The original title of this article was "The Summer of MAHG" and is available at:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/aH-gen/message/133 Since Jones is on a posting hiatus, I thought he wouldn't mind if I resurrected one of his better speculative posts from the summer of 2005. <start> With the normal "caveat" that IF the reported JLN results are reliable... then....what does it all mean? As mentioned recently, there is the chance that the MAHG is operating as a Casimir heat pump for ZPE. In this hypothetical process, the device is utilizing the energy asymmetry of isomeric para-ortho-hydrogen to cohere the most universal ZPE frequency. Most likely the frequency involved is that associated with the 21 cm hydrogen line and the CMB (cosmic microwave background). Both the microwave resonance of the tube and the collision rate are suggestive of this being the case. This is low energy non-ionizing radiation, but the universe is awash in it (even if it is in another dimension). The Casimir heat engine has actually been forecast for quite some time in a different form (more like the Maxwell-Demon idea) - since at least the time of Robert Forward. If Casimir is the MAHG modality, it raises a number of fascinating issues, including one issue relating to gravity. I will save that for another time, but touched on it previously in a posting about Sakarhov's contention of gravity itself being a relic of ZPE. We will hope that at some point, a mass measurement will be made of MAHG during OU operation - however the 100 watts of OU is not much in the way of mass-equivalent, without very high precision. It is clear from the 'lack of traffic' recently on this device, that most observers would prefer to play a waiting game until more is known officially, and until JLN confirms the excess heat. Very understandable! And if pressed, I might agree that the chances of winning the Lottery are better than the realistic chances of this being anything but measurement error... nevertheless, the upside of it being real... wow... that is like ALL of society winning the equivalent of a Lotto jackpot at the same time. This makes the prospect of an old guy wasting a few hundred hours in the "gray-lab" rather trivial, if that effort might ultimately help to stimulate others to get involved. Therefore, for the past several weeks or so, I have been willing to suspend disbelief (and all other obligations) and have thought of little else than the question - "how could it work, if it does produce excess heat." This is the latest installment of that vision-quest - knowing full well that it could all be a tempest-in-a-teapot... but also being able to sense the thin chance of success juxtaposed to the earth-shattering ramifications.... but then again... having followed "alternative energy" since 1989 and been disappointed about twice per year, it is clear that the batting-average for such claims is not good. There are three 'coincidences' with this device which seem to make it different. The problem with analyzing MAHG is that it is neither a plasma device nor a gas-phase device, nor technically even a vacuum device (in operation) but lies somewhere in between. There is an apparent negative electrical bias to the gas, i.e. some current through the gas; but as plasmas go, this one is very cool. In the most favorable incarnation of MAHG, the parameters of the device are ~5 watts of electric power-in (12+ volts and 8 amps at 5% duty cycle) which are put into a 80 torr H2 filled chamber, but incredibly 100 watts of heat is given up at the wall-anode. There is barely enough heat being generated at the anode to push the cathode near the claimed temperature, so the actual OU is even greater than what is reported. But even at best, these operating parameters are too low to cause very much ionization, and only negligible atomic hydrogen. Therefore, even though the device was built to accomplish one goal, it appears closer to being the serendipitous discovery of an interlocking set of operating parameters - which accomplish an even grander goal than it was originally intended to do. On to some of the details. Frederick Sparber obtained ~5,400 K as the effective temperature of the H2 molecules in the MAHG by dividing the ~100 watts (joule-sec) power output by the number of molecules in the chamber, giving about 0.46 eV per molecule. However at the anode, we have a 300 K temperature limitation and perhaps 2.5 degrees delta-T in the range. Normally with such a high collision rate as is seen internally, we would not expect this to be possible.The PV = nRT equation is pretty much being fooled by the Gibbs' paradox. As mentioned earlier QM - Quantum mechanics requires that the wave function of a molecule must be antisymmetric with respect to the interchange of the space coordinates of two fermions (spin = 1/2), and symmetric for the interchange of bosons (spin = 1). Consequently there are two kinds of hydrogen molecules in the singlet state, namely, ortho-hydrogen (symmetric, with parallel nuclear spins ) and para-hydrogen (antisymmetric, with antiparallel nuclear spins). There is a small energy "gap" between the two, indicative of the entropy. At low temperature p-H2 will exist in a virtually pure state. The conversion of o-H2 to p-H2 is exothermic and a function of temperature OR catalytic contact. It is also a spin alignment issue which could be influenced by a negative bias in the gas caused by current flow, or by near-fields at the tube wall. Perhaps the negative bias in the gas serves the purpose of both mass-transport and exotherm at the anode, but the isothermal reversion of p-H2 to o-H2, in the gas itself, happens without the "degenerate" electron giving up its own energy. The energy is recouped by ZPE - most likely in the gas itself, which (not coincidentally) has a collision rate alignment coincidentally near the 1.42 GHz resonance line of H2, which can be assumed for these purposes to be a strong ZPE frequency at the low end of the range. Just getting back to the ortho state requires an energy input but not necessarily kinetic energy - and that is the key. This involves a change in quantum spin, which is not required to be a product of heat transfer. This has ZPE written all over it, even if the details are not spelled out yet. And there are probably at least two different thermodynamic mechanisms taking place involving spin and kinetics. When hydrogen is cooled from room temperature (300 K) the ortho-hydrogen component converts from a negentropic equilibrium concentration of 75% (3-1 ratio of ortho-to-para) down to 50% at 77K, which is never reached in this tube, of course but there are catalytic effects on the tube wall, which can accomplish the conversion of o-H2 to p-H2 which is exothermic, due to temporary hydride formation. Remember the anode wall is sputtered with lots of tungsten, and has a very high surface area. Without this, the tube will not function. There may even be better catalytic metals available than tungsten. When o-H2 approaches this interface there is something unusual poised to happen as the interstitial spaces within the metal matrix are similar in volume to the approaching molecule, but slightly smaller - plus this mechanism probably also involves that singularity mentioned earlier - in the case of tungsten hydride: there are at least 5 bonding states between tungsten atoms, all of them have may have potential energy-spreads. Most likely some of these bonding states (which is most unusual and perhaps is a singularity in the periodic table) can catalytically induce the exotherm while not really allowing a stable hydride bond to form. Then when the para-hydrogen, having given up its energy (at the rate of over a billion times per second per molecule) reverts back into the chamber it is induced to revert to the ortho state by the "virtual spin" of a gas-collision rate which is coincidently the same 1.42 billion times per second per molecule frequency of the CMB. Even an extra (fractional) billionth of an eV in spin energy, at this rate of collision will amount to a lot of excess energy being available at the anode wall. The specific heat is the amount of heat per unit mass required to raise the temperature of a target mass by one degree. The relationship between heat and temperature change is usually expressed in the form shown below where c is the specific heat. The relationship does not apply if a charge bias or phase change is encountered, because the heat added or removed during a phase change does not change the temperature, and an added negative bias can throw everything into disarray. Anyway, Q = c*m*d-T where Q is the heat added. We wish that we knew the actual current passing through the gas. This is not clear. The coulombic energy (i.e.electrostatic energy) of an electron-biased gas changes everything, even when the electrons are "cold" (and there are few stable H2- ions). An ampere of electrons captured in H2 gas at any one time in a volume of half a liter would add energy due to coulombic repulsion approximately equal to an atomic bomb, so even small charge imbalances are important - and we do not know how unbalanced the charge is here yet, and how it affects the ideal gas law. If we ignore coulombic repulsion, the specific heat of depends on density and temperature. At higher density and low temperature of the MAHG an electron gas, and probably even a negatively-biased gas-phase H2 becomes "degenerate" and the specific heat is very low. To capture ZPE in such a circumstance, instead of just a normal kinetic transfer, may actually require such a cold population of "virtual" degenerate electrons. "An Aether Model of the Universe" by Dr Allen Rothwarf, is a paper which touches on this aspect of ZPE coherence, but it does not seem to be online any more except for this abstract: http://itis.volta.alessandria.it/episteme/ep6/ep6-aeth.htm There are many PhD level investigators heavily involved in ZPE and the "Casimir connection" but most have difficulty making that necessary dimensional "systems" separation which is a pre-requisite to get over the "something-for-nothing problem." Some will say incoherently that "We cannot get something for nothing-this would violate the conservation of energy and the second law of thermodynamics. But maybe we can find a convenient way to pay for the vacuum energy and thereby use it profitably." Rubbish. We can and do get something for nothing all the time in QM. It is happening all around us, in every cell in our bodies 24/7 but at the quantum level. What we need to do is find a convenient way to convert the low probability of QM into an everyday Macro-resource. Nature will take care of the balancing act elsewhere. Everyone reading this posting is accomplishing this very thing now. Modern computer CPUs - the Pentium or Power PC - all use quantum tunneling to operate, which is a normally low probability phenomenon, but which has been engineered into everyday reality. The presence of the ZPF is predicted by QED (Quantum Electrodynamics) but even QED does not go far enough - we must incorporate the Dirac epo field to get the true picture of what is going on. QED is limited in its coverage of the total system in 4 dimensions. In the ZPE ground state, the equations indicate that ordinary physical photons are not present, yet "potential electromagnetic energy" is present - and vibration at that exact frequency seems to be the stimulus that converts the potential into the real. This is what is happening in the MAHG (apparently). The presence of zero-point fluctuations have been verified experimentally with the Lamb Shift, the magnetic moment of the electron, chemical isomers such as para-ortho-H2 and the Casimir force and the CMB. Here we have a situation where all of them are involved and inter-related.. QED predicts an energy density for the vacuum that goes as the cube of the frequencies, but the only part which is generally recoverable in our 3-space is much narrower - and in this case may be limited to a single frequency. This device will not solve all our problems - but low grade heat is a big step in the right direction. In general relativity, energy has an equivalent mass, given by E = mc^2, and is therefore coupled to gravity in 3-space. Most of the mass equivalent is "frozen" into the one-space epo lattice. Some theorists believe that the black hole and other very dense objects connect directly to this one dimensional space and can channel energy back and forth to "balance the books" which is basically how the Laws of Thermodynamics work on a large scale, and the reason that these laws can never be "disproven" ... only redefined. They will be redefined when the Casimir/ZPE energy resource has been engineered to provide free-energy to out 3-space on a regular basis, even if it is small at first. This enormous zero-point energy density, if the experts are correct, would be equivalent to a mass density of over a metric ton per cubic centimeter, and would be expected to cause an enormous gravitational field if it were in our 3-space, but it is not. Those high energy applications may follow from that realization, but as for now, smaller is better. Luck may have been involved, and the MAHG could be the fortuitous break that we needed to tie all these loose ends of theory together. That would not diminish the role of Nicholas Moller in any way - one must actively put oneself into a position to benefit from good fortune - should it come your way. Time will tell, but I must admit that the 'silence is deafening' from the point of view of a July holiday that is anything but relaxing. Jones <end>
