Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Physics Forum Just a second!

In the proper lab we don't use the home sort of harvester we use atoms to do the absorbing. The usual is pentacene (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentacene) which has a nice exciton emission you can easily detect.

So we convert the emission directly to an electrical signal.

We do eliminate that sort of thing and it still behaves the same.

Oh now you understand what was happening you will probably be able to understand what a maser is and why it works like a laser.


You will also get why and how it works across all those frequencies now and confirmation the effect is real at a micro level. Basically you control which atoms are likely to see an emission and by doing so build a population inversion for the stimulated emission which you output for use. There are some designs that don't work like this they use different mechanisms but it is the most common way to do it.

so I have a headache now , thanks orac.

my brain has told me that the RF that is being consumed
by the RF harvester can be compared to a air valve opening
on a compressed air tank that has 20 air pressure guages
and 20 pressure release valves attached in a circle around it.

the pressure release valves will only open at a certain
pressure and after the first pressure valve has opened then
the remaining 19 valves will not open because the air
pressure drops inside the tank , so an individual pressure valve will never open unless it is the first one to open.

from a engineers viewpoint that issue can be solved by
ensuring that all 20 of the valves are opened at the same time.

the purpose of doing this would be to equally distribute
the escaping pressurized air for stabilization or to reduce
material stress.

now , the pressure valves can be fitted with orifices
and pressure regulators that only allow a certain amount
of pressurized air to pass through the orifice in a given
time no matter how large the pressure is in the tank.

now applying the above thoughts I get the below
but using light vs RF and the below may work with RF
Im not sure yet.

we now know that we can control the speed of light using
a medium so there is the pressure regulator valve and
the pressure release valve and the pressure orifice.

by slowing down the light using 20 mediums that the light
passes through and then collecting the light and converting
the light you remove the ability of a single photo cell
to absorb all of the light energy.

the light will be trapped inside the medium until it
exits the medium but it doesnt need to exit the medium
to be detected.

also the exit time of light exiting the 20 mediums can be staggered over a time period using different thicknesses of
mediums that would allow Time for each individual photo
cell to collect and convert the light into a capacitance array
to be used to compare the emission energy of the light source and the energy collected in the capacitance array.


what do you think?

It gave me a headache trying to understand you as well

I followed all the top bit it is very engineering but it got harder to follow you the further down I went.


I don't understand the point made in this quote above. You can detect the light in and out of the medium, does that mean light has two forms that have subtle differences?


This wont work, there are some things that happen with light when it enters a medium and it doesn't quite behave the same.

However I think I can show you what you are trying to do which is called an optical Maxwells demon

http://phys.org/news/2016-02-physicists-photonic-maxwell-demon.html

They use observation of a photon to indeed charge a capacitor.

The idea goes way back to 1867 and has been a theoretical idea it just took a long time for anyone to work out how to construct an experiment to do it. The experiment has application in testing some QM concepts and ideas to do with thermodynamics which groups are trying it at the moment.

If I understand you that is what you were trying to do, slow light down to be able to create a measured charge separation. The group above just did it a very different way.

The absurdity of that experiment still does my head in. You absorb energy by observation creating a power difference. You then use the power difference to charge a capacitor, which you can then use to power other things ... WTF.

Consider the joke if you take that to the largest macro scale, us humans observing gives energy to the universe to use elsewhere. Oh got a good joke, stop looking at things Paul you are making the universe expand.

All they need now is to tell me it can be done at 100% efficiency and I slash my wrists and give up on the universe

I was just saying that the light doesnt need to be
detected while it is trapped inside the medium.

the speed of light slows through a medium.
so the thickness of the medium causes the travel time
of light inside the medium to increase.

because the speed of light slows apx 40% through glass.

so before light enters a glass medium the light is
traveling at its normal speed through its current
medium such as air.

lets say we want to allow light to travel a distance
of 3 cm from point A to point B

and located between point A and point B there is a
1 cm thick glass medium that the light must pass through
in order to reach point B.

the light moves away from point A towards point B

and lets say the light has a speed of 300000 km/s
before the light enters the glass medium.

the light then enters the 1 cm thick glass medium.

the light then slows by 40% to 180000 km/s as it enters
the glass medium.

so while the light is traveling through the glass
medium the speed of the light is 180000 km/s vs 300000 km/s.

obviously when the light slows through the glass medium
then the travel time of the light from point A to point B
would be longer than the travel time of the light from
point A to point B if the 1 cm glass medium were not there.

so the thickness of the glass medium would determine the
amount of Time delay from point A to point B.

the light then exits the 1 cm glass medium and it
resumes its normal speed of 300000 km/s.

if a photo cell is located at point B then there
would be a Time delay of the light reaching the photo
cell.

and if there were 20 photo cells in a circle
like in the experiment you posted about where all
the energy from the light was directed into a single photo
cell.

then this would be a way to store the light inside the
glass medium long enough to allow each of the 20 photo cells
to collect and convert the light energy if each of the
photo cells had a glass medium between point A and point B.

ie...

1 light source. (point A )
20 glass mediums. ( of the same or different thicknesses )
20 photo cells. (point B )
1 capacitance array to collect and store the electricity.

this could be done 1 at a time or all 20 at the same time.

because the thickness of the glass medium would determine
when the light would reach the photo cells.

so if you have 20 different thicknesses of glass then
you would have 20 different time periods that the light
would reach the photo cells.

concerning the experiment you posted about where all the energy was directed into the single photo cell and no one
could understand why this happened the above does not
explain why this happens but it would provide a work around
to avoid it from happening.

and perhaps even more !!!

Gotcha now and no it won't and doesn't work.

IBM did that trick on a silicon chip in 2005
(https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/7956.wss)

It slowed light down to 1/300th of its usual speed and they then set a cell at it's end and one in which the cell could see the light in the normal way and time.

What happened was that the normal one was just more likely to see the photon the one with the massive delay saw the photon less times. However if the delayed one was the only detector (you covered the normal one) the delayed photon was always seen.

It is was that weird behaviour again and the time delay just reduces the chance it will see the photon.

I personally have also done this experiment on RF using radio frequency delay transmission lines and the same thing happens if you harvest the RF.


Yes we expected that as well but it doesn't work.

I have neither the time, nor the inclination, to wade through this thread to find it, but I think the question was raised as to whether, in the photon model of light, gaps would arise between photons when light travelled over a very long distance.

Christopher Baird deals with this, here:

http://sciencequestionswithsurprisingans...en-the-photons/

I would appreciate comments on this.

and if there would have been more of the delayed ones
they all would have been seen.

the uncovered one did exactly like the experiment you posted
because all the energy was drained by the collector.

the covered IBM experiment did exactly like the one I
posted except with only 1 medium.

besides if you store the light in glass then wouldnt it be
interesting to see the light dissappear from all the other
19 mediums when all the energy gets drained by a single photo cell.

and if the light is staggered into 20 seperate events then
it would be really hard to understand or explain why the
light that is still visibly trapped INSIDE the other 19 mediums does not have any LIGHT as we know it or understand it that can be detected as it exits the other 19 mediums and impacts the other 19
photo cells.

so either the light is trapped inside the 20 mediums
and registers on all 20 photo cells.

or

the light is trapped inside the 20 mediums and the trapped light energy inside 19 of them is completely drained or
vanish while the light is inside the 19 mediums
and only one completes it journey and registers the full emmission energy.

that would be a great experiment to watch as the light
inside the 19 mediums just vanish because unless the
light that we see is independent from the energy of light
itself then the light that we see traveling inside the
other 19 mediums would have to just vanish as we watch it
on a high speed video playback on youtube.

so there would be a period of time that all of the 20 mediums
have light traveling through them and none of the light has
yet exited any one the 20 mediums , so the light would be
visible and detectable inside all 20 mediums ,

and then when one of the photo cells drains all of the
light energy away there should still be light trapped inside
the other 19 mediums unless the energy of light is independant
from the light of light.

I personally dont think I will ever see light just vanish inside a medium even if the light source is switched off
the light in the medium should continue to travel inside
the medium and exit the medium and speed away from the medium at light speed.

me thinks theres more to it that me is hearing.

its obviously a conspiracy , thats my theory anyway.

we see light from stars that may have already burned out billions of years ago , because that light has indeed been trapped inside the medium of space.

now Im trying to think of a really cheap way to check
this conspiracy theory out.

What would be even harder would be to see the light trapped in the media. The only way to 'see' the light is to detect it. To detect it its energy has to be transferred to the detector. If it is detected in one of the media then there won't be a photon to detect later.

Bill Gill

according to orac we cant see a single photon anyway because
it takes a minumum of 8 photons for our eyes to see light.

so a short burst of light for 1 entire second might be
best to use , then measure the emission energy and the
energy collected from the 20 capacitors.

energy out (the source) and energy collected (the photo cells)...

my problem is that all 20 of the photo cells should register
not just one.

light is generated in packets so light travels in packets.
so obviously there are gaps in light ...

time gaps.

like a light bulb flickers on and off 60 times a second.

or think of a generator in a electrical power plant.

3600 rpm / 60 seconds = 60 hertz ... I think.

1800 rpm / 60 seconds = 30 hertz ...

the light flashes with the frequency of the power source.

so the packets of light from a star may be due to the
frequency of light production on the star.

sounds logical to me anyway.

even if you were using a single photon and you did not detect
the light that radiates away from the single photon
as the radiated light enters the 20 mediums and passes
through the 20 mediums with increasing thicknesses and exits
the 20 mediums over 20 different time periods and is absorbed
by the 20 photo cells and is collected and stored in the 20 capacitors, each of the 20 capicitors should register a charge.

so according to what you posted as soon as the light is
detected by the first photo cell the light that is trapped
inside the other 20 glass mediums will simply vanish?

is that your view on this?

It's not my view, IT IS THE EXPERIMENTAL RESULT of every experiment ever done on it. There are literally thousands of them all showing the same thing.

So I find you use of the word "view" rather strange perhaps its a translation thing.


Not sure what you think the conspiracy is no-one knows how this works we are just reporting the experimental results. I can describe this well under QM but that is about all, so I am unsure why we would conspire to make up the resul. You are basically saying even though there is $1.5 million USD up for grabs to prove it wrong we aren't for a conspiracy reason. I can assure you if I could prove it wrong I would and take the money and run, what do I care what the answer is. So explain to me why I might be conspiring to not report the correct answer please Paul, I am really curious on your logic.

The basic problem is simple to represent the energy of a photon of light has a formula E=HV. H is a constant and V is simply the frequency of the light.

Do you notice what is lacking ... any reference to distance.

E=HV stands whether you are 1cm away of 1 billion light years away.

The macro law says the light power diminishes by a square law function because the surface area of a sphere increases via 4 * pi * r^2.

The macro law and the micro law are in conflict one includes distance and one doesn't.

E=HV still stands for radio waves it just makes the value a lot smaller as the frequency is lower, and we don't think of them as photons. This was my reason for testing them when I was young but much to my disappointment the same results happen. Yes I was going for the Nobel prize I was sure there must be a boundary on the behaviour but I was to be very disappointed.

I am struggling to see how there can be a conspiracy here, solve the problem and fame and money is all yours.

I think his description is about as good as I have seen for a semi classical view.


Not sure any layman is going to understand that, its a fairly complex idea.


The first part will make sense to a layman but the second part won't .. how does something spreading out appear at a point.

I think you have to describe it as a collapse anything else just seems confusing to a layman.

I agree totally with what he is describing but I am just not sure layman will understand it. Somehow I think you have to deal with this thing spreading out in a sphere can and does collapse to a point.

The other main point Christoper doesn't deal with, is the one Paul is struggling with that even if you take the waveform into different media simultaneously ... the detection of the photon in any of the media collapses all the energy to that point in the one media. It appears like the waveform was never in the other media .... AKA Paul's conspiracy. See paul had no problem with the gap behaviour what he can't get over is this behaviour because he finds it strange and we must be making a mistake or on a conspiracy. You see Bill G understands it as a collapse and correctly identified the experimental result that if you detect it in one media it disappears from everywhere else.

To me it's easier for a layman to equate it with lightning where you have and can measure a sheet voltage but the moment a lightning bolt breaks all the power collapses to a point transmission and the sheet voltage disappears. Maybe I am wrong but I just feel you have to deal with the collapse. Lubos for example would take me to task for making the collapse physical.

The only other way to explain it a layman might understand is using electronic currency where you can use your credit card at any given place in world that supports the credit card , provided you have funds. The problem here is it doesn't deal with the concept of the spherical spread in being able to withdraw the funds.

Doesn’t this suggest that the spherical spread would collapse into multiple points, which would be detected at a range of places? Presumably the energy of these points (photons?) would equal the energy of the waves.

Would this be an example of the photon appearing as a wave, or particle, depending on the measurement taken?

Yes he doesn't deal with that at all and he sort of avoids discussing the collapse to right at end. Why that doesn't happen we know the answer, it is conservation of energy.

In the above example we have a single photon, if all 20 detectors saw it they are extracting 20 photons of energy. Take the circle bigger and put in 1 billion detectors and 1 photon produces 1 billion photons of energy. Free energy for all, and I could power a whole city off 1 photon, even though I never had that much energy at the source originally

What causes the collapse in that context is obvious, the energy can only be consumed at one place. Once consumed the wave in all the other places disappears. That much of the understanding has always been understood but understanding of the process beyond that is limited.

What we did in the above is meticulously dissect the process, and looked at tests we could do. Where we ended was being unable to break the micro experiments and find we had weird answers. It lead us to realize our macro laws must be wrong and can be only approximations based on having an abundance of photons compared to observers. What science is currently doing is trying to confirm that by dismantling all the macro laws.

a single photon flash , we cant see it.

several time activated high speed cameras , not flash activated.

what happens?

One camera will detect the photon. The others will see nothing. Which camera detects the photon is completely random. That of course assumes precisely the same distance from the source to the all of the cameras.

That of course is one of the essences of QM. QM can predict that one of a number of events will happen, and give the probabilities of which one will happen. It cannot predict which one.
Bill Gill

Cheating Bill G, yes the answer is obvious and trivial in QM and matches experimental results but they don't accept or understand QM

It can be described by QM but the reason is purely conservation of energy, the initial EM emission only has a discrete value of energy available. The problem is simple (it is the same as my RF harvester example) you reach a point very easily where you have more observers absorbing the energy than you have available at the emission point. With a single photon anything more than one observer creates the condition. If each observer really could get the same energy you would violate conservation of energy and make no mistake that is what is behind the strange behaviour.

Paul doesn't believe in QM and that is fine we don't need to convert him. I encourage and support him trying to find an alternative answer and anything short of denying the experimental results is fine with me. The experiments are dead simple and are repeatable in millions of ways and all give the same result, pretty much because noone has ever been able to beat conservation of energy laws.

The problem even comes up in cameras and eyes which should not work if light is a wave like Paul wanted. With a camera or eye looking at the night sky the wave should come in thru the lense be focused as a spread area on the view area and the whole area should see the light. You wouldn't be able to localize it to a point. Go to an optical site and they have to draw the light as a ray (a transverse wave) to make sense of the results, you cant draw it as a spherical emission wave. The real answer is the spherical wave does enter as Paul imagined, if the whole plate saw the photon and all absorbed it we again have the violation of conservation of energy. The shortest path on probability will see the photon (which matches the ray description) and that pixel triggers and so the result localizes to one point. We in fact have experiments where we fire single photons at a photographic plate and the result is indeed a scattering of the dots the highest probability at the shortest path. So a photographic image is never perfectly clean because it does involve an element of probability. Much harder to explain all that to a layman and so we cheat and turn light to a ray representation when discussing optics. Most layman never pick up there is hand waving involved in normal school level optics.

Prof Christopher Baird who Bill S linked goes the same path I would it is better not to lie and hand wave when discussing this stuff. He also like me stopped short of dragging QM into it because it isn't required for an understanding.

So none of that behaviour requires a QM description and Paul can have his spherical waves so long as he remembers the waves are subject to conservation of energy. Once the energy that was emitted has been absorbed however he wants to describe it the spherical wave must cease everywhere else because there is no energy left. If he does that he will derive the same answer as the experimental results.

For the record the cameras do not have to be the same distance that just changes the probabilities. The closer camera is more likely the further camera less likely but the probability change is steep. That result is also consistent with a single photon fired at a photographic plate.

I don't know about you guys but to me that just does not
sound logical at all.

I can understand why a single photo cell would consume
the light energy because the photo cell converts the light energy into electricity.

but a cameras film does not convert light energy into
electricity.

so the light energy is not consumed by the film.

if anything the light is being absorbed and re-emitted
by the film unless camera film actually does consume light energy.

isnt it a chemical reaction to light that causes the film
in a camera to form images on the film?

if the camera film does not consume light energy and
the light energy is being absorbed and re-emmitted then all
of the cameras should capture the photon flash.

because the energy of the photon flash would not be
being drained and should not collapse the field as in the
photo cell experiments.

suppose a camera were constructed that would take a
360 degree panoramic picture of the flash , the film itself
stretched 360 degrees around the flash so that as the light
sphere reached the film the film would capture the image from
all directions that the light flash traveled in.

would there be a constant line on the film of the
captured image or a single dot?

you wouldn't really need a camera at all just a roll of
unexposed film stretched around the flash point , it might need to be unrolled in a circle around the flash point while
inside a dark room to avoid pre-exposure to any light source
before the single photon light flash is executed.