Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Casimir Torque Project

From: Adrian Tymes <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 May 2005 13:50:38 -0700 (PDT)

--- Hal Finney <[email-masked]> wrote:
> I gather that you realize that this is a perpetual motion machine of
> the
> first kind - it violates conservation of energy.

You didn't read my full explanation.  ;)

As I said, it does not.  It's a convertor of energy.  Energy source
in: quantum fluctuations.  Energy source out: mechanical (which is then
converted to electrical).

Now, what happens when quantum fluctuations are drained of energy?
Nobody knows - but there were laboratory experiments in the 80s and 90s
showing that it is possible to at least take local QFs to a different
potential energy state.  (Google on "Casimir effect", or check
Wikipedia.)  There is a chance that there's only so much energy that
can be drained from that source, and that nothing will refill it; if
so, then this would not work.  But there have been theories that, were
QFs to be tapped like that, replacement energy would diffuse in from
outside.  (To a limit, of course: if you placed the entire system in a
QF-impermeable box, you'd eventually use up all of the energy.)

Again, at this point it looks like the only real way to see what will
happen is to actually build it and observe.  I've lost track of how
much time I spent going over the theoretical problems, but in the end,
science is about actual experiments.

> I'm not saying that you can't spend
> your
> time doing whatever you like, but people should not expect this
> machine
> to work.

I'm not betting the farm that it will work, unless and until I can
produce a working prototype.  (One of the factors slowing progress is
that I'm doing this on the side, while a different job pays the bills.)
I definitely agree: no one should be betting anything on my success
until after the fact - *if* it happens.  At the moment, I haven't even
taken any funding - it's all out of my own pocket.  (There have been
discussions about getting some funding for the NEMS development alone,
the project itself aside.  It looks like I definitely will wind up with
a non-trivial nanostructure, in any event.)
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From: Mike Lorrey <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 May 2005 14:08:45 -0700 (PDT)

--- Hal Finney <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Adrian Tymes writes:
> > http://www.wingedcat.com/ct/casimirtorque.txt
> > http://www.wingedcat.com/ct/casimirtorque.gif
> > ...
> > The general reaction I've gotten from academics who know quantum
> > physics is that it doesn't violate what we know - but they don't
> want
> > to say it should work unless I can produce a working prototype.
> 
> the first kind - it violates conservation of energy. It's no
> different in principle from the overbalanced wheels of the
> medievals.  Just because it relies on quantum effects, that
> doesn't free you from the need to conserve energy. I'm curious who
> these academics are who are so willing to imagine
> that a machine can work which violates such a fundamental principle
> 
> Mike Lorrey will probably complain that I am being a naysayer.  

Yup. Adrian, welcome to the Perpetual Propellerhead Brotherhood.

As I'd once said, Prof. John Cramer once said my Lorrey drive would
work if the working mass operated in the relativistic range (as did
Sasha).

> I'm sorry,
> but at this point in time I don't see how we can credibly propose to
> violate the laws of physics.  I'm not saying that you can't spend
> your time doing whatever you like, but people should not expect this
> machine to work.  You would do better to apply your budding
> micromachining skills to a design that is consistent with the laws
> of nature.

I'm gonna start working on my fricassied crow recipe. Either Hal is
wrong, or a whole lot of physicists are gonna have to give back their
Nobel prizes...

Hal, Hal, Hal......any idiot can figure out how to make nano-wing-nuts
once they master the common skills. Yes, you can probably make a mint
figuring out how to make nano-wing-nuts in mass quantities, but
wing-nuts don't win nobel prizes, nor do they save the world.

Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com

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From: Mike Lorrey <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 May 2005 14:13:04 -0700 (PDT)

--- Adrian Tymes <[email-masked]> wrote:
> much time I spent going over the theoretical problems, but in the
> end, science is about actual experiments.

Not on this list, it's about giving flippant and self assured excuses
for doing nothing and why whoever is doing something is wasting their
time and list bandwidth.

Mike Lorrey

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From: Adrian Tymes <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 May 2005 11:15:44 -0700 (PDT)

--- Hal Finney <[email-masked]> wrote:
> As I understand it, this device consists of a disk that has a metal
> square in the center and a metal ring around the outside.  Between
> the
> disk and the ring are specially shaped black body structures which
> block
> the Casimir force.  The whole thing is one piece and rigid.

Incorrect: the ring is mechanically separate from the rest of the
device.  The black body structures and the metal square in the center
are rigid with respect to each other, though.

> Your
> design
> is intended to produce a net unbalanced torque force, such that if
> this
> device were suspended in a vacuum in empty space, it would
> spontaneously
> begin spinning, superficially at least violating conservation of
> angular
> momentum and conservation of energy principles.  Is that right?

That is correct, if by "superficially" you mean "from a point of view
that fails to recognize the actual source of energy" - which is an easy
oversight to make if one is not familiar with quantum mechanics.

> The problem that I see with your design is elementary.  You try to
> arrange the black body shields so that the unblocked places on the
> rim
> are attracted towards the center square with a net torque.  But you
> have
> forgotten Newton's third law!  Every action has an equal and opposite
> reaction.  This means that if the rim is attracted to the center
> square,
> then the center square is equally attracted back to the rim.  And the
> torque due to the center square is exactly the opposite of the torque
> due to the rim.  These will cancel each other out and it won't spin.

Actually, by that analysis, the post would spin the opposite way from
the ring.  Total angular momentum of the entire system would continue
to be zero, even if the pieces themselves move with respect to one
another: plus and minus cancel out.  (Consider two interlocked gears,
flat on a table.  Turn one gear one way, and the other gear turns the
other way.  There's an issue with where you get the energy to spin the
gears in the first place, but the fact of counterbalancing torque to
conserve angular momentum does not itself freeze the system in place.)

The post and shields should indeed experience some torque.  While these
will be fixed to a large external mass in practice, it is possible that
a sufficiently large array of these would cause that large external
mass to rotate.  But since this would be in the opposite direction of
spin from the rings, the rings would still spin relative to the posts.
Any generator assembly would probably be fixed relative to a post, and
thus be able to extract energy from the ring's relative spin.

This does not appear to be the core issue of your objection, though.

> Consider a large model of your device, which instead of using the
> Casimir
> force, uses rubber bands.  Stretch rubber bands between each
> unblocked
> point on the rim and each unblocked point on the central square.
> Your analysis still goes through!

No it doesn't.  When the point of the band that's on the ring travels
beyond the blackbody shield, the band would wrap around the shield and
produce a counterbalancing force.  As I stated in another post, the
Casimir force doesn't act like that.  Magnetic force does, and that may
be what you're trying to draw an analogy to.  But this is closer to
optics, where the lines do not warp unless there is some medium change
making them warp - but the curved path the rubber band would occupy to
get around the shield, is occupied only by empty space.

To analogize to the rubber bands, imagine if they could stretch but not
bend - and vanished if they were forced to bend.  In fact, try to
imagine rubber bands made of photons bouncing back and forth:
obviously, such a band that is "cut" will disappear as all of its
photons are absorbed by the cutting material.  (In this case, the
blackbody shields intersect and thus "cut" the band.)  Now imagine that
new rubber bands appear, pre-stretched, between the ring and the post
as new sections of the ring are uncovered with respect to the post.

Actual rubber bands don't act like that, of course.  But the force I'm
tapping doesn't act like actual rubber bands.  (At least, by current
academic understanding it doesn't.  If my experiment proves that it
does act that way - which would indeed cause the device not to produce
energy - then that's a significnat revision to our understanding of
quantum mechanics.  Which isn't to say that it won't happen, just that
the experiment would be worth doing even in that case.  Finding a way
to make light bend in free space, without any refractive material at
the actual point of the bend, has its own applications.)
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From: Adrian Tymes <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 May 2005 11:36:54 -0700 (PDT)

--- scerir <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Any work, against the (supposed conservative) 
> Casimir force, when the plates are spinning?

Ah, but that's the key: *supposed* conservative.  It is in the parallel
plate model that was originally proposed, and part of my inspiration
for this was noting all the failed attempts to extract energy from this
that were running into the issue of conservation.  I was also slightly
inspired by the specific problems cold fusion had faced: measurement
errors in energy input potentially overwhelmed the energy output...but
what about a system that had no energy input (from us, anyway), so any
energy output would necessarily be net energy output?

Note that I'm not using parallel plates, nor am I letting the plates
actually approach one another.  Thus, I don't need to put energy back
into the system to pull them apart.  From that perspective, it is
conservative: zero minus zero equals zero.

(I suppose another analogy here might be a sailboat sailing at an angle
to the wind.  Set things up right, and wind impacts sail, sail pulls
against boat, boat steers against the water, and boat can travel almost
any direction along the water's surface - perhaps not directly into the
wind, but see "tacking".  Now, what happens to the sailboat if it sails
behind a cliff on one side of a small island that cuts off the
wind...and what happens if it's chained to a boat in front of it, going
in the same direction, that's just emerged from behind the cliff on
the other side of the island?)
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From: [email-masked] ("Hal Finney")
Date: Thu, 5 May 2005 12:07:29 -0700 (PDT)

> are rigid with respect to each other, though.

Okay, I apologize for misunderstanding this part.  So we could imagine
instead fixing the central square, in which case the outer ring would
begin to rotate, right?

I still don't think it will work.  Here is an explanation of Casimir force,
from http://www.du.edu/~jcalvert/phys/casimir.htm

"The Casimir Force is an electric force, but its origin is different
from that of ordinary electric forces. It is a purely quantum-mechanical
effect arising from the zero-point energy of the harmonic oscillators that
are the normal modes of the electromagnetic field. The electromagnetic
field must satisfy certain boundary conditions at the surfaces of our
conducting plates, and these boundary conditions rule out some of the
modes (oscillators) that would otherwise exist in unbounded space. Since
there are fewer oscillators between the plates, there is less zero-point
energy in this region. If the plates are brought closer together, this
volume of smaller energy density is decreased, while the volume of normal
zero-point energy density is increased.  Since this results in an overall
gain of energy to the universe, a force pressing the plates together is
the result."

This is consistent with the concept of a conservative force.  The force
results from a change in the potential energy of the system.  In a
conventional parallel-plates Casimir force test, the ZPE is lower in
the region between the plates, and so moving the plates together is
energetically favorable.  This is what produces the force.

If you apply this concept to your system, you see that your device does
not work.  There is no torque.  Rotating the outer ring does nothing
to change the volume or shape of the altered ZPE region.  The potential
energy will remain exactly the same as the ring rotates.  So there will
be no torque which acts to rotate the ring.

In fact, despite your attempt at geometric arrangement, the pressure
on the outer ring will be entirely central (directed towards the center
of the ring).  The same thing would happen if you considered the ZPE as
gas pressure.  Imagine having high pressure gas outside the system and
low pressure gas in the cavity (white region).  Despite the asymmetrical
shape of the cavity, the pressure on the ring will be perpendicular to it.
The gas pressure will not act to rotate the outer ring.

You keep saying, or implying, that some kind of detailed QM explanation
will justify your torque.  You say that if the device doesn't spin that
this will require re-thinking the theory of quantum mechanics!  It seems
to me that this is all wrong, based on the considerations I have offered
here.  If conventional QM predicted that rings would speed up arbitarily
in a vacuum, it would be a strong argument against the accuracy of QM.

Do you have a more detailed QM model for the Casimir force in your design
that you can offer?  While I am not a QM expert I did have two years of
physics at Caltech and have kept up a modest interest over the years.
I would not be afraid of some equations if you want to offer them.
I am also curious to know the qualifications of the academics who have
endorsed your design, in broad terms - you don't have to name any names
or embarrass anyone.

Hal

---

From: Adrian Tymes <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 May 2005 12:26:29 -0700 (PDT)

> energetically favorable.  This is what produces the force.

No it isn't.  Just because and end result is energetically favorable
does not automatically, in and of itself, cause it to happen.

Consider a boulder on top of a hill.  If its path is not blocked, it
will roll down the hill because that would be energetically favorable
to gravity.

Now consider a boulder a meter or so away from a cliff.  Its path is
otherwise not blocked, and it would be energetically favorable if the
boulder fell off the cliff.  And yet it refuses to jump sideways a
meter or so to allow that fall to happen.

Likewise here: to see what happens, you have to consider the vectors
of force, not merely the potentials.

> The gas pressure will not act to rotate the outer ring.

This analogy fails too.  Gas particles are more or less uniform in
size, and usually far smaller than any cavity or pressure vessel they
act upon.  However, the virtual particles that cause the Casimir effect
are of wavelengths that are significant fractions (or more) of the
width of the gap they act upon.  There are only so many ways the longer
wavelength ones can fit inside - and they all lean in the same
direction with respect to the perpendicular.

> I would not be afraid of some equations if you want to offer them.

That, I will admit, has been a problem.  Almost all of the analysis
I've seen of the Casimir effect has been on the parallel plate model;
there appears to be some disagreement on the magnitude of the effect in
different geometries (like the one I'm using).  So I'm not certain
that, even if it works, it would produce significant power.
(Microwatts per cubic centimeter, considering a vast array of these
devices, might be too low density to be of practical use.)  The proof
so far is just that there's torque at all in one direction, and not in
the other, ergo there's net torque in one direction.  (It's possible
that the torque would be less than what is needed to overcome friction,
which would also cause the device to not work.)

> endorsed your design, in broad terms - you don't have to name any

Ph.D.s in physics or quantum physics at various universities.  A few
who have studied the Casimir effect in particular (say, for using it to
store energy - a kind of nanoscale spring or capacitor).

As it happens, my next session in the lab to work on the device is
about to start, so I'll have to cut this email off here.
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From: [email-masked] ("Hal Finney")
Date: Thu, 5 May 2005 15:29:13 -0700 (PDT)

> meter or so to allow that fall to happen.

The actual equation is force F is proportional to dE/dx, where E is
potential energy and x is a positional parameter.  In the case of the
boulder near the cliff, x could measure the distance along a path from
the boulder, to the cliff's edge, and then down to the ground.

Potential energy E is constant along that portion of the path where we
are approaching the cliff's edge.  Then as we turn and move down the path
to the ground, E decreases steadily.  This translates to dE/dx being
zero until we reach the edge of the cliff, then a constant downward.
That means there is no force along the portion of the path leading to
the cliff, and a net downwards force once we go over the edge, exactly
as observed.

In the case of your system, the positional parameter is the rotational
position of the outer ring.  But the ring is perfectly circularly
symmetric, so rotating the ring will not change the potential energy
E of the system.  That means that E is a constant, so dE/dx is zero,
so the force is zero.  Therefore there is no rotational force on the ring.

Hal