Jovion Corporation - Zero-Point Energy

Transcript

if you get online and look for zero point energy devices or gadgets or things like that you're going to find lots and lots of claims dozens if not hundreds of claims of devices and conspiracies and things that are on the shelf but hidden from us and so i don't believe any of that what i'm presenting to you this morning is i think the real mccoy the real thing the problem is it's the real thing but we can't guarantee it's going to work i mean this is something that we we think may be revolutionary on the other hand we have to prove it experimentally so i'll talk to you this morning about the physics behind it this concerns the quantum vacuum energy patent that garrett modell and i issued a couple of years ago it's now assigned to the university of colorado and it concerns zero point energy now the zero point energy comes directly from the heisenberg uncertainty principle if you let any oscillator oscillate it will eventually come to rest because of friction in the case of a quantum oscillator it will never come to rest because the heisenberg uncertainty principle for bids taking the last little bit of energy out of anything so it was first proposed prior to the onset of quantum mechanics in 1912 and 1913 by max planck einstein otto stern who studied this in the context of the black body emission now interestingly it was sort of dropped from consideration for a number of years until quantum mechanics was developed in the 1920s and then zero point energy came directly out of the quantum mechanics formulations of that time and it's been part of quantum mechanics ever since you can calculate how much zero point energy there ought to be at any place in the universe you do this by looking at the the modes of the field i don't get too technical but modes of the field means any any given direction or frequency there is electromagnetic mode and if you sum all those up you get a frequency dependent spectrum that goes as frequency cubed and so the spectrum of the zero point energy goes as the frequency cubed which means it rises very rapidly unfortunately it rises to we don't know where it could be infinity which is a bit embarrassing because you don't want infinite amount of energy in the universe it could cut off at the plant frequency which still is enormously large so we just don't know where this cuts off but it goes as a frequency cubed spectrum now there are effects that can be attributed to zero point energy one of them is the casimir force if you put two plates close together you find that the the wavelengths of light or zero point radiation which is a form of light that are larger than the cavity the distance between the two plates in the cavity they can't exist there because of electromagnetic boundary conditions and so you have an under pressure you have more waves of zero point radiation outside of the casimir cavity than inside that causes the plates to be pushed together that's one way to explain the casimir force it's been measured casimir force is now a well established phenomenon it's not only been measured but it's also part of microtechnology these days because the casimir force is a candidate to use for control of microelectronic devices it's also responsible for an annoying problem called stiction which causes things at a very small scale to stick together so there's no doubt that the casimir force exists and that it's even a potentially useful thing or a potential nuisance depending upon how you look at it but it's certainly something that is part of modern technology the uh the force between parallel plates due to the zero-point field goes as the inverse square of the or the inverse fourth power of the distance between them that's also been measured very precisely now now while i've been emphasizing the casimir force in fact the casimir force is not necessarily attributed to the zero point field it's possible to reformulate all this in terms of the interactions of particles in the two plates with each other like a typical van der waals force kind of formulation and so the fact that the casimir force exists even though it seems to me to be a pretty good pretty good more than suggestion but less than a proof if zero point energy exists it's not a guarantee because there is alternate alternate formulation in terms of source theory however the quantum noise in the circuit has been measured and in my opinion the quantum noise in a circuit can be attributed directly to zero point energy and so it in my view it has been measured directly as if a real phenomenon the zero point energy exists now the measurement in the in the circuits has been at very low frequencies and so all we know for sure is that zero point energy exists at very low frequencies but we need for it to exist at fairly high frequencies to be useful in the context of this invention i'll be talking about the uh the device that we hope will be able to tap into zero point energy now the objections also raise sometimes that you can't actually extract energy from the zero-point field it can't do anything useful well there's actually a thought experiment that was published in 1984 already by bob forward that shows very clearly that yes you can do you can get work out of the zero point field there's no doubt about it it's not useful in this context but you can get you you can get work out of it we're hoping what we proposed is useful this is not useful but it's a demonstration of the principle if you take this this sort of spiral spiral plate and you charge it up with with electricity so it simply has positive or negative charge on it and you then rely on the casimir force that vax between the layers of the plates you can use the casimir force to press this this uh spiral together and in doing so you're increasing the electric field in the region while you're increasing electric field because you're causing the charges to get get closer together and so this is very useful for demonstrating the the the effect of the zero-point field doing work on this device and the problem is it can only do work during half a cycle if you wanted to recycle this you'd have to pull it apart again let the zero point energy then push things back together that's not very useful because it's going to take more energy to pull it apart than you get out of pushing it together but think of this as an engine that works one half of a cycle not useful but certainly demonstrates that zero point energy is doing work it actually does work here and that's the useful aspect of this so this was the robert forward battery experiment proposed in the mid-1980s now the basis of our experiment or our patent is the prediction of from theoretical physics that the ground state of hydrogen might be attributed to the zero-point energy now we all know that um the classical view of an atom that was developed in 1913 to try to explain the the early results of atomic physics show that there was a problem in the rutherford view of the atom which was having in the electron orbit around the nucleus just like a planet around the sun the problem with that of course is that as the electron goes around the nucleus it radiates energy alarm more radiation and it would quickly spiral into the nucleus and boom that's the end of the atom in less than a millionth of a second so clearly that model is wrong but what's been discovered since then in the in the 1970s and 80s was that if you let the electron spiral around the nucleus just the way a planet would around the sun yes it will emit lot more radiation but if you let it pick up energy from the zero point field you find interestingly that there's a balance between those two effects exactly at the bore radius so this strongly suggests that the bohr radius is not there because bohr said you are not allowed to decay rather at that point there's a balance between the amount of energy that a radiating electron will naturally emit as it orbits around the nucleus versus what it would pick up from the zero-point field and so we're kind of back to a classical view of an electron as something that is sort of real that's going around a nucleus that is ex that is destabilized in its orbit by zero point energy i don't want to take that too literally because i'm not really very happy with the thought of going to a 100 year old model of the electron going around the nucleus but the point is that zero point energy uh zero point energy contribution to the stability of whatever this orbit is exactly balances the emission that you would expect if this were a classical orbiting electron so there you have a schematic of it the stable orbit in quantum theory is provided by simply the the bore condition that you're not allowed to radiate whereas in our case the interpretation is one of a balance between two things radiation and emission of radiation of emission and absorption of emission from the zero-point field so um in quantum electrodynamics you have a prediction of zero-point energy but it's regarded as virtual electron energy states are determined by the wave function so what you see down here at the bottom is the uh the the classical or i must say classical sort of classical quantum probability density distribution of the electron orbital as a function of distance from the nucleus now as it turns out you can go a step further than the the previous hal put off analysis that i showed which indicates that the bohr radius there's a balance between the emission and absorption radiation you can actually go to simulations that show that if you let an electron sort of be buffeted around the as it be buffeted by the zero point fluctuations as it orbits around the nucleus in a coulomb field that in fact this probability distribution which is attributed usually simply to the uh the wave function of the electron can be reproduced by letting the the model of the zero-point field buffering the electron take place and so here's a simulation run by dan cole at boston university he took a classical electron let it orbit in a coulomb field let it be buffeted by the zero point fluctuations and looked at the position as a function of time of that electron and lo and behold it looks just like the the probability density function that you get from quantum mechanics and so it looks as if this model the sort of simplistic model of an orbiting electron does a pretty good job of giving you the the same important condition that you find from quantum mechanics um close to close up of the same thing the quantum probability density function for the ground state of hydrogen is a solid line and the the simulations using the the buffering of the zero point field on the electron is the the dashed line this is also um reproduced by um lj nickish at uh an institute in monterey who did the same thing but with his own with his own different uh with his own simulation program different from dan cole's so what is the the basis for our uh for our patent well in scd electron orbits are determined by this balance of mission and absorption and so if you take a you take an electron and an atom i should say and put it into a casimir cavity what you see here in the middle what you see here in the middle is the long wavelength radiation uh schematically represented by everything in green and shorter wavelength radiation from the zero-point field represented everything in purple and when the uh the ele the atom is sitting out in free space of course it sees the entire zero point radiation field when we insert it into a cavity that cavity then blocks out the longer wavelength aspects of the zero point field and so it's only reacting to the the the truncated zero point field which is represented by the the purple arrows and so since there's less zero point energy pumping up the electron in its orbital we would assume the electron would spiral inward slightly and as it does so give off some energy which energy then we would propose to capture and so this is the basic idea behind the patent so the idea is that if you have an atom and let's have it moving from from left to right through the system in free space the uh you might have an atom that has a number of electrons in particular probably we would use uh noble gases argon neon xenon or krypton because they have a number of outer shell electrons that can be active bonded by this effect in free space you have the uh several electrons in the the orbitals you'd expect when the atom enters a casimir cavity so you have plates here and the orange or the orange lines represent plates you would then expect some emission of radiation from the atom because the orbit is shrunk a little bit then the uh like the atom moves out of the region between the plates into free space again so this gray represents no casimir plates it's again pumped up by the zero point field goes back into its normal orbit goes through another casimir cavity and so on so you can have this take place many times in fact in our one of our prototypes or prototype concepts hundreds of times the atom would move through in and out in and out and out of casmir cavities and each time it does so it would emit some radiation that we would hope to capture so where's energy coming from well in fact the energy is always picked up when the atom leaves the casimir cavity it's being picked up from the universe at large we're drawing energy out of the zero-point field of the universe it's sort of like taking a thimble and taking water out of the ocean yeah we're using we're getting energy at the expense of something but it's something enormous something vast that's something that permeates the entire universe everywhere and so the view is that we are able to tap into this universal sea of zero-point energy using this device and down at the bottom we simply have a a schematic representation of a heat exchanger we don't know exactly whether where the radiation is going to come out and how to capture it that's part of the part of the problem we face now and trying to show experimentally this is going to work um capturing emitted energy it's oftentimes argued that we are making a mistake by assuming that there's an energy to be captured because as the atom is pushed into the cavity and and again is pushed out of the cavity somehow we're gaining we're tapping into that energy that we were hoping to capture to move the atom and i don't think that's the case because take for example an ordinary hydrogen atom and we have it in the we have it in the ground state so we have an atom of a hydrogen in the ground state there's the electron we illuminate with ultraviolet light and by luminating with ultraviolet light we cause an excitation of the first level so this is the lyman alpha transition at the 12 16 angstroms and so we have an excited atom and if we then have that atom enter into a region where there's an opaque shield not a casimir cavity just something to block out the ultraviolet light then clearly the the electron will drop down into its ground state orbit again emitting line alpha radiation and then it'll move out again and if we want to we can we can repeat the process now this is no good because we're supplying we're supplying the energy to do this but the point is that just because the uh the atom is emitting energy in in this region here where the excitation radiation is being blocked that's got nothing to do with any uh pressure gradient needed to push the atom out and so this is an analog of very simply analog what we're proposing to do with zero point radiation so i see no reason why there should be one and the analog is shown down here in the case of zero point radiation instead of ultraviolet light you have the zero point field you have casimir plates that block out the zero point field in the same way that these opaque shields block out the ultraviolet light the uh there's emission of light or whatever radiation form of radiation we don't know what part of the spectrum it will come out and then upon re-emergence again we expose it to the zero-point field and it's re-energized um i said could this be tested apart from well there two ways of course to test this idea one is to actually have energy generation take place in such a device another test would be a spectroscopic one and there are a couple of ones that i've thought about that i think would work one involves looking at the transition and outer shell transition of xenon one which is an opal gas the ordinary the ordinary transition between the outermost excited state and the the unexcited orbital is known to take place at 1469.6123 angstroms that's a well-known spectroscopic uh data point what i'm suggesting is we took xenon 1 and put it inside a casimir cavity both these orbitals would be influenced would be modified to some extent it's unlikely they'd be modified exactly the same way and so there's probably some differential between these two orbits and so we would expect to measure a spectroscopic line in 1469.6123 plus or minus delta angstroms so unless we happen to be extremely unlucky and have the effect have the zero point field effect occur exactly the same for both these orbitals there should be some differential here and so this spectroscopy experiment would show whether in fact orbitals are influenced by the zero point field the way we hope um the problem with this is that you'd have to do it in vacuum because this radiation is at 1400 angstroms you can't do it in air you have to do it in vacuum that's difficult then because you have to put all your instrumentation into a vacuum chamber and so on there's a simpler way to do it do it with hydrogen because you can do the same trick in this case we're looking at the the balmer lines of hydrogen the transitions from the n angles three to n equals two states 65 63 angstroms one of the most well-known lines in all spectroscopy or astrophysics and again we would expect to have a differential effect between these two orbitals so that the the bomber line would be shifted to 6563 plus or minus some delta delta and xtremes now this is simpler because you don't have to do this in in vacuum you can do this in air the difficulty is that hydrogen is is not monotonic it naturally comes as a molecule so you have to dissociate the hydrogen and at the same time excite the the hydrogen molecules and then look at the cascade the recombination spectrum to see whether such a shift takes place so this is a second spectroscopic test it doesn't suffer from the vacuum chamber requirement but then suffers from the fact you have to you have to dissociate the hydrogen molecules and excite the resulting atoms into the state where you have been a recombination that at the end will give you a bomber spectrum line that is shifted because of the effects of the casimir plates so the way to do this on a large scale would be to build for example plates that have metallic strips put on them so that the the atoms would flow through casimir cavities you see that here's a casimir cavity and i just cut the top plate off so you can see the inside of this thing so so uh the gas flow would go this way crossing casimir cavities in and out in and out and out of casimir cavities and device like this can can accommodate a million or more casimir cavities it's very simple to build such a device another one might be like this a stack of uh conductor and non-conducting layer plates with casimir tunnels on the order of a tenth to one micron in diameter and again the the atoms would simply flow through in this case a tunnel a tunnel that consists of many many thousands of casimir cavities each time it passes into and out of a casimir cavity it would hope to pick up some some energy and another way that in fact if larry limpy's in the room i'll thank him for this another way to do that is to have a rotating device looks very much like a cd a stack of cds and the rotation of this will naturally pull gas through it and as the the the gas then flows down the center and out through along the uh uh the discs the discs of course have have casimir cavities etched on them you again get the same kind of effect so there are various ways to do this and um we're hoping that this will be a new energy source if we're correct this is a game changer i mean it would be a free energy source it would change things dramatically on the other hand we've yet to demonstrate that the effect actually occurs we have these good theoretical reasons to think it does but you know theoretical reasons are one thing experimentation is something else we hope to fabricate a prototype garrett's been working on this we did have some funding for a time from darpa and the results from that were inconclusive there was also some private funding and the experiment is still going on at a very low level here at the university we need another several million dollars to do this right to do this properly and the design is based on microchip technology which gary tells tells me and told all of us last night is pretty easy to do and pretty cheap to do so the cost of building one of these things if it works like this would be very very low and we're hoping that this demonstration can be built here at the university and show the effect and that this then becomes a game-changing result that emerges from within the ssc let's put it that way and i think i'm done do we have time for just a few questions bernie you didn't say anything about the the material is it is is that uh the cashmere plates is can it be metallic or yeah it's got to be metallic it's got to be conducting they have to be conducting faculty conducting have to be conducting at the right wavelength too because if you go far enough in the ultraviolet materials lose their conductivity so that's that is another issue we're sort of in a narrow range where it has to be the cavity has to be a certain size and yet if we go down to that size we may be stretching the conductivity properties of the the boundaries of the plates so it's it gets a bit finicky and a bit tricky but garrett will solve all that over here does it the effect gets stronger as you get smaller dimensions right so is is there a point at which you can make this uh a smaller scale device and get more energy or is there sort of a trade-off if it does yeah if the theory is correct then the electron when it loses sort of the support of the radiation at one wavelength it drops down into a lower lower orbit and that may that then be stabilized by the higher energies of the zero-point field so the further drops more energy comes out in principle yes yeah that's right yes um yeah you and last night you talked about the size and uh how how much energy you're going to get yes it doesn't clear to me you know how much of that energy you're going to be able to capture yeah how can you make these estimations without knowing that that's a swag um i was assuming that we had perhaps one electron volt per transition of an atom through the cavity in the case of hydrogen the uh the ionization is 13.6 electron volts and so i'm assuming we have something like a few percent of the energy of the the the the ionization a few percent of the effective ionization energy from a given level it but it is a swag it's a guess okay it's clear that this uh talk has generated lots of questions which we won't have time for at this time hopefully bernie will be available at the break i'll be around and later so thank you again