On Sun, 21 Jun 2009, Michel Jullian wrote: > Assuming for a moment the plasma was actually holding excess > electrons, why wouldn't they just fly to the inside of the glass > envelope, which is of course positively charged, and remain stuck on > that dielectric? This would result in a larger capacitor with the same > charge, i.e. a drop in capacitor voltage.
I finally noticed the word "hiddink." I thought this thread was about general principles, rather than about this patent: http://www.rexresearch.com/hiddink/hiddink.htm Yep, Michel has it right: a plasma is somewhat like a liquid metal, and if you used it for capacitor plates, they'd flow towards each other. Hiddink has wrong ideas: if a conductive capacitor plate suddenly becomes an insulator, then its charge must disappears? No. Its charge just becomes immobile, either trapped on the gas ions, or trapped on surfaces where the gas ions migrated. Metal is to plastic, as salt-water is to ice. Saltwater is a conductor because it's full of movable charges, but when you freeze it, it turns insulating. The charges just get solidified, they don't disappear. BIG PROBLEM: What if Bequerel had stuck to his guns, and insisted against all evidence that uranium can store sunlight? Imagine what might have happened if he'd sneeringly kept pushing his private theory, the one where uranium fogs film plates only if you leave the uranium ore in sunlight first. That was Bequerel's original idea. Because it went against observations, he discarded it. If he'd hotly defended it against everyone, used namecalling against all critics, and refused to slightly consider that he might be wrong, then it's certain that other researchers would recoil in disgust. And next, they'd refuse to try replicating the effect. Perhaps they'd even ignore his first report: that uranium fogs film. BIGGER PROBLEM: crackpots are crackpots whenever they discover a new unexplained phenomenon, then skip over any need for detailed description. Instead they jump immediately to pushing their personal idea, fight any suggestion of their own error, and perhaps hide any parts of their observations which don't fit their theories. (Hmmm, what if Hiddick didn't see any lightning at all, but heard a loud bang?) And, if their theories are genuinely flawed and crazy ...then nobody tries replicating the anomaly, and everyone ignores the crackpot's original observations. The same thing happened with Hutchison Effect. Hutchison pushes all sorts of personal theories, refuses to consider that they might be wrong, and is therefore labeled as a crackpot. No professional researcher bothers to check whether his anomalies can be replicated, or even considers the possibility that they might have been real. Possibly the same thing happened with the Searl effect: a genuine gravity phenomenon is ignored because its discoverer uses it to promote an incorrect personal theory, while rejecting all possibility of personal error. So, what if everything Hiddick observed ...is actually real? His explanation of the phenomenon still could be wrong. Suppose he'd started out by trying to verify an incorrect theory, then stumbled over a weird phenomenon by accident? In his mind, finding any odd event is certain proof that his earthshaking theory must be true. But Murphy's Law says that the odd event is a matter of dumb luck, and it has nothing to do with the theory that led him to that experiment. On the other hand, the discovery of an EMP "death ray" is probably best left in the alt-science netherworld, forgotten and untested. (((((((((((((((((( ( ( ( ( (O) ) ) ) ) ))))))))))))))))))) William J. Beaty SCIENCE HOBBYIST website billb at amasci com http://amasci.com EE/programmer/sci-exhibits amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair Seattle, WA 206-762-3818 unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci
