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PUTHOFF

Been thinking about                     Martin Gardner points out that
Puthoff's stuff:                        Puthoff has a long record of
                                        getting involved with flaky
   Zero-point energy.                   nonsense, e.g. Uri Geller.
   Vaccum energy.
                                              Perhaps not the
The Casimir effect: Bring two                 best person to
conductive plates close                       get your physics
together.  Many ZPE modes are                 from...
excluded from this tight
resonance cavity.  Hence there                Though the Casimir
is radiation pressure pushing                 effect is a real,
the plates together.  It's                    observed phenomena.
possible to extract energy from
this force... which becomes
quite large at around 1 micron.



Now Puthoff speculates that
there may be some sort of way
you can use this to get a
Casimir force plasma pinch
effect, and extract energy in a
way similar to fusion.

Forward talks about building a
vacuum energy battery, where
charged plates would repel each
other just enough to balance the
Casimir force attracting them.

Me, I think they're both
thinking too much like
physicists.  Micron scale
mechanical devices are within
the reach of photolithographic
micro-machining techniques.  How
about a design with a couple of
plates with a one micron gap
between them that get pushed
together, then you slide a box
over them (with one micron
clearence on either side).  If
my simple understanding of the
effect is correct, then this box
should act as a shield to the
ZPE fluctuations, so it would
take much less energy to
seperate the plates than was
generated by letting them close.
You then slide the box/shield
back, and let them close again.

I mentioned this to a friend of
mine: His first thought was that
all the energy expended to slide
the shield in place and back
must be greater than you would
generate, or else you've
violated the First Law of
thermo.

My impression was that this is wrong:
I don't know where the energy comes
from -- maybe the universe gets a           I believe Forward
little smaller, or something -- but         says that the
the way Puthoff/Forward and all the         field has "not yet
rest talk about this, there isn't           been shown to be
any reason you can't get useful             conservative."
energy out of this effect.
                                               You might infer though
On the other hand, there could be a            that Forward *expects*
gotcha I don't understand, such as             the field to be conservative,
some ZPE resistance force that might           which is why he's talking
make it harder to slide the shield             about nothing more radical
over the two plates.                           than energy storage.

   Milonni et.al. says:
   "In the case of a
   spherically conducting
   shell... the effect of
   the vacuum field is to
   produce a radially
   _outward_ force, as first
   shown by Boyer."

      His point is that simple
      intuition may not be
      enough to predict the
      force on a given geometry.



Anyway, here's another crazy idea:

Puthoff claims that gravity is a result of
the vacuum field interaction with matter.
But, then, it might be possible to build an
anti-gravity capillary, using a conductive
tube a micron in diameter.  This seems like
a nifty experiment to test the theory: try
to float a submicron particle inside such a
capillary. Measure the transit time of a
particle falling through one, if it isn't
possible to observe it directly.

Further, it suggests another
crazy energy generation idea: a
bundle of micron scale
capillaries to suck up water
which is then poured down
through a hydro-power generator.


Another thought: why don't
people do this with ordinary
capillaries?  Slow?  But so
what?  I mean, it works for
trees, right?  What scale is
an ordinary capillary that
works on chemical adhesion?

And now for a really crazy
idea: could it be that the
chemical adhesion is really
another ZPE effect?  After
all, these guys all seem to
take it for granted that
Van der Waals forces are
really a ZPE effect.




Once again, where would the
energy come from?  Would the
water get colder? The earth
less massive?

Wait a minute: "the water get
colder" would imply the direct
conversion of heat into useful
energy, wouldn't it?  Doesn't
seem likely.

But then:

For the crazy idea of the evening...

I was talking to a physicist friend of
mine recently about these
sorts of notions, and I was
surprised to learn that he
doesn't really believe in the
second law of thermo.  It
seems obvious to him that
there ought to be a way to
create a device that can
convert the thermal energy of
a gas into useful work.  A
perpetual motion machine of
the second type.


I find this quite surprising,
because I've suspected this might
be true for a few years now, but
have been very reluctant to talk
about it for fear of seeming          The history of this field
completely bonkers.                   does not exactly inspire one
                                      with confidence of success.

Here's my original notion:
Take a cyllinder with a gas
inside it, at some temperature
above absolute zero.  You've
got a lot of molecules
randomly banging against the
piston, but it doesn't move up
and down much, because the
effect of all these collisions
tend to average each other
out.  But suppose you could
make a smaller cyllinder, with
very few gas molecules in it,
perhaps only one.  Then every
time the molecule collides
with the piston, it should
bump it up a bit (against
gravity).  Couldn't you put
some sort of transducer on it
(say, a piezo) and extract                       Another thought:
energy from this motion?                         cut out the middle man,
                                                 try to work directly
One good objection I've heard:                   with the thermally
A nanoscale cyllinder wouldn't                   induced fluctuations in
be perfectly rigid unless it                     the voltage out of the
was at absolute zero.  Really,                   piezo?
it would be something like a
fulleresque tube of carbon                       It might not be possible to
molecules bouncing around                        create a diode small enough to
their equilibrium positions.                     deal with these small voltage
It might not be possible to                      changes.
construct a piston to move
smoothly through such a cyllinder.

I'm not so sure this is a fundamental
objection... but I suppose the small
amount of energy in the single gas
molecule could be lost against the
thermal noise of the piston motion.



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