet that it stretches out the string but the magnet doesn't touch the steel, rather, it is suspended in mid air. How long will it stay there, supporting it's own weight against gravity, versus a magnet that is stuck to a steel plate? Has anyone ever done this experiment, quantifying all the forces involved including the energy used to magnetize the magnet?
I have to put energy into an electromagnet in order for it to do the same thing a permanent magnet is doing with "no energy." Hard to believe.
All this from an article about "hydrino." My fault...
apryason @#92:
Well if it seems counterintuitive, it's probably because you're anthropomorphizing the magnet. When we humans stand up, it takes work. It also requires work for us to hold something up against the force of gravity. It's easy to assume that defying gravity in itself requires the expenditure of energy. But it doesn't.
A magnet on a string can hang there indefinitely as well.
Maybe this analogy will help: Imagine that instead of a magnet, you've got a weight on a pair of strings attached somewhere, pulled taught. I doubt you have any problems imagining that weight hanging there in defiance of gravity. No energy had to be put into the strings to make them do this. No energy is required to keep it hanging there.
What's keeping it in place? The forces along the strings (and countering forces from wherever they're attached and so forth). Now imagine that you replace the weight with a magnet, and let magnetism mediate that force instead of the string. Any clearer?
@#93
Nope. I still don't get it. Gravity is acting on the weight, pulling the string taught, but in my experiment, the magnetic field is pulling the string taught, either horizontally or vertically (up). Gravity is still acting on the magnet, trying to pull it down. The magnet must put out a greater force, "trying" to reach the steel, while gravity is pulling on it. The magnet will eventually lose it's strength and fall. There is work being done. When that work stops, it is because the magnet loses strength (energy?) and gravity wins. The weight on a string might hang there forever, but the magnet on a horizontal string will not. There is a source of magnetic energy in a permanent magnet that will eventually be exhausted as the domains randomize again.
When my late Ph.Dad made the statement, years ago, that a permanent magnet can put out no more than was put into it I became more curious.
Also, I have read that if you force two magnets together, N to N or S to S, they wear out quicker. Interesting....
The magnet put out the same force regardless of gravity or not, it only depends on the distance to the steel and the strength of the magnet. If that force is sufficient to overcome gravity then the magnet will stay up, if not, it'll fall.
Again, no work is being done. Per the definition of mechanical work - force x distance. If an object is stationary it is not "working".
Why is it so hard to imagine that a string can sustain mediating a force indefinitely but not a magnet? Especially considering, btw, that the string itself, like all matter, is held together on the atomic/molecular level by... electromagnetic interactions!
It's true that a magnet will eventually lose its magnetization. Being magnetized is a higher-energy state than being unmagnetized. It requires energy to magnetize an object - more energy for a stronger magnetization. That's what your father meant. Thermodynamics dictates that it must lose its magnetization sooner or later. Sooner if you expose it to an opposed magnetic field, heat it, or do anything else which allows the spins to realign themselves.
But the magnetic field put out by a magnet is _always_ there. It doesn't 'cost' that magnetization energy to do so. In fact, if you stick a horseshoe-shaped magnet to something, it'll stay magnetized longer, because the metal will give you a stronger field between the poles, which assists in keeping the magnetic poles aligned. Analogously, magnets should be stored in attracting positions, e.g.
N==S
S==N
Back to my original original question: What does the magnetic field consist of? What do I "feel" as I try to force two like poles of two different magnets together? Photons of some sort? What is the substance of this propagation? The aether? (silly me...)
The magnet held in a stationary position between a string and a metal plate a short distance away is always moving a tiny bit, isn't it? The magnetic field is very slowly wearing out, allowing gravity to take over. Has anyone ever measured this? You'd have to suspend the magnet at the maximum distance from the plate that it would hold against gravity, then measure it's movement over a long time.
Matter is a form of energy. Must we always light fires or smash atomic particles together at high velocities to release that energy? Seems kind of primitive. T. Henry Moray invented a type of transistor in the 30's (and got 50 kw from an antenna and a ground connection), but the patent office said you can't get sufficient electrons from a cold cathode...unless you work for Bell Labs, of course: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMe_kOl1Z3M
Moray was visited by Shockley; there is a letter written by him that I read in Moray's book. Shockley was incensed that Moray would not reveal his secret, but he could not because he couldn't get to first base with the patent office.
Is the debate over? What a shame. I found it very educational.
Personally, I do believe there is something we are missing here. It's easy to understand why you have a magnetic field (spinning electrons). It makes sense why magnets push away or attract (due to alignment of the spin).
What does NOT make sense is how the spin is able to exert influence though space IE: a magnetic field.
Nothing I have ever read fully explains this.