Note that the publisher of this journal was at one point included in Beall's List and is known to have published pseudo-science before:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI
The one standout graph to me from their paper showed that adding these sources in either serial or parallel configuration did not result in a linear increase of either current or voltage. 4x the units resulted in a 3.n multiplier.
That looks to me like the beginning of a limit value that remains tiny. Of course, with only two points we can't tell if it's a curve or a straight line, and that doesn't happen by accident.
In addition, the paper (paraphrased) says repeatedly that they've made thousands and thousands of these devices, and yet their entire serial/parallel exploration is a few combinations in the 4x regime. Nothing is said about throwing 1000+ of them in a row/parallel to see if a stronger signal emerges from the noise.
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.
I think that the presentation and the paper look good enough to listen to the claims of experimental results in good faith. While I also remain fairly skeptical, in my opinion it's worth to reproduce those results. Even if it's not the free source of energy as authors claim (it's probably not), nevertheless it may be an interesting effect worth exploring and explaining.
Regarding the attack on scientific journals which tend to ignore anomalous results, I agree that it's a deeply flawed system (even if we are to forget about parasites like Elsevier & co), but there is no simple solution to that. Journals are incentivized to cultivate their reputation by producing a constant stream of good enough papers. Accepting papers with extraordinary claims is a bad strategy from risk-benefit point of view. On every paper which indeed correctly points at a future breakthrough you get many-many thousands of "duds".
With the advent of preprint sites at least you can freely share your results. Hopefully, eventually we will build an open reputation system on top of them, which will replace the existing system of journals and conferences.
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.
In many ways this is the core of good science. "Hey, this seems unusual." followed by "Here is a theory, and a hypothesis with a prediction of this theory is what is going on" then "Here is an experiment to test that hypothesis with all the ways we can think of that might mess up the answer compensated for." and then "Here are the results of the experiment." At which point other labs can go do the same experiment and see if they get the same results, and if so they can try to screw with those results in ways that they believe invalidate the theory, until everyone can reproduce the canonical experiment and on remaining theory agrees with the evidence produced by the experiments.
That said, nothing I saw in the paper suggested it would be expensive to reproduce this effect. The palladium is pricey but you don't apparently need very much and the fabrication, as described, it pretty standard semiconductor fabrication steps. Feature size is pretty large compared to modern processes so you wouldn't need a state of the art fab to make a wafer of these things.
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.
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 [2]) 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.
Expensive. For all the legitimate pointers to quackery, it seems he somehow scraped together >$10k (maybe much higher) to get a photolithography batch done.
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!
“ 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.
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?
The most accessible interpretation of the quantum vacuum is that it is the “base” state of any system ( including free space ). How much energy is at least theoretically in this base state is either extraordinarily high or infinite.
Now the challenge is that you can only extra energy when there is a difference in energy - the Cassini effect and others get work out of the vacuum via geometry. This geometry takes an equal amount of work to setup as it extracts.
That's one explanation for the force. Another is that it's just the electrons/atoms in the two plates attracting each other. It's literally mentioned in the page you linked.
Just from the paper (OP), they do not show their measurement setup on the electronics (I and V) side.
Simply measuring the I-V characteristics of a quantum-sensitive device is a far cry from showing that it will spontaneously deliver both I and V -- i.e. power out.
Even if it did, it might be through cooling of one of the masses involved. I.e., cooling of the thermal mass in a mirror or metal electrode. They are talking about harvesting, after all. [Edit: the APS paper also refers to hot carriers; sounds very much like coupling to the solid state.]
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.
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.
