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Comment by tantony | Hacker News Reader

There's a video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tGRhTXKh8A

I will remain skeptical until it is independently reproduced and verified and gets demonstrated at scale.

I’m not a physicist but even I can tell this dude isn’t either. My quack alarms were ringing within seconds of watching this video, but I watched the whole thing anyway to see if I was judging too harshly and he actually had discovered something notable. This guy spent more time attacking scientists, peer-review, and just generally the process of science itself than actually just showing some damn proof. You would think one would be showing video demonstrations of this unbelievable effect. He tempers his claims by saying that it scales with a larger area and it produces less power than a solar panel of equivalent size and I thought… ok, let’s say I’m completely wrong and this guy just invented a “solar panel” type of device that can be used without visible light yet produces less energy… I suppose that could still be fairly useful depending on the application. Bravo, well done if that’s the case. Go ahead and make one or 10 panels or whatever and set it up in an empty warehouse with a 24/7 video feed and show it continuously charging an electric car, or powering a tv, or hell even powering a light bulb. I’ll retweet. I’ll be a customer even if it’s just for fun checking out this new dangled tech. No, he suddenly starts talking about how he could potentially create coin cell sized battery of infinite power among other far fetched sounding claims. Say what??? Maybe my quick math is off by several orders of magnitude but this threw off so many quack alarms that it’s just way beyond belief. I hope and pray that I’m wrong and the rather modest initial claim is somehow correct even if it’s for reasons he doesn’t understand. Yes, it is ok to not understand why something works, as long as it gets you results. Who cares what anyone thinks? Start a tiny energy company out of pocket with however many panels you can make. Sell electricity and profit from it. Go nuts. Get rich. Eventually people will realize whether they like it or not that you have something worth looking at. Look, I totally get that most scientific discoveries start off with a statement of: “huh, that’s weird”… but that doesn’t mean you get to declare that the whole world is against you. “They” are not just jealous. “They” are not just afraid of violating current understandings of science. Scientists incorporate new understandings fairly regularly. Sure a couple people might be jealous they didn’t figure something out first, but that doesn’t mean every scientist on earth is out to get you. Holy hell this turned into a rambling rant. I apologize. It was just a stream of thought that I don’t care to edit at this point. I’m sorry this came across so rude. Make me a customer sir. I’ll joyfully put a sock in it if you succeed.

While the topic is interesting, I had somewhat the same impression from certain parts of the video.

I would love for this to be real, but until it is verified I remain skeptical. To quote Sagan, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

> Start a tiny energy company out of pocket with however many panels you can make.

It might be too expensive to scale this up such that it generates an appreciable amount of power. It might require mass-production techniques.

I think that the presentation and the paper look good enough to listen to the claims of experimental results in good faith. While I also remain fairly skeptical, in my opinion it's worth to reproduce those results. Even if it's not the free source of energy as authors claim (it's probably not), nevertheless it may be an interesting effect worth exploring and explaining.

Regarding the attack on scientific journals which tend to ignore anomalous results, I agree that it's a deeply flawed system (even if we are to forget about parasites like Elsevier & co), but there is no simple solution to that. Journals are incentivized to cultivate their reputation by producing a constant stream of good enough papers. Accepting papers with extraordinary claims is a bad strategy from risk-benefit point of view. On every paper which indeed correctly points at a future breakthrough you get many-many thousands of "duds".

With the advent of preprint sites at least you can freely share your results. Hopefully, eventually we will build an open reputation system on top of them, which will replace the existing system of journals and conferences.

The description seems reasonable, but given how many times “zero-point energy” has been shown not to be harvestable, it’s unlikely that this is the time it worked.

This may turn out to be another EMDrive. But the implications of this claim being true are too great to ignore and warrants further investigation.

I wonder what it would take in terms of expense/equipment to do an independent verification.

It’s a bit like the FTL neutrinos. We knew it couldn’t be, but the data showed otherwise, so they got to check everything down to the cable connections.

The EMDrive is a better example, I think. The OPERA people knew from the start that they likely had an "uncontrolled systematic" and their measurement was likely to be wrong, so very few people got excited. The EMDrive got a lot of people excited over a minor error in a very difficult measurement. In both cases the general "science" public picked up on it, inappropriately, but in only one of the two cases were the flames fanned by the research team. (Compare also the Pioneer anomaly [0].)

I do suspect this is just another EMDrive. Interacting with the vacuum to shift energy around is well-known (again, see Hawking radiation [1]), but holding on to it overall for long enough to violate the uncertainty principle (the one for the E-t commutator [2]) doesn't work. And I don't think you can hold it just long enough to reverse entropy... though that doesn't sound prima facie impossible. Making a measurement incorrectly, though... I do that every day I'm in the lab.

Addition: Also, the MDPI journals are kinda-sorta just one step up from trash-tier, at least in my mind, so I don't pay much attention to work that can only manage to get in to one of them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle ...at least I think it's in there somewhere. Otherwise grab Griffiths!

They also got published in an APS journal - "Physical Review Research"

https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev...

However, I do not know how reputable that particular journal is.

> And I don't think you can hold it just long enough to reverse entropy..

Sounds like a good quantum analogue of Maxwell’s demon!

In many ways this is the core of good science. "Hey, this seems unusual." followed by "Here is a theory, and a hypothesis with a prediction of this theory is what is going on" then "Here is an experiment to test that hypothesis with all the ways we can think of that might mess up the answer compensated for." and then "Here are the results of the experiment." At which point other labs can go do the same experiment and see if they get the same results, and if so they can try to screw with those results in ways that they believe invalidate the theory, until everyone can reproduce the canonical experiment and on remaining theory agrees with the evidence produced by the experiments.

That said, nothing I saw in the paper suggested it would be expensive to reproduce this effect. The palladium is pricey but you don't apparently need very much and the fabrication, as described, it pretty standard semiconductor fabrication steps. Feature size is pretty large compared to modern processes so you wouldn't need a state of the art fab to make a wafer of these things.

Expensive. For all the legitimate pointers to quackery, it seems he somehow scraped together >$10k (maybe much higher) to get a photolithography batch done.

I wonder if someone like Jeri Ellsworth or Sam Zeloof will be able to reproduce this with their home-fab techniques

Yup. The presentation (and the paper) are very light on math, argue by analogies and dismissive about USPTO's rather reasonable policy to discard inventions contradicting 2nd law of thermodynamics. The author is undoubtedly a technical person but gives off the vibe of someone trying to casually wing it into quantum physics.

Since am not a physicist myself I could well be proven wrong tho. In that case this reply gotta end up infamous!

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