Nois fopro toa sutafo

Time to write about time…

If you are waiting with bated breath for my next post about gravity… sorry… you will need to wait. I have started to write a few times, and I just can not do it without taking you off on another bunny trail that I walked before I had the gravity epiphany while talking to my 3-year old. The trail I am talking about is TIME! I suppose I must say that time does not exist either, just to be consistent. However, like my existance, I believe that time exists, but not as I normally perceive it. This insight will take a few posts to unpack, as will the following discussion about gravity. It should be interesting though… would you like a way to visualize time travel? Would you like to see how you can have predestination and free will at the same time? Be brave and read on.

I need to keep these posts shorter than my ones on existance, so I will make them into shorter chunks. Hopefully you will not run out of interest before you run out of text. This first one will introduce Flatland, then from there we will talk about a rain barrel, then about Adam, the hydra; then about time travel and changing the past. Eventually we will end up back at the Galactic Hologram, finally to Einstine’s rubber sheet, and to gravity. Here we go.

As a graduate studant in Math at Colorado State University several professors mentioned a little book called “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions” 1884, by Edwin Abbot Abbot an English schoolmaster. Even without reading it, the ideas excited me because they gave me a tool to visualize 9 dinensions! Say, what… how could that be? Well, you see, if I can be in 3 dinensions, and can under stand how a 2-D creature can visualize my 3-D world, that helps me to visualize a 4-D world… see? Then on to 9 or farther!

Here’s the basic idea… Imagine a little 2-D sort of creature… I sometimes think about an amobea living on the surface of a pond… not perfect, but it is something I can see in my mind. Suppose he wants to build a house… what would it be? If we assume that he and his fellow creatures can not swin dowm from the surface or up into the air, then, all he needs is a little ring of algae stems with a little hinged one for a door! As far as he is concerned, when he closes that door he is completely safe and can not be seen or see out.

So, let’s suppose he “gets up” in the morning and goes outside. Suddenly he is terrified to see a little black dot appear out of nowhere! then it grows into a hard, black disk. Of course he only sees a black line, but he is used to moving around an object to figure out it’s shape. Then, it changes into a brown, fuzzy disk that grows and then into a red disk. Just as quickly, it goes back to the black dot and is gone. Scary! What he does not know is that I just put a red pencil down into the water near his house and then pulled it out. Stop a while and visualize that sequence in your mind… what does it look like to me. What does it look like to him?

That night I rocked his world… I put the pencil into his “house”… he did not sleep any more that night!

So, how would a Flatland Jesus walk through the walls? He would have freedom in other dimensions, so he simply goes up or down a bit, moves over the closed stem walls, and moves back to flat-D. Voi la! He is inside a locked door…

How would that look if I was a 3-D creature with a 3-D house and someone with freedom in time simply went “up” in time moved over inside my locked house and them came back to my time… are you getting it? Don’t have nightmares. Nois

Having established that I do not exist (see earlier posts),  I would now like to tern to some amazing consequences of the fact that we are not what we perceive ourselves to be.  One of the most amazing things to me is that we think we know so much about our world and the universe and yet we do not know the simplest things.  Take gravity for example.  There are many theories of what gravity is, and there are pretty thorough descriptions of how gravity works, but really… no one knows what it is!

What… I thought that since that apple hit Newton on the head we figured out what gravity is… nope!  They can not even agree if gravity happens instantaneously or if it has “gravitons” that must travel at the speed of light.  Humm… how can we do rocket science if we do not understand gravity???

When my 14 year old was 3 we were on a trip to Rocky Mountain National Park.  We had several of our extended family in Colorado and sort of made a tent city!  One afternoon some of us decided to take a drive over Trail Ridge Road to visit Granby.  That was a fun time and on the way home almost everyone “punched out”.  My wife was driving and I was riding shotgun… trying to keep my eyes pried open to support her and keep her awake.

After we reached the high point on the ridge and started down I was thinking about the discussions I had been reading about the speed of gravity.  One would think that such a basic question would have an obvious answer… unfortunately, it seemed to have several obvious answers and was intuitively obvious to 3 different groups!  So, they seemed to dismiss each other as incompetent, or dumb… sad thing science…

Suddenly, I heard a small voice from way in the back of the mini van… “Daddy, where are we going?”  I did not want to disturb the sleepers, so I just quietly said “Home.”  I heard no more, so I went back to my musing.  In a few minutes, again I heard, “Daddy?”  “Yes.”  “Are we going to our house, or back to our tent house?”  I was amazed!  This little one really had a grasp of things!   She was clearly thinking through things as we watched the glory of God’s creation streaming past our windows.  “We are going back to our tent house.”  Silence… Musing… Silence… “Daddy?”

“Yes.”  “How will we know how to get back to our tent house?”  Now I was really awake.  This little one was capturing all of my attention.  What was going on in that pretty little head?  I thought about the scene from “The Hiding Place” where Cory’s father decides to only answer the direct question and not weigh the little one down with a long drawn out answer that would be far beyond the question.   So, I just said “We will follow the road.”  Silence… Musing…  “Daddy?”

“Yes dear?” “How does the road know the way to the tent?”  … a 3 year old? I thought for only a second, but for some reason, I felt like I was wading in a river and just stepping into a hidden pool that was much deeper than I was ready for.  “The road knows because it is already there.”

I am not sure if she said anything else… my brain was about to pop out of my scull… that was it!  Gravity acted instantaneously, because it was just the expression of the interaction between things that were already there… sort of…  I could not focus what I was thinking… it was just out of reach… but I knew the vision was the key.  Over the next 11 or so years I remembered that moment in the car, the tiny voice  and the feeling of wondering if I would loose my balance as I stepped into the deep pool in my mind and drifted the rest of the way on the road back to the tent house.

I will try to unpack this a bit in a few posts.  I will touch on Fourier transforms, Cheerios, Entropy, Holograms and a few other bushes to run around. While I have read several books, articles, web sites since that day, I do not know of anyone thinking in exactly this way… so here it goes… baring my soul… be gentle.

My earlier posts established that I am insane… and you are too… as a matter of fact, I proposed to you that I do not exist… and neither do you.  I promised 4 simple arguments… First, my perception of me… is all in my head!  There is no objective evidence that I exist… my brain is totally isolated from what it perceives.  My argument from the Microscope showed that we are composed of transient stuff… what am I anyway?  Even my bones are totally new every 3 years.  The third argument went from the Cosmic “soup” of stars dense enough to fill high magnification photos, to the vast empty space between the sub atomic particles that compose every object around us.  That chair you are sitting on does not exist… it is just micro dust specs with thousands of times the empty space between.  Or, is it…

In my last existence post I mentioned that the teachers who showed me that my chair did not exist still lied to me!  Even the molecules, atoms, electrons, protons and neutrons do not exist!

What???  It is even more amazing that this was known long before I was born in 1949!  For example, The foundations of quantum physics were laid back in the 20’s.  Heisenberg stated his famous Uncertainty Principle in 1927.  One simple example of this is trying to find the location of an electron.  The energy you use to observe the electron, moves the electron so that it is no longer there!  You can measure velocity or position, but not both at the same time.  Another example that I use all the time is tuning my guitar using beat frequencies.  I start by tuning one string to some source, then use that string to tune a second string.  I press the string to a fret so that the two strings play the same pitch.  Then I listen.  If I hear a beat in the sound, I tune the second string until the beat slows down.  In order to tune the string perfectly, I would need to wait forever to prove that there was no beat!  So, I just get it slow enough that I make it faster if I try to get it closer.

All sorts of strange things happen in the realm of quantum physics.  Another example is the double slit experiment.  Back in 1803 Thomas Young explained the phenomenon where light passes through two slits and forms an interference pattern on a screen behind the slits. What should particles do?  If you shoot bullets at a slit in a steel wall, you see a line of bullet holes in the screen behind the wall.  OK, so make two slits, and what would you see?  Yep, 2 lines of holes, each neatly behind the 2 slits.  Easy!  We use electron guns to make (now old style) TV displays (cathode ray tubes).  So, lets shoot electron “bullets” at 2 slits… we should see two neat lines of “electron hits” behind the slits – right?  However, we do not!  Instead, we see electron hits in an interference pattern just like the light made!  What?  The electrons behaved like waves, not like particles.  Some described the electrons as merely “probability” distributions, and others talked about the paths they took.  For example, in 1948 Feynman published his “Path Integral” explanation.  Basically he said that the particle traveled all possible paths to it’s destination!  Weird!  More double slit into.

 Of course, one of the most amazing and famous things that was stated around this time was Einsteins formula, E = MC**2 (1917).  Basically, it says that matter and energy are interchangeable!  If you think of that in light of our discussions of particles and waves, you must deal with the fact that those particles we perceive are just a manifestation of the energy that composes them.  If you want to visualize the universe as starting in a big bang, then think about it as God imagining a 4-dimensional (at least) space, then thumping it with a big old finger to instantly create “all the stuff that ever was and ever will be”… stuff = matter = waves = energy.  The wave-particles are all held together by electro/magnetic/atomic force to cause us to perceive them as solid objects… Can you feel the vibs yet?

So, we can not figure out where an electron is, and we see that it behaves as a wave as well as a particle and is just a manifestation of big bang energy.  So basically, we can visualize the electron as “popping in and out” of existence in the vicinity of the nucleus of an atom in one of the discrete bands determined by its quantum state sort of like it would appear randomly in an interference band behind two slits.  The other building blocks of the atoms, the neutrons and protons are made from bosons that behave in similar ways to the electrons, so you see… even the subatomic particles do not exist!  So, the atoms do not exist… so I do not exist!  Simple – eh?

Now for a final example, lets get to the condensate… back in 1924-25 Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein imagined a very odd behavior of matter.  They said that if matter could be cooled to near absolute zero, the atoms would become totally indistinguishable!  Basically, thy would become a glob, not individual anymore.  As it turned out, we did not get to observe this behavior until 1995, right here in good ol’e Colorado at CU.  They used the wave troughs of laser light to grab the atoms, and thus, cool them, and an electro-magnetic field to lock them into the center of the beam so that they could not bounce into other atoms and heat up again.  When they accomplished their goal, they saw the phenomenon. The atoms got “fuzzier” and “fuzzier” until they just merged together into one condensed blob!  Double weird!!  Atoms are not the nice little solar systems we were told about, are they?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose-Einstein_condensate   More details http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/2242

Well, you may not think these  arguments have been simple as I promised, but I think I can summarize them simply… I do not exist because…

- My perception of myself is based on a remote sensing scam.   My brain interprets sensations that come in from remote sensors via electrical impulses and does not actually experience any of the things that it perceives.  That does not prove that I do not exist, but it opens the possibility that I might not exist.

- Any Microscope shows that my body is not any thing like I think it is!  It is a battle field of microscopic beings, worms, mites, foreign cells, and many other things and even the part that I think of as “me” is constantly refreshed, even including my bones within 3 years!  After I die, liquids and gases are released as the soft stuff rots until only a tiny collection of minerals is left behind.

– The Cosmos is a soup of particles called stars with vast intervening empty space… ah… except the 2 Hydrogen nuclei per cm**3… Then, zoom down to the super-microscopic world of atoms and we find the same thing… tiny specs of “matter” with comparatively vast volumes of emptiness between them… basically, the chair you are sitting on is nothing but empty space with some specs held together by electrical force.  Go ahead… jump up and down on it…

– Finally, that solar system picture of the atoms was false too!  Not only are the atomic components made from other, smaller entities, but those entities do not behave like particles at all!  They flip in and out of existence and can not even be located!  How can they make something that does exist?

Like me for example, I do not exist.  At least not in the way that I perceive myself to exist…  not in the sense that I am sitting here on my non-existent chair, typing with a non-existent keyboard a non-existent message… oh bother…

The only thing that finally relieved my tension, felt from childhood, of realizing that I did not exist was finally figuring out that I did exist!  I exist in exactly the way that the creator created me to exist, and how He designed me to perceive my existence.  I think I said it simply in an earlier post… I am a figment of His imagination, not mine.  Sorry Rene… He thinks, therefore I am.

Ac 17:28 – for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, `For we also are His children.’  (NAS – CrossWalk online Bible)

Greentheo… we just got bested!  Forget the Stalkerator!  These guys can generate around 2000 kWh/year with a 30′ vertical wind turbine.  The article does not say what kind of windy knob you have to live on to do that, but the Mariah site says you only need an average wind speed of 12 mph!  The sample home they showed seemed to be in a reasonable location.  http://www.popsci.com/bown/2008/gallery/mariah-power-windspire-photo-gallery  With a 30′ height, small footprint, and quiet operation, they can get past a lot of neighborhood restrictions… probably not in my current location though…  (only 8.8 dba in 50mph wind!)   I could not find a price.  They had a “nice” cost-saving calculator on the site, but alas, one of the fields you had to put in was the cost of the unit… duh…

I first learned about vertical turbines years ago when I read about Darrieus turbines which were invented in 1931 by French engineer Georges_Jean_Marie_Darrieus. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darrieus_wind_turbine)  The Mariah unit seems to be a close cousin, or maybe a nephew!

Greentheo and I have been blogging about several energy producing and saving ideas and have noted several examples of homes that only needed 1000 kWh/y.  With this turbine you could splurge and watch cartoons on Saturday morning! OK Greentheo, I am ready to go build my papercrete elliptical dome in the boonies with my own little power source!  I hope the wind is blowing on those cold Colorado nights!

 I have read quite a bit about the water ice found on Mars.  I have read a lot about the prospects of life on Mars, but not much about something that immediately struck me when I heard it… Fuel to go!

As I have blogged about elsewhere, a big problem with distant space travel is carrying enough reaction mass to propel the craft.  It takes an incredible amount of O2 and H2 to get our big payloads off this planet, so we must keep the amount of fuel we carry to a minimum.  On the other hand there is a big difference between carrying fuel and carrying energy.  A lot of energy can be carried by using nuclear sources, but what can you do with that energy if there is nothing on board to use the energy to throw out the back – ya know?

Enter ICE.  Yep, good old ice.  You can get several kinds of ice on Mars including water ice and “dry” ice (CO2).  So, one of the really important aspects of finding ice on Mars is that we do not need to schlep our reaction mass up there for the return flight!  All we need to do is take the energy!  Actually, we could even capture some of the energy while we were on Mars by using solar panels.

How could we use the ice?  Well I know of a couple of ways.  One would be to  melt the ice, then use hydrolysis to split the water into H2 and O2 (or Brown’s gas).  That could go into standard rocket engines to blast off and return.  Other folks are working on ways to use high energy fission products to heat gas for use in rockets.  In that case, all you have to do is start the fission, then throw in either kind of ice and ZOOM!

I suppose reaction mass is not as sexy as finding life, but I think it could get us boots on the ground a lot faster if we did not have to lift fuel for the return flight.  What do you think?

Mars colony mining ice.  http://www.redcolony.com/art.php?id=0401070

americium-242m high energy fission products for space travel:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/01/010103073253.htm

I have an amazing ability… I can fall asleep from being wide awake in just a few seconds… but only if I am driving.  ugh.

You can imagine that this skill has created some interesting times on long driving trips and even occasionally on my short commute to work.  What’s a guy to do???  I had a sleep study done and found out that I have sleep apnea.  I got a CPAP and that helped tremendously with my daytime sleepiness… except as soon as I touch a steering wheel!

Driving sleepiness is a big problem.   http://www.drowsydriving.org/ is a site devoted to helping people be more aware of the dangers.  It is a dangerous as driving drunk! Here are a few highlights from the drowsy driving site:

• The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that at least 100,000 police-  reported crashes each year are the direct result of driver fatigue. (NHTSA)

• Each year drowsy driving crashes result in at least 1,550 deaths, 71,000 injuries and $12.5 billion in monetary losses. (NHTSA)

• Approximately 11 million drivers admit they have had a crash or near crash because they dozed  off or were too tired to drive. (2005 Sleep in America poll)

• According to NSF surveys, half of Americans consistently report that they have driven drowsy and approximately 20% admit that they have actually fallen asleep at the wheel in the previous year.

So, I am not alone.  Some states have moved toward serious consequences for sleepy drivers.  In Massachusetts in 2007, Senator Richard Moore pushed for a law to make it vehicular homicide if a sleepy driver causes a fatal accident.  If passed they would join with New Jersey in charging sleepy drivers.

I “got my wake up call” in a little nicer manner.  One year as we were loading up the car to start a long trip my wife set a cold spray bottle on the console between us.  She looked me in the eye and said “go ahead, make my day”.  The fear of having my ear filled with icy spray was enough to keep me awake!  It also reminded me of a Japanese invention I read about that I can not find by searching the internet… weird.  It was a pair of glasses that had a small refrigeration unit – possibly electrothermal cooling – that cooled the g-jo acupressure points (http://www.g-jo.com/) on the forehead to reduce sleepiness.  Try as I did, I could not find anything about the right g-jo points either!  ..maybe I was dreaming…  (Now the Japanese have a new thing with glasses.  They sense the tilt of the head and if you nod off they vibrate in your ear!  It interrupts the sleep inducing alpha waves!  They say it tickles too!  If I get sleepy in a meeting, I crunch on carrots! http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1522985/How-the-Japanese-are-getting-a-buzz-out-of-falling-asleep-at-work.html, http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/30/mydo-bururu-glasses-vibrate-your-dome-to-prevent-sleep/)

Anyway, here is what I did to significantly reduce my drowsiness – after working on my sleep problems of course!  I decided that I did not need some fancy glasses to cool my pate!  Instead, I would use a swamp cooler!  That is how I cool my house, so why not my head?

I got a cheap, light brown terry cloth towel and cut it into a long rectangle about 4″ by 12″.  I folded the short edges in to the middle, then folded it in half again.  Now, I had a nice neat 4″ x 3″ terry pad.  I got the pad wet and let evaporation do the cooling.  I put the pad on my head and enjoyed a very awake and comfortable trip — no spray in the ear!

I sometimes put ice in the upper fold to jump start the cooling, but usually it is not necessary.  I keep the pad quite wet – just short of it dripping.  I now carry a pad and a re-filled bottle of water in my car at all times.  I think it has saved my life!  If I see a sleepy driver on the road, I want to roll down my window and tell him about the no-nap-cap, or maybe grab a spray bottle.  : )?

btw… One person was bugging me at work about my cap idea and how it would not work for him.  I agreed.  He had a very thick head of hair!  I told him that memories are processed during sleep and that the more intelligent you are, the more your brain heats up and wants to sleep.  That is why God gave older and wiser men a bald pate to help keep their brains cool.  In some cases, the intelligence was so extreme that even the bald pate was not enough to cool the brain, so it takes a little help from a moist pad.  He just walked away.  I suppose it beats slapping someone.

It has been a while since I wrote about existence…  does being too tired and frazzled support that I exist or that I do not exist???  (Theo… I know I can not be a figment of my own imagination… but maybe I am a figment of someone else’s imagination… they think, therefore I am…)

I started this train of thought by demonstrating that I am not sane… I do the same thing over and over again expecting a different result – I expect hot water when I turn on the hot water spigot… are you sane?  Then I said that I would give 4 simple arguments that I do not exist… and neither do you…

The first argument had to do with physical perception.  Our perception of the environment is a remote sensing scam!  Our brains could be hooked up to synthetic sensors and we would not even know it!  (Matrix movie stuff!)  The second argument had to do with a microscopic view of our bodies.  We never think about the fact that we are mostly water, Hydrogen, CO2, and Nitrogen.  When we die, we basically drift away – literally!  Moreover, while we are alive we are a huge collection of “stuff” that is not us (like little eyebrow worms) and the fact that all of the molecules in our bodies, including our bones are totally replaced at least every 3 years!!!

OK, so I do not exist in the way that I think I do when I look in the mirror – eh?  So, now let’s look farther.  The 3rd argument I promised was Cosmology.  You know, Carl Sagan’s star stuff. “The cosmos is all the stuff that ever was or ever will be.”  Really?  Let’s think about how empty the cosmos is.  They say that the best vacuum producible on earth barely approaches the vacuum of space.  Yet, since 1960 Robert Bussard and other dreamers have been looking at an ionic propulsion system that carries energy (nuclear), but no “fuel” to eject to propel the space craft.  Instead, the craft would use an electrostatic field to suck in ionized interstellar hydrogen molecules (2 per cm³).  The engine would use another strong electromagnetic system to eject the ions out the back or form a fusion reaction and eject the hot, heavier combinants.  (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A600436, http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Bussard-ramjet) Wow!  They are counting on there being a lot of “stuff” out there!

Another scroggler posted a few weeks ago about black holes from “badastronomy.com” (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/10/30/ten-things-you-dont-know-about-black-holes/ (I was sure it was Stapler, but search and Google can’t find the post!)).  If you were to fill a sphere as big as the orbit of Pluto with air, there would be enough mass to be a black hole!  So, while black holes are the densest thing we know, if we look at them as being everything inside the event horizon, then they are very non-dense!  We think of air as being light and with no substance, yet air holds up a super-cargo plane!

We think of space as “empty”, but is it?.  We visited the Mount Palomar observatory in California.  We sat on a bench which we later found out was a replica of the mirror!  We looked at an amazing series of photos taken by the telescope.  They surveyed the sky with low magnification and picked the dimmest frame, say f1.  Then, they bumped the magnification up and surveyed that frame to select the dimmest sub-frame f2.  They bumped the magnification again and surveyed f2 to find it’s dimmest sub-frame, f3… etc.  through an amazing series of, as I remember, 12 frames.  The amazing-est thing is that once they were “blown up” each frame was just as “busy” with “stuff” as the original!  The sky is a dense soup of stars !!!  Yet it is empty…   The last frames showed mostly far away galaxies and quasars!

Did you see the amazing photos that made the email rounds last year showing the relative size of the various planets and stars?  It showed our tiny sun was a single pixel on Antares (http://www.webxact.co.uk/2008/08/these-pictures-will-humble-anyone.html).  Even though we think of the earth as huge and the sun as very huge, there is so much empty space between us and the moon that it takes days to travel there!  Even at the speed of light it takes 8 minutes to get from the sun to the earth!  It would take 4 years to get to our nearest neighbor star.  Our solar system, our galaxy, our cosmos is just a bunch of specs held together by gravity.

So now, lets look closer.  How about that table in front of you?  It is solid – right?  It is probably strong enough that you would sit or even stand on it… but, does it exist?  I mean in the way you perceive it?  Take a microscope and bump up the magnification.  At not very high magnification, the surface is no longer flat, but is a rough landscape of knotted strings!  Bump up the focus more, and the strings become coils of connected dots.  Further, and the strings are only specs connected by strong electric fields.   Actually, the molecular particles are even smaller, relative to the “orbits” of the electrons than the vast separation of the planets in the solar system! (http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/nuclear/nucuni.html)  What??? that table is like empty space!  It is just a bunch of specs held together by electrical attraction!!!  When did you think of that last?  You have know that since elementary school, but do you see that when you perceive that table?  Nope.  But really, that table does not exist!

The first time I realized this was when I was about 12.  I was on one of the very few, long driving trips I took with my parents.  I was reading Jules Vern’s “Around the world in 80 days”, a great science fiction story, which got me into the mood to think… OK, so I was dozing off… We had been studying molecular structure at school (No one told me it was a lie!  Next argument about waves…) I remember looking at the plastic cover on the back of my dad’s seat and imagining it being a sea of vibrating, spinning, crashing atomic particles… quite an impression!  If you know me, think about me growing up “knowing” that the chair I sat in did not exist!  Now I make more sense to you – eh?  Feel the vibes???

It is actually amazing that we do not just slip through each other, drift right through the earth, or fly apart!  Then, there is the issue that the protons, neutrons, and electrons don’t exist either… but that is another day, and another post.  I do not exist – Condensate.

Hi stalkerator fans! …Ah… Nois… what is a stalkerator???

Don’t you read all of my posts throughout all time???  And the comments???    : )?

In the responses to my post “Kepler, what a buoy!” I revealed my invention of a generator based on a stalk of grass.  One reader, greentheo, liked it so much that we continued discussing it in the comments.  The design went through several stages and I have now gotten some numbers together… Oh buoy!  (Actually, the same idea could generate electricity on a buoy.)

The current design is to have our pseudo stalk be a graphite kite tube about 4′ tall, perhaps with a ping pong ball on the top for extra drag – like a thistle stalk (make it a steel ball on the buoy).  About 3″ – 4″ from the bottom you attach some kind of gimbal to hold the stalk while allowing it to bob in the wind as stalks do – ya know?  Below the gimbal you build a coil around the stalk and glue a nail up the tube shaft inside the coil.  below the nail you attach a floating magnet so that the bobbing stalk flops the magnet around under the nail – Cool! An inductance generator!

OK, fine, so would it be any good?  I decided it was time to do a little experimenting.  I had a nail on a coil from some earlier experiments (Gary’s “Gary Effect” was a little far-fetched I think… the nail was just following the field lines… another post another day…) If I put the nail end near a stack of my Neodymium super-magnets, I get a measurable current.

Last year or so I tore apart some computer hard drives and saved the very strong control magnets.  They are mounted to steel plates which I think is to strengthen the magnet so they do not explode under their own stress.  They are polarized with the two opposite poles near the middle of the bar with maybe some “dead” space between them.  I decided to try the induction coil on that and got an interesting sensation… The nail head was big enough to span the DMZ, so it just felt like 2 strong magnets, but the nail point gave a different result.  The dead zone almost felt like repulsion as I moved the nail over it.  I do not think it was actually repelled, but I was having to hold the nail away from the magnet, so the reduced pull in the DMZ gave the sensation of repulsion. As I moved the nail point across the zone it snapped sharply across to the other side!  Ah ha!  Just what the stalkerator needs!  I can get up to 16 mV even with my poor coil set up.  I did not measure milliamps.

I grabbed my stack of tiny Neos and made 7 stacks of 4 each.  I arranged 6 of them in a circle around a heavy iron washer with #7 up the middle.  I tried having all the same polarity up, but the nail just sort of smooshed from stack to stack with not much generation.  So I flipped every other stack.  That was better, but what ever pole I picked for the center stack still created sort of a magnetic plateau for the nail to ride.  I eliminated the center stack and got much better action.  The nail seemed to hop from one stack to the next as it had hopped across the DMZ on the HD magnet.  Also, if it did go across the middle it now had a “hole” with significantly lower field strength, so I got some generation even while crossing the center.

With the final configuration and just holding the nail in my hand I easily got 10 mV and .25 mA.  I just measured it with my voltmeter, so these numbers would need to be confirmed with a known load to get accurate results.  Anyway, using those numbers, .010 V x .00025 A = .0000025 Watt.  Wow!  That’s Some Pig!  Let’s just say that with a great coil, great magnets, and optimized construction we can get that up to 100 times that… why not?  That is .00025 W.

OK, so according to “The Physics Factbook” (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/BoiLu.shtml) the average house uses a bit under 9,000 kWh in a year!  Ugh! There is a long way between those decimal points!  However, one guy cited got that down to 1,000 kWh per year.  If we assumed that we can generate power about half the time and save it until needed, we have 365.24 x 12 = 4383 hours for generation. That would require generation of 228 W (plus change).  Lets see, at .00025 W/unit, that is only 912,617 units!  OK, 1,000,000 units.  (1.09575 Watts per unit per year)

If I put a stalk at the corner of each square foot I could have 1000 stalks in a 100′ x 10′ plot. Woo Hoo 1 W/year!  Let’s suppose I build a papercrete house and a bunch of greentheo energy savings strategies to reduce my need to 1,000 kWh/y.  That is only 1000′ x 1000′ for the 1,000,000 units!  Gee… if it takes me 1 hour to make, connect, and install each one (after getting the parts and the bridge rectifiers…), then if I have to repair each one after x hours of operation…

My goodness… this is not going well.  A common solar cell gives 1.2 W for each 4″ square!  That one cell working for a year would make just over what 500 square feet of my “grass” would make… with no moving parts… not good news for the stalkerator…   : )?

My post about the SMOT had several comments.  In one response I mentioned Brown’s Gas and got a request to blog about that… so…

Brown’s gas is the electrolysis output if do not use a partition so that the hydrogen and oxygen are separated.  So, the hh and o are all mixed together… kabOOM!!!   No, not really.  It does take something to ignite the reaction, but still it is highly explosive.

One of the cool things about this explosive mix is that you can make it on the spot with really simple, home made equipment.  A favorite setup I have seen is to buy a bunch (10?) of steel switch plate covers from the hardware store.  You stack them up and clamp them together, then drill one of the hole stacks to about 1/4″.  Next you unclamp them and flip every-other-one around so that the holes are stacked small-big-small-big… Next you assemble the reactor core by using threaded rod or long bolts with insulating 1/16″washers.  So, you screw the bolt through a washer, then the first hole, then a washer, 2nd hole, washer, 3rd hole, etc. finally you put on a washer and nut to finish the stack. After you do both sides you have a stack with each bolt in contact with every-other plate on both sides… does that make sense?

If the right screw touches the first plate it misses the second plate then touches the 3rd, etc.  At the same time on the left, the bolt misses the first, touches the 2nd, misses the 3rd, etc.  If you apply 12v DC with right + and left -, then the plates alternate +, -, + ,- etc.  All you do is put this core into some water with a little baking soda, apply 12 v and you get Brown’s gas!  ( 15 – 20 amps) You should bubble the gas through a water valve so that if it does ever flash back, only the gas in the tube will burn, not the larger amount in the reactor… little boom is good.  Here is an example… there are many… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDpNUtXbz9U

So, what do you do with the stuff?  Some people are making car kits that use the alternator to generate hho near the air intake.  BG creates water when it burns, so you get the cooling and steam expansion benefits of water injection but with the added power of the burning hho.  Some people hope to make the system so efficient that you can drive forever on just water… uh guys… remember it takes energy from the alternator to run the electrolysis core…  One person said that the energy going into the core was just waste energy that would be going to heat.  If that is true then this would be a great advantage indeed.  However, it seems to me that whatever energy being used by the core will put additional drag on the engine – have you ever tried to light a bulb with a hand generator???  The energy to make the gas has to come out of the engine power via the alternator.  I suppose you could charge a deep cycle battery at home, then use it to generate hho to burn.  That can not be as good as just doing an electric drive.  Plus in the electric scenario you could use regenerative breaking to recover a large percent of the kinetic energy you put into the car.  http://www.runyourcaronwater.com/,  http://www.hytechapps.com/, http://aardvark.co.nz/hho_scam.shtml

I am not planning to use hho in my car, but it sure seems like it would be great around the shop!  If you have a small unit on your bench you can use a simple brass tube nozzle with a flow control.  It burns clean and hot.  There are a lot of stories about the unusual properties of the flame.  For example, it seems to only heat certain things, like metal.  You can cut a piece of steel, but not burn yourself if you touch the tube.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKKoU1Fp3gs&feature=related

Near the bottom of the “runyourcarononwater” site there is another very interesting device.  They have some sort of electrolysis catalyst cell.  The unit is about the size of a drip coffee maker.  You buy a “cell” and fill it with any water.  Then, for about a month you can plug in devices up to 270 Watt-Hours!  After that, you return the cell to the store for a replacement for about $20.  (A standard AA battery has about 2.6 WH. http://www.allaboutbatteries.com/Energy-tables.html)  If you buy several cells, you can take them all with you and just swap them out for continuous power. – Very cool!   That would sure be a lot lighter to carry than my 60 lb 105 WH deep cycle battery up to the camp site!  : )?  http://www.horizonfuelcell.com/portable_power.htm

Per Wikipedia: “Maxwell’s demon was an 1867 ^[1] thought experiment by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, meant to raise questions about the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon

I remember studying the demon in high school and thinking how “cool” it would be… and impossible, to have a little “demon” that could sort air into hot and cold molecules! Wow!

Years later, before cyclonic cleaning was common, I learned how a vortex could be used to clean machine cutting oil. I first figured out how it worked at a manufacturing convention when I was a quality engineer at Gerry Baby Products (now defunct… remember the umbrella baby strollers and baby-backpacks they invented?) They had a display with a clear cylinder and dirty cutting oil going in the top. the oil spun and formed a vortex that went back up a center tube in the opposite direction. The oil stopped momentarily then violently spun in a vortex up the center tube and out. With the slowing at the turn and the spinning vortex the fine metal particles were thrown outward and could not go up the inner tube. Voila, clean oil! We see this same idea all the time now in cyclonic, bag-less vacuum cleaners.

Wait, you say! You were talking about Maxwell’s demon… how did you get off onto vortex cleaning??? Well, because the vortex is the demon! Just think, it can separate the heavy metal particles from the lighter oil molecules. Interesting. Later, still at Gerry, I discovered that that cleaver demon can indeed be used to sort air molecules into hot and cold sides, just like Maxwell proposed! Incredible!

Here’s how it works… you hook up “shop air” at around 80 psi to a vortex tube. Generally the air enters at one end off center so that it spins. Near the far end some of the air turns a corner and goes up a center tube and out while some continues to the end of the tube and out an adjustable hole. Sound familiar? What is amazing is that the “cold” molecules, that is the slower ones, are more likely to be able to turn the corner and spin up the center, while the fast ones can’t quite make the turn, so they exit. See the demon at work? You don’t? He just sorted the air molecules into two streams with the cold ones coming out the near center and the hot ones going out the far edge. Very smart that demon.

Vortex cooling is used a lot for various things like spot cooling machining operations and cabinet cooling. Check out one vendor http://www.vortec.com/vortex_coolers.php They even have vortex cooled vests that let people work in 200 degree environments! (with protective clothing.)

Maxwell did not say that the demon did not use energy to open and close the tiny door. It was just that the demon was not putting energy into the air to heat it. One side got cold and one got hot but neither heat nor cold was created by the demon, both were already present in the incoming air. What sort of efficiency do you suppose this process gets?

Heat pumps are similar in that they use some energy to move heat from one place to another rather than creating the heat. A refrigerator is a compression-cycle heat pump that takes heat energy from inside the cabinet and pumps it into your kitchen air. Heat pumps for home heating use an almost identical process and apparatus to move heat from the outside air into your house. You could just as well use a thermoelectric cooler or a vortex cooler. However, the good old compression method is around 65% efficient while the thermocouple is lucky to make 8%! Vortex coolers can drop the air temperature by 80 degrees with an efficiency of up to 16%… not bad I guess… (http://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2440/43646/1/hdl_43646.pdf).

You could try to use the heat differential to do work. However, if the hot and cold side are in a fixed volume, then the pressure on the hot side would increase. The demon would need to operate the door more and more, and thus use more and more energy to run the door to keep those fast molecules from passing through to the cold side. A vortex demon needs a free flow of air, not a fixed volume. You could use the hot and cold air streams in the open on a thermocouple to make electricity, but then you would suffer from the poor efficiency of the thermocouple. Hummm… maybe you could use a Sterling cycle engine! Theoretically they can be 100% efficient, but for now, 30% is good… not so good…

Maxwell talked about sorting the molecules, not creating the energy… so if the energy that the cleaver little demon needed to open and close the door was small enough, maybe he could harvest a little heat differential from the hot to cold side to run the door mechanism, and then I could use the rest of the differential to do other things. I could heat my house in the winter and cool it in the summer by just changing some dampers! That would not be violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics any more than using some sunlight to power a photocell (about 10% efficient), after all, sunlight heated the air – right? OK, so it looks like the little vortex is a demon, but he needs too much energy to operate his door… do you know any other demons looking for work???