Unlocking Zero-Point Energy

Transcript

hello i'd like to tell you about a scientific journey that my lab and i have been on for the last couple of years in developing an energy harvesting technology that appears to be harvesting energy from the zero-point energy vacuum it's a story not just about the technical nature of what we've done but the reaction of the scientific community and also the implications for this technology and in general what we might do with it but before i talk to you about that i need to mention the second law of thermodynamics the second law of thermodynamics can be interpreted a number of different ways and one of the ways is to say that you cannot harvest energy from a uniform background if everything is at equilibrium you can't get energy from one place without there's some there being some sort of flow that would require there not to be an equilibrium and if in fact we are harvesting energy from the background vacuum then perhaps that would mean that we are violating the second law of thermodynamics so in looking at this i was discussing this with a respected scientist i know and he talked about our technology and about what we're doing with me in the course of several emails back and forth and i shared some data with him and uh he was very forthright and and i appreciate his honesty in in his responses at the end he wrote me an email and that email said the following he said hi garrett look most people are not going to believe your paper and that's with good reason it's almost certainly wrong like every other paper that has claimed to get something from nothing there have been many many people saying the second law of thermodynamics is wrong so far they have all been wrong yours might after all the failures be the first success but that's not how the smart money is going to bet i'm not ignoring your data i'm just balancing your data against all the data that says the second law of thermodynamics is inviable isn't that great i i really appreciate his honesty so let's take a look at the technology and why it brings on such sort of skepticism so what we'll be talking about are the following and that's this is the journey through data and doubt we'll be talking about zero point energy the challenges in harvesting it and ways to meet those challenges we'll talk about our devices and results and the implications that this would have for the world in general and we'll talk about second of law law of thermodynamics issues and objections uh then finally we'll talk about making science work how do we find the balance could our results be valid or are we just diluting ourselves okay let's get going so what is vacuum energy there are background electromagnetic fields there are thermal electromagnetic fields and these were uh developed and understood over the course of quite a lot of time finally an accurate theory describing it was developed by planck in 1900 and this was his first theory this is called the planck distribution function i'm not going to show you many equations here but this is useful just to show you that this says that the energy density is proportional to uh the energy of the of the light and there's a temperature dependent term so this tells you that there is a temperature dependence because this is radiation that comes from hot objects warm objects and it's all over the place but then 11 years later here i realized that this theory was incomplete and didn't completely describe the data and so he came up with his second theory and in the second theory he added another term that's temperature independent and this it turns out is zero point energy this was largely ignored by the scientific community for a decade or two until the development of quantum mechanics of which planck was really the grandfather and with the development of quantum mechanics the whole concept of the uncertainty principle came up we'll be talking about that and the uncertainty principle then once again gave rise to zero point energy and that's when the general scientific community accepted that there does seem to be some sort of a zero point energy so what does this mean if you take a look at the energy density the amount of energy that there is in free space as a function of photon energy so this is how much energy each particle of light has you'll see that there is this thermal background radiation and this is a thermal background radiation at room temperature which is about 300 kelvin and at room temperature the background radiation peaks roughly here so this goes from the far infrared to the near infrared visible light and then ultraviolet light and so we can see that the radiation from the temperature around us the temperature of the earth and everything we see is dominantly in the infrared and that's why we don't really see it but then there's this additional factor and this additional factor is the zero point energy and the zero point energy increases dramatically it increases with the cube of the frequency and quite quickly by the time you get into the visible and ultraviolet it completely dominates what the background radiation is compared with the zero-point energy fluctuations i'm sorry compared with the thermal background okay so what is this vacuum energy so zero point energy fills all space and matter it was proposed by planck as we saw and then later codified by the uncertainty principle so the basic idea of the uncertainty principle is that you cannot know to absolute precision two different types of variables at the same time so for example you cannot know the position and the momentum or velocity of a particle both of them to absolute precision if you know the momentum more you know the the position less and vice versa so one of the implications of this is that no particle can stand still because if a particle stood still you'd know that it wasn't moving and you know where it was and so everything wiggles everything has to wiggle in quantum mechanics and not only does everything wiggle but also free space itself wiggles and by that i mean uh that there are electromagnetic variation radiation that appears and disappears and appears and disappears in free space and a lot of other phenomena that occur and then are annihilated in the vacuum and this uncertainty principle can be expressed in terms of an uncertainty in position and momentum or velocity you can also express it in terms of a time and energy so the more precisely you know when something is there that you can measure it uh the less precisely you know its energy or so in other words the more energy it could have and we'll talk about this uncertainty principle a little bit more in the future but the basic idea i want to take home right now is that these fluctuations occur for a very short time okay so what are the issues in harvesting zero point energy uh there are really three main issues that i've put together that really are the objections from the scientific community saying that you really cannot harvest it and use it one of these says that it's the universal background state everything has zero point energy and therefore there's no tilt to it there's no flow to it it's uniform everywhere the second one is that it's an equilibrium state and so in order to harvest it you'd be violating the second law as i mentioned earlier and then the third problem is that if some way you could there's still the problem that these fluctuations that form the zero point energy are very short-lived they're extremely short-lived so how do we get around this can we modify the ground state so that it's not uniform everywhere well it turns out that for zero point energy you actually can and that is that the vacuum state depends upon the structure around it in other words it's geometry dependent uh so this would be as if you could have an ocean with a flat level and then one region of the ocean would just have a a a dent in it a well in it that was lower than everywhere else oddly enough you can do this and it's been demonstrated with a zero point energy the way has to do with a a structure called a casimir cavity so in 1948 uh the physicist casimir was doing some mathematical analysis on having two closely spaced mirrors and he said if there are two closely spaced mirrors that means that you'll only be able to have a certain number of modes of wavelengths within this closely spaced casimir cavity but outside you could have all sorts of wavelengths so this is think about it like a guitar so a guitar string is pegged on both ends and therefore it just vibrates at a fundamental frequency and its harmonics same thing with zero point energy inside a casimir cavity all wavelengths that don't meet the appropriate boundary conditions are suppressed another way of looking at it is that it suppresses all long wavelengths so any wavelength greater than twice the spacing of the cavity ends up being suppressed and other wavelengths are permitted so casimir came up with this concept and one of the predictions he made is that because there'd be more zero-point energy radiation outside the cavity than inside there'd be a radiation pressure that would push the cavity walls together and these two plates would be pulled together so he predicted this in 1948 and it wasn't for several decades and really until the end of the 20th century that it was measured accurately and he was right and so these chasmir cavities do in fact have plates that are attracted together this only happens for very very closely spaced plates and it happens only uh it's it's a fairly small force so these plates need to be less than a micron apart a millionth of a meter and uh the force is tiny okay so we now say that yes we can modify the ground state but then we have the problem of equilibrium and the violation of the second law in trying to harvest zero point energy so is there some way around it is there something we can do to get around it well by answering the third objection maybe we'll find a way so that has to do with extremely short-lived fluctuations so before i go there i want to tell you about equilibrium and detail balance so equilibrium [Music] means that everything is in harmony and there's no net motion anywhere but there can be motion and there can be particles and energy moving so for example if we have a system that has three parts here i'm laying them labeling them a b and c there can be energy flow from a to b but there is a detailed balance in which the energy flow from a to d b is exactly balanced by the energy flow from b to a and the same thing between all the other parts of the of the of this system in equilibrium and if this weren't true what would happen if it weren't true then we might have a net flow for example if zero point energy everywhere were absorbed by a leaf and a leaf is a non-linear material and so the leaf is going to take these zero point energy fluctuations and down convert it into heat and so we'd see hot spots all over the place on leaves and every other sort of non-linear material within our universe but we don't why do we not because there's a detailed balance in other words whatever might be producing heat uh the the reaction also goes in the other direction and we don't can we break that detailed balance and so here we come back to these extremely short-lived fluctuations so this gets into the notion of again the uncertainty principle but the delta e delta t that is uncertainty and energy and uncertainty in time uh there has been proposed by a physicist larry ford that there's a quantum inequality and the quantum inequality says that an energy delta e may be borrowed from the quantum vacuum for a time delta t then it has to be repaid and it has to be repaid with interest so how long can you borrow the energy and how much energy well if it obeys the uncertainty principle and it's not clear it does exactly but if it does that would mean we could borrow say a photon a red light photons worth of energy for a tenth of a femtosecond now femtosecond is extremely small it's a zero point fifteen zeros one six it's an extremely short time but during that time we can violate the second the first law of thermodynamics that is we can actually get energy out of nothing and we can see it but then it's got to be returned okay well if we can borrow it could we be sneaky and could we borrow it and capture it very quickly and if we could borrow it and capture it very quickly then could we skirt detailed balance and this was what i was thinking about as i was trying to come up with a way to harvest zero point energy and the way that i thought we should try involves a metal insulator metal diode so let's talk about that if you have a metal insulator metal diode so you've got a piece of metal a very thin insulator and this is going to be a couple of nanometers thick that means about 10 inter-atomic distances or so thick and then another metal you can excite electrons on one side and those electrons tunnel through this forbidden region of the barrier or the insulator and get captured on the other side and once they're captured on the other side it's very unlikely that they'll be able to go back again and so in this way we might be able to very quickly capture zero point energy because this tunneling process takes place on uh takes about a femtosecond or so to occur and so we might be able to absorb some of that zero point energy so i thought okay how are we going to do that well let's take a look here at um the the concept so we've got a base metal thin insulator and an upper electrode and this upper electrode is very thin it's so thin that if a radiation any sort of radiation is absorbed light is absorbed it creates hot carriers and these hot carriers or hot charge carriers of electrons then can travel through this thin upper metal electrode before they're absorbed and then they can tunnel through or go over the barrier that that's between the upper metal electrode and the lower metal electrode now if this metal insulator metal diode is just sitting out in free space there's also going to be the opposite current because there will be internally generated uh hot electrons from the same sort of zero point energy or whatever is producing it out here and they'll cause a current to go the other direction and there'll be no net flow of current ah but what happens if we do something now what happens if we add to this a casimir cavity so we're adding to this a casimir cavity on top and we know we just found out that a casimir cavity reduces the allowed wavelengths in this casimir cavity between these two mirrors so that there's less energy here than there would have been in free space because it restricts the vibrations on the guitar string if you like and so therefore we're now going to have less radiation coming in we'll reduce the current going this way but perhaps the current going the other way will remain the same and in that way we might get a net flow of current from the base electrode to the upper electrode so the actual device that we built is depicted here so this is our metal insulator metal device uh using nickel palladium transparent uh dielectric it's it's too hard to make this out of vacuum so we use either a polymer or a glass is our transparent material and then coated with a mirror and in this way we're making our devices and our measurement circuit probes current flowing between the base electrode and the upper electrode this is a scanning electron microscope image of our device they're very small they're about a tenth of a micron on one side and a little over two tenths of a micron on the other side so um this was the concept i came up with and i was working on it for quite a while and my lab tried it furtively we were doing other projects so we really couldn't spend a lot of time with this and it looked like maybe it was working but it really wasn't very convincing and uh finally my uh technician who's been with me for now about three decades uh dave doroski and he said look at you really have got to give this a good try let's dig in and really do it right and so he and a great postdoc in my lab ayandra weracody worked together and tried this and they tried it with a number of different devices and they tried it with a number of different configurations and lo and behold it actually seems to work so we actually got power from the vacuum so let me show you uh the way that we measure this and this is measuring the current as a function of voltage so this is the current and this is the voltage and we're getting out about in this case about 75 nano amps and it's at a voltage of a few tenths of a millivolt and or almost a tenth of a millivolt and the way that we can tell that we're getting power is this is the sort of current voltage measurement that's also done for solar cells and there are four quadrants in the curve so if your curve falls in this quadrant as in up here you're using power if you fall in this quadrant the second quadrant or the fourth quadrant then you're actually producing power and this one is using power and in fact our devices put out about 70 watts per square meter which is actually not bad for little test devices that's close to what a solar cell puts out which is perhaps 200 watts per square meter and we then did this for different cavity thicknesses now you know that the thinner the cavity is the more uh modes it suppresses because the thinner the cavity is the more the it suppresses all wavelengths that are longer than the cavity than half than twice the cavity width and so we're suppressing more and more wavelengths as we make narrower cavities and that's just what we saw as we made narrower cavities either from the polymer or from the uh the sio2 we found that the narrower cavities gave us more current so you say well maybe this is just some sort of electrochemical reaction or there's some sort of a degradation mechanism that's just producing this the current it's like a little battery so if you calculate that we have um how many uh atoms we have in the insulator it turns out that if one charge were trapped at every insulator molecule uh the current we're seeing 20 nano amps would take about 3.2 microseconds for deplete for it to deplete but we see this current continuously here's a plot showing the current as a function of hours and actually we've done this for longer times the current comes out and it just keeps coming out then as another sanity check we took a look to see for example does it scale with area so this was a different set of devices and we made devices having edge sizes from roughly the micron range up to about 100 microns and yes the current does scale with area and we ended up taking more time in trying to disprove ourselves than we initially took to build these devices simply because the result is so unbelievable and we went through eight different sorts of tests to check whether what we were seeing might be due to an artifact another test that we did is to make arrays of these devices so if you make a four by four array of these devices then you ought to get out four times as much current and four times as much voltage we made two types of arrays one is this staggered array here and then we also made ones in which we had devices in parallel in series and in both cases we found that yes in fact the current out was about four times the current for a single device and the voltage out was also about four times that for a single device well might this be due to some electromagnetic pickup that we're picking up something from uh fields because they're electromagnetic fields all over the place from everything so we did a test in several different environments we tried in a new metal box a new metal box is a box that shields very low frequency electromagnetic radiation we also did it in an aluminum box and an aluminum box shields us from high frequency radiation and in both cases we got pretty much the same output as we got for the devices just sitting in ambient so okay what else might this be maybe maybe it's not zero point energy maybe it's uh due to cosmic rays so if you take a look at the known cosmic ray flux on earth that comes to about 10 000 particles per square meter per second and these are for one giga electron volt cosmic rays and so these end up for our very tiny devices corresponding to one hit every 160 years but we're getting current out continuously so it's not every 160 years well might it be something else might it be perhaps say something like neutrinos so we took a look and the highest neutrino flux turns out to give you about four hits per second for a device so that's a little more like it but the problem with neutrinos is that the capture rate for neutrinos is infinitesimal that is if you um go if the neutrino hits the earth it goes all the way through the earth without being scattered the amount of scattering is just one neutrino particle in a zillion and so there's no way no known way that neutrinos could cause this so we went through a number of different possible ways that this might be false that we might have have made a mistake here and we couldn't find any so is this real i mean if this is really real uh what are the the applications uh so you know the applications are everywhere uh the cost for making this is about the same cost per unit area as for making solar cells so we can make them big you can even stack them put them together in little boxes initially we're thinking well maybe we should make small batteries uh button cell batteries or coin cell batteries to be used in electronics mobile phones other things we could use them for lighting we could use them for electric vehicles they'd be there'd be electric vehicles where you don't ever need to recharge the battery it just runs indefinitely you could use it for desalinization we need water and desalinization is very energy intensive we could use it for wearable electronics for temperature control for industrial and home power units we could make aircraft and ships and space vehicles using this technology imagine airplanes flying overhead that didn't have that awful noise from the uh fuel-powered engines so just think about this free your imagination what are the what are the implications for this um the implications are immense uh we'd have no electric power cords uh we'd have no chords at all each device would be self-powered we'd have remote power globally everywhere anyone wanted it ubiquitous power 24 hours a day not limited by anything we could essentially eliminate the need for carbon-based power and stop producing these nasty greenhouse gases so the implications are huge okay well what do we know so far we know that casimir cavities adjoining an ultra fast charged transport device produce power and we've built thousands of these we've built uh hundreds of different types we've tested them over and over uh we've gone through a whole bunch of different types of self-tests and meters and everything we could think of we find that the cavity that the current increases as we reduce the cavity uh width or thickness and this is consistent with uh having a larger sink for zero point energy as we make these cavities uh narrower and so it's consistent with it being with the source being zero point energy but we certainly can't say that's what it is for sure we've checked for artifacts we checked for eight different types of artifacts and each of the checks ended up being negative we published this we published this in two papers uh one is a paper that came out in the journal symmetry and another in physical review research both of these are mainstream journals they're not the most [Music] widely read journals but they are respected and so what has the response of the scientific community been what are they saying given that this potential for something really radical has been described um none there's been essentially total benign neglect we've heard nothing from them and you know in the meantime my lab has published other papers we published another paper on something a lot less important uh in in the journal um uh what is it nature communications we got all sorts of press coverage interviews and so on but for this nothing why i suppose people just don't know what to make of it they just don't believe it so we really have uh met with some scientific challenges so the the challenge you know that we talked about first is the second law of thermodynamics so the second law of thermodynamics as i said can be described several different ways one way is to say that it's impossible to convert heat from a system at uniform temperature into work and this has been observed uh for uh more than a century and a half it was observed with steam engines and uh it's it's very well accepted in fact there's a famous quote by sir arthur eddington he said if somebody points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with maxwell's equations then so much the worse for maxwell's equations if it's found to be contradicted by observation well these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes but if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics i can give you no hope there's nothing for it but to collapse and deepest humiliation there's another quote from einstein and einstein said thermodynamics is the only physical theory which i am convinced will never be overthrown in fact it's not only the scientific community it actually enters into legal system and patents so the in the second law is actually being enforced the second law of thermodynamics is considered so fundamental that the u.s patent and trademark office will not consider patent applications that claim to violate it unless a working model is provided with the application so this is really a well-entrenched law so you say okay if there is such a law it must really be proven right i mean the scientific community must know that it's absolutely rigorously followed so is there a proof for the second law of thermodynamics well it's been observed since the invention of the steam engine it's been derived for idealized situations i teach it in my stat thermal class and in in this particular near equilibrium situation yes it is observed but there are assumptions in that derivation about the initial state and so no it has not been generally derived well at least no demonstrated violations are generally recognized right there are no violations aren't there isn't isn't that right i mean if there were the scientific community would know that so mainstream science is much more reliable right well um so there are a number of demonstrations daniel sheehan in 2014 published a paper on epic catalysis where he has two dissimilar metals in what should be a uniform temperature bath but because of the different reactions at the two surfaces he ends up seeing a temperature difference he published this he published exactly how he did it and the theory what did people say they ignored it uh recently a paper by thibodaux talked about thermal fluctuations in graphene and how these thermal fluctuations in graphene can be produce a current and this current can be harvested and he published this paper to a lot of acclaim now i don't claim to know have any particular insights into this but the way that he did it the way that he managed to publish it is that he said the second law is not violated because any energy that's being produced in one part of the circuit is being dissipated in another part of the circuit and so there are no temperature differences that are ultimately being created but something there uh sounds a little funny to me i think uh i will we'll have to see what he has to say in the future about this daniel sheehan has also uh uh published a talk on concentration gradients and membranes which also would violate the second law and they're certainly our work we've published two papers now on casimir cavity-induced currents so how many papers would have been published but they were simply rejected by the publishers and by patent examiners so you know you say okay well science is still working because uh you know mainstream science is is much more reliable and uh things are done right and so to uh discuss this i'd like to tell you a story about when i was a graduate student at harvard i was a beginning graduate student and i was working with a postdoc and we were working on someone more basilica and i won't tell you the details you don't need to know um but he had the notion that if you uh can deposit this amorphous silicon uh with uh by sputtering at a low argon pressure then the amorphous silicon would end up having a lot of defects with which the pressure which the argon energy did not get rid of and if you did it at too high in argon pressure there'd be also defects left there because the argon pressure was too high and blocked the defect removal but in the middle he suspected that there would be a sweet spot and we were going to use photoconductivity which i was measuring as a function of the quality to measure the quality of the film and so he expected something that would look roughly like this some sort of a sweet spot in the middle so we made some of these films and tested them and they looked something like this they didn't really follow the trend that he expected and he said well you know we had a beryllium substrate in the deposition system and beryllium is a known contaminant you know i think we need to do this again without the beryllium so we did it again and we got something that looked like that again a different trend but not not the trend that he was expecting so he said you know maybe we had a leak in our in our deposition system and maybe we ought to just try it again so we tried it again we got some data that looked like what he expected and we published it is that good science choosing the data you want and publishing that of course not but we were able to do it why because they were believable results it was what you would expect and uh so nobody argued but when you're pushing the envelope at that point you get all sorts of pushback and we got a lot of pushback when we were trying to publish the zero point energy paper from our reviewers two reviews that actually weren't that bad uh said the following one and critical reviewers that we shouldn't publish said perhaps the authors need to add a theoretical co-author to the paper to help come up with a plausible explanation for the effect another one said i still hope the authors could give at least some basic theoretical analysis and compare it to the experimental results before publication so what are they saying here they're saying you can't believe a result unless you have an explanation so does that mean i can't eat an apple and enjoy it unless i understand the the chemistry and the biology of how it grew and the uh the way that my digestive system works i cut out an article 30 years ago from physics today which is a journal uh read by by physicists in america and elsewhere and this was an article an opinion article written by philip anderson who won a nobel prize actually for theory and he said the following in the reviewing process excessive weight is given to theoretical interpretation we don't want to lose sight of the fundamental fact that the most important experimental results are precisely those that do not have a theoretical interpretation a major weakness in our approach as scientists is a collective unwillingness to welcome new or anomalous results and so we've got this question when do you accept new results and when do you not how do you find the balance you know the general argument is that science is self-correcting well maybe it is but how quickly is it quick enough i often am sent papers by scientists who have some theory that or some even experiment that just looks pretty wacky to me um and uh it's uh many of them are sort of in this einstein is wrong category or various sorts of energy measurements where they really did very poor measurements and so i think some of them might have been too gullible but maybe the mainstream isn't gullible enough is the second law inviable or has it already been violated but nobody believes it are renegade results worth investigating should we accept results that we have no explanation for so which is it is it a matter of the dogmatic mainstream suppressing breakthroughs or is it a mad scientist deluding himself by the way do you recognize this picture it's me um so which is it what do we do i think we've got to consider the implications the implications for this are immense we're in a world where a changing climate is more rapidly than we expected destroying us we're hungry for alternative energy sources is it good to invest in something that may or may not be right on the chance that maybe it'll really make a difference thank you you