Gary Harnagel
2020-12-25 21:41:14 UTC
Has anyone seen this:
"Neutrino Power Cubes can transform portions of energy into power"
https://neutrinovoltaic.com/en/
https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2016142056A1/en
Interesting, if true. But is it?
[[Mod. note -- Think about what we know about neutrinos: they only interact
*very* weakly with matter. In particular, most neutrinos incident on a
detector go right through the detector... indeed, they go right through
the entire *Earth* without ever interacting with it. (I'm using "interacting"
here in the particle-physics sense, i.e., I'm ignoring the gravitational
interaction.) Without an interaction, converting "a portion of their
kinetic energy" into electricity isn't going to get very far.
Despite what the technobabble on that website suggests, neutrino
interactions with matter aren't similar in any useful sense to photon
interactions with a solar cell. Notably, most of the solar photons
incident on a solar cell *do* interact with the solar cell (they're
absorbed or reflected).
There have been past claims of stronger neutrino interactions with matter,
but these claims have proven to be wrong. Nobably, in the 1970s Weber
[This was the same Joseph Weber who also claimed
huge-amplitude gravitational-wave detections that
noone else could confirm.]
claimed that an N-atom crystal would coherently scatter neutrinos with
a cross section which scaled as $N^2$), but both experiment and theory
strongly refuted these claims. (A nice example of a refuting experiment
is Franson & Jacobs (1992) ["Null result for enhanced neutrino scattering
in crystals", Physical Review A vol 46, pages 2235-2239].)
The referenced patent is irrelevant -- it's about a production process
for metal films, and doesn't present any evidence for neutrino electricity
production.
Overall, the referenced website reminds me a lot of some of the examples
described in this classic book:
Arthur W. J. Ord-Hume
"Perpetual Motion: The History of an Obsession"
St. Martins, Press, 1980, paperback ISBN 0-312-60131-X
-- jt]]
"Neutrino Power Cubes can transform portions of energy into power"
https://neutrinovoltaic.com/en/
https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2016142056A1/en
Interesting, if true. But is it?
[[Mod. note -- Think about what we know about neutrinos: they only interact
*very* weakly with matter. In particular, most neutrinos incident on a
detector go right through the detector... indeed, they go right through
the entire *Earth* without ever interacting with it. (I'm using "interacting"
here in the particle-physics sense, i.e., I'm ignoring the gravitational
interaction.) Without an interaction, converting "a portion of their
kinetic energy" into electricity isn't going to get very far.
Despite what the technobabble on that website suggests, neutrino
interactions with matter aren't similar in any useful sense to photon
interactions with a solar cell. Notably, most of the solar photons
incident on a solar cell *do* interact with the solar cell (they're
absorbed or reflected).
There have been past claims of stronger neutrino interactions with matter,
but these claims have proven to be wrong. Nobably, in the 1970s Weber
[This was the same Joseph Weber who also claimed
huge-amplitude gravitational-wave detections that
noone else could confirm.]
claimed that an N-atom crystal would coherently scatter neutrinos with
a cross section which scaled as $N^2$), but both experiment and theory
strongly refuted these claims. (A nice example of a refuting experiment
is Franson & Jacobs (1992) ["Null result for enhanced neutrino scattering
in crystals", Physical Review A vol 46, pages 2235-2239].)
The referenced patent is irrelevant -- it's about a production process
for metal films, and doesn't present any evidence for neutrino electricity
production.
Overall, the referenced website reminds me a lot of some of the examples
described in this classic book:
Arthur W. J. Ord-Hume
"Perpetual Motion: The History of an Obsession"
St. Martins, Press, 1980, paperback ISBN 0-312-60131-X
-- jt]]