Where is Horace H. these days, with winter's deep freeze setting-in? Shoveling piles of snow? Speaking of piles of cold stuff, there is a lingering resonance today from this thread over a year ago, which mentions the Clarendon dry pile, *which has been running for over 160 years* in case you do not remember that shocking <g> bit of trivia; and is the closest thing to macro perpetual motion which is out there (but it will stop eventually):
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg35190.html http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/DryPile.pdf <http://www.mtaonline.net/%7Ehheffner/DryPile.pdf> That chapter of vortician madness is deep enough with unresolved questions- but now with even more new twists. Think about this: a Casimir "boiler" on one side, opposite a Casimir "freezer" on the other - and with a compound axis pendulum in between ? What the hay, you say? Well, a story on Sterling Allan's site today led me to this article: http://ppp.unipv.it/Collana/Pages/Libri/Saggi/Nuova%20Voltiana3_PDF/cap5/5ne w.pdf And there are implications for transposing this into a modern context, due to all of the memes which are floating around cyberspace. At any rate, there is the whole thing about the Casimir geometry - attraction or repulsion, or an oscillation of both in the same device. And then there is the mystique of the ZPE driven electrostatic 'battery' or pile, which arguably does not deplete. Ever. Of course, 160 years ago, the pile in question was made in a way so that it will deplete, as it does involve non-reversible chemistry - but chemistry may be completely unnecessary to achieve kilovolts of potential at perhaps 100 nanoamps. If ZPE is real, and that is almost a given. More on the details of this madness later. Teasers: BoPET (Mylar), ITO (indium tin oxide), sputter deposition, negative energy, FRET, near fields, Casimir cooling . Jones
