Here is an interesting little video from a Mexican builder of fabulously interesting dynamic gadgets (aka SkyCollection) - whose handiwork many of us have followed over recent years:
http://www.youtube.com/user/skycollection#p/a/f/1/JRdHbcB7MYE This kind of imaginative gadgetry is somewhere between art and science, and is most provocative for a number of aesthetic reasons that imply excess energy, if not magic. For other observers, the interest is more art than science in the sense of converting Rube Goldberg into precision devices of very high efficiency. Anyway, the purpose of this posting, featuring this device, is to show visually and verbally the complexity involved in defining where energy comes from - the energy that allows the levitating rotor to spin and dance as it does. It may be a surprise - but the ultimate gain can be said to come from Quantum Mechanics. It is a chore to explain that further. To understand how quantum mechanics is even involved at all, you have to go back several levels in time. In Law, and in Science, there is "proximate cause" and "ultimate cause" and within the category of 'proximate' there can be a progression of levels, each further back in time, in a chain of cause and effect - which this video helps to demonstrate. Looking at causation we first see an electrically energized coil and spinning permanent magnets. That is one level of proximity. The electrical charge is held in capacitors, which is a second level. The solar cell provides electrical current to charge the capacitors - the third level of proximate cause, and that is where most of us stop - but beyond the photocell, there is a big nuclear reactor which we call the sun. But is nuclear energy the "ultimate" source of gain that allows the rotor to spin? Probably not. The photons that power the device come not from the sun itself but from a corona around the sun, which is much hotter than the sun itself - and the photons start out as ultraviolet radiation, much of which is downshifted into visible light and are produced outside the sun. Although the corona would not "work" to produce UV without the nuclear reactions in the sun, those reactions do NOT emit these photons, the ones which the solar cell receives, so they are arguably NOT the ultimate cause of the motion we see in the rotor. Those photons ultimately come from the corona, and if Randell Mills is correct, this is best explained in his version of QM (which he wants to deny is really QM). Go figure. The most important future concern - in trying to fully understand ultimate source of gain in Ni-H reactions, e.g. in the progression from Thermacore to DGT is that only the thermal gain has been harnessed so far. The thermal gain comes from another level (going back in time) and that reaction also gives us UV (if Mills is correct) but this UV does not necessarily go back further to a nuclear reaction. That is the magic of nickel. Understanding how the reaction proceeds, and in great detail has been the main contribution to our understanding of the world from Randell Mills. He did get it right wrt the solar corona, at least, and probably with Ni-H he is half-right. The source of thermal gain in Ni-H is almost certainly not strongly related to phonon motion (the heat itself), which is an effect, and not a cause. Phonons are the evidence of gain, but not the ultimate cause. We can be pretty certain that the gain is not chemical, if we define chemical as relating to valence electrons, and redox reactions, etc since no known chemical reactions produce the amount of heat seen. A workable premise is that the ultimate source of gain is not "nuclear" in the sense of reactions that transmute one nucleus to another kind of nucleus, but nevertheless the proton (which is a nucleus) is intimately involved. This leaves one option open for ultimate cause of non-chemical excess heat, and it has been called "supra-chemical" among other things, since gain comes from inner electron orbitals where the ionization potential produces UV light. You can use Mills theory or not, but the key is UV emission and proton mass is being converted to energy in the form of UV photons in a way that leaves the proton unchanged (in identity). The bottom line of all of this is that the UV source is a falsifiable premise with lots of experimental evidence backing it up - and if it is accurate, which we will know soon - then it is counterproductive to look at converting the heat from Ni-H into electricity via steam or any normal kind of heat engine. If and when UV light is available direct from the Ni-H reaction - then direct conversion into electricity from a photocell, not unlike the one being used by SkyCollection in this video - is all that will be needed to fully implement the technology in a way that gets us off of the grid - and the inherent danger of a grid that is both too fragile and too expensive. Jones
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