Superconductivity at room temperature??

[sol invictus]

Well my friends have advised time time and again not to throw pearls before swine. I hoped that the Jeff Randi forum would be different. Unfortunately it turned out not to be different. Therefore, I will stop wasting my valuable time here and bid you all a final farewell. When (not if) I am one day vindicated you will know how disgusting sol, Ben m, Ziggurat and Clinger have been.

That's the right decision, Johan, the one I urged you to take many times. Go spend time with your family.

 

[Teemu]

To keep my sanity, I will have to respond piecemeal as time allows; since it will also require teaching you elementary physics which you obviously do not understand; or do not want to understand, or are too brain-limited to understand: For example, Drude's elementary equation of charge-transport through a conductor.

One of the central causes of resistance to new theories has been the inability of many scientist to differentiate properly between phenomenology and fundamental theories.

Phenomenological Theory: A theory which expresses mathematically the results of observed phenomena without paying detailed attention to their fundamental significance.

Drude model , Ohm's Law, and London Equations are all phenomenological theories. You don't use equations of Drude model to disproove another phenomenological theory. Considering Drude model's limits for solid state physics, if you really want to put phenomenological theories of different areas against each other which you shouldn't do, you could even argue that London equations do their phenomenological job better (This is not scientific fact, just opinion, to make it clear that I don't claim it to be scientific fact). So do the London Equations discredit use of Drude model for those application areas for which it is accurate enough? No, they don't. Phenomenology doesn't work that way. Phenomenological theories of different areas are not used to disprove each other.

 

[ben m]

When (not if) I am one day vindicated ...

It's a stretch, but I can sort of imagine it.

August 1, 2028: Physicists discover a new form of hyperdimensional aether conductivity at a diamond-vacuum interface. "It turns out that a similar effect was seen accidentally by an engineer, Johan Prins, almost 30 years ago.', said Bob Schrieffer, whose brain was transferred to silicon in 2014 and won its third Nobel prize in 2026. 'He misinterpreted it as superconductivity. Unfortunately he didn't understand superconductivity very well---or basic electromagnetism, for that matter---so he never followed up in any useful way. He spent the next ten years composing elaborate, but utterly incoherent explanations for what he had seen, and angrily denouncing anyone who disagreed.

This reporter asked Schreiffer whether Prins should get credit for the discovery. "That's a good question. It took us a while to even figure out whether Prins' old work included this effect. His writing mixes up voltage with electric field and garbles the energetics. And he's impossible to talk to. Eventually we tracked down his onetime technician, whose brain-on-a-chip lives at McMurdo Forest in New Antarctica. The technician explained the actual experiments, which made it much clearer: yes, Prins had had the hyperdimensional aether right in front of his nose, but failed to turn his luck into science. If anyone should get the credit, it's this technician." Prins' brain-on-a-chip could not be reached for comment.

 

[!Kaggen]

It's a stretch, but I can sort of imagine it.

Apart from the brain on a chip garbage an entertaining post there ben m.

Oh and my apologies for starting this hard work thread. Well done though, great stamina.

 

[dasmiller]

Oh and my apologies for starting this hard work thread. Well done though, great stamina.

IMO (and, of course, I wasn't doing any of the hard work), your OP was perfectly reasonable so you've nothing to apologize for. I don't think there was any way you could've known that the thread would stretch for 1200 posts and include references to the Ku Klux Klan, mock conversations with questionably-educated goldfish, and use of the word "nerney."

 

[Skwinty]

Although I had heard of Johans theory last year on a petrol head forum, I could only think crackpot based on the excerpt from his book of physics rotting.

However, I have learned a tremendous amount about superconductors from this thread and so I say, thank you Johan for bringing this to the JREF.

 

[!Kaggen]

Although I had heard of Johans theory last year on a petrol head forum, I could only think crackpot based on the excerpt from his book of physics rotting.

However, I have learned a tremendous amount about superconductors from this thread and so I say, thank you Johan for bringing this to the JREF.

Well yes I suppose we can be thankful to crackpots for helping us learn more about interesting and difficult- to-understand subjects.

 

[Sati1984]

I'm kinda sad, I really enjoyed reading this thread. Hopefully the subject is not dead yet...

 

[marplots]

If it is about to die, I wonder if one of the technically trained could lay out their understanding of what Mr. Prins thought happened, what actually happened and where they believe the error lies. I'm not asking for a complete rehash, but a best guess as to why someone trained has drifted so far from shore.

I too have been following the thread. I find it a good mental boost and one of the highlights of my day.

 

[sol invictus]

If it is about to die, I wonder if one of the technically trained could lay out their understanding of what Mr. Prins thought happened, what actually happened and where they believe the error lies. I'm not asking for a complete rehash, but a best guess as to why someone trained has drifted so far from shore.

I too have been following the thread. I find it a good mental boost and one of the highlights of my day.

There are a couple of issues. One is what Prins actually observed in his experiments on diamond. As far as I can tell it might be a moderately interesting effect in solid state physics (I'm too ignorant of the subject and lack sufficient details on what he actually did to be sure), but it has nothing to do with superconductivity.

Another is Prins' "theory" of superconductivity. That's been quite thoroughly debunked in this thread. Problem number zero is that it violates conservation of energy - so if true, it would overturn the basic foundation of all of physics, leaving us to explain why physics seems to work so well.

A third is Prins' evident lack of comprehension of basic concepts in physics (probability, expectation values, voltage, electric field, speed versus velocity, Maxwell's equations, etc.). I'm not sure where that's coming from - but his training in physics was quite a long time ago, so possibly he's simply forgotten many things, or lost some mental capacity due to age. Perhaps most likely he never really had a firm grasp on physics in the first place, and some combination of time, age, and cognitive dissonance (the fear of being wrong) prevents him from regaining whatever understanding he once had.

 

[ben m]

I can say a few things about Prins' experiment. He's got a device in which (he says) a specially-prepared diamond is held a few microns away from a rounded electrode. What do you expect the I-V curve to look like when you apply a voltage between the diamond and the electrode? Well, roughly speaking you expect zero current until you reach some threshhold voltage that causes a spark, or field emission, or some other nonlinear breakdown. Once the breakdown has started, increasing the voltage should drive increasing current (with the details determined by the series resistance, etc.)

Prins's experiment showed that, once a "breakdown"-like behavior has happened once, the threshhold voltage goes to zero. The device behaves like an ordinary resistor all the time.

(This is, I would add, exactly what you'd expect from one well-known experimental error: you've mispositioned or contaminated your electrodes, so there's a regular surface contact between them.)

How do you get from "there's no threshhold voltage" to "room-temperature superconduction"? That's where all of Prin's misguided analysis comes to play. He has some mental picture of how electrons are moving around in this "gap". He can't think of a way for that picture to include an in-gap electric field. Therefore the electric field is zero; zero electric field is the same thing as superconductivity; therefore he's seen superconductivity. I think his errors come in right at the first step---the "can't include an electric field" step, where I think he's just confused about how fields and accelerations work, and how that relates to his data---but the subsequent steps are also nonsense.

 

[Teemu]

According to Archie Campbell of University of Cambridge since Prins was applying 1000 volts and drawing only half a milliamp, the resistance of his circuit was 2 megohms. And since the noise in his current was at least 1 per cent, any resistance in the gap less than 20 kilohms would be undetectable. If the gap were made of copper the resistance would be about 0.04 micro-ohms, so the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the resistivity of the electron gas is no greater than around 10^11 times that of copper.


So the error margin was larger than resistivity of undoped silicon. For some doped diamond thin films fast googling seems to bring up resistivity values of around 1/100th of silicon resistivity, so the error margin of Prins' setup is around 10^5 times larger than resistivity of some doped diamond thin films.

 

[ben m]

According to Archie Campbell of University of Cambridge since Prins was applying 1000 volts and drawing only half a milliamp, the resistance of his circuit was 2 megohms. And since the noise in his current was at least 1 per cent, any resistance in the gap less than 20 kilohms would be undetectable.

I tried to press him on this point; he didn't even care. He did not claim to have a direct measurement of anything resembling resistivity. The only observed behavior was "the gap doesn't require a breakdown voltage to start conducting". From that single fact, he derives his model; and from his model he claims that E must be exactly identically zero.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

According to Archie Campbell of University of Cambridge since Prins was applying 1000 volts and drawing only half a milliamp, the resistance of his circuit was 2 megohms. And since the noise in his current was at least 1 per cent, any resistance in the gap less than 20 kilohms would be undetectable.

I tried to press him on this point; he didn't even care. He did not claim to have a direct measurement of anything resembling resistivity. The only observed behavior was "the gap doesn't require a breakdown voltage to start conducting". From that single fact, he derives his model; and from his model he claims that E must be exactly identically zero.

Along the way, his model led him to ignore or to reject

• conservation of energy
• the definition of acceleration
• Maxwell's equations (in those situations where accelerating charges do not radiate)
• various circuit laws, including
  • the law of capacitance
  • Ohm's law (when resistance is zero)
• the BCS theory of superconduction
• various laws and core principles of quantum mechanics, notably
  • Born's rule
  • expectation values
  • Ehrenfest's theorem

Because mainstream physicists have held onto the above laws and principles instead of accepting Dr Prins's model, Dr Prins wrote an entire book "aimed at the mainstream" and called it The Physics Delusion.

Dr Prins deserves the last word:

Well my friends have advised time time and again not to throw pearls before swine. I hoped that the Jeff Randi forum would be different. Unfortunately it turned out not to be different. Therefore, I will stop wasting my valuable time here and bid you all a final farewell. When (not if) I am one day vindicated you will know how disgusting sol, Ben m, Ziggurat and Clinger have been.

 

[dlorde]

Thanks for persevering with the thread guys, I too seem to have learned a little about superconductivity (mostly through endless repetition!).

Johan seemed prickly & insulting from the start, although he had his reasonable moments - but his degeneration into plain insults at the end leaves a sour taste - especially calling forum contributors scumbags simply for being anonymous! A strange character indeed. I noticed he seemed to have detailed knowledge of parts of the subject but it never seemed to all fit together at any one time... fascinating, but annoying & frustrating.

 

[marplots]

Two side notes: Life can be cruel and physics is hard.

There aren't any shortcuts.

 

[davefoc]

I was interested in the conditions where electron acceleration lead to radiation and where they don't. I've been wanting to ask about this for awhile, but I didn't want to side track things.

The experiment with charge placed on a spinning disk was interesting. If I understand things, as long as the charge is evenly distributed around the disk when the disk is spun there is no radiation.

However, if the charge is placed unevenly around the disk , when the disk is spun there is radiation.

Is the above correct?

Could somebody talk a little bit about what is going on here qualitatively? What is going on at the individual charge level? How does an individual electron decide whether it is going to radiate or not? Is it sort of a net effect deal where all the individual electrons are radiating no matter what but in the evenly dispersed charge case the radiation from individual electrons cancels out any net radiation? Or does somehow the distribution of charge prevent the electrons from radiating at all?

Could somebody talk about what's going on energy wise here? When the charge is unevenly distributed the system is losing energy. Where is that energy coming from? Is the spinning disk slowed by the radiation or is the disk losing mass?

 

[W.D.Clinger]

I was interested in the conditions where electron acceleration lead to radiation and where they don't. I've been wanting to ask about this for awhile, but I didn't want to side track things.

The experiment with charge placed on a spinning disk was interesting. If I understand things, as long as the charge is evenly distributed around the disk when the disk is spun there is no radiation.

Correct, assuming the rate of spin is also unchanging.

However, if the charge is placed unevenly around the disk , when the disk is spun there is radiation.

That depends. If the charge is placed evenly around the rim of the disk, then the charge is not the same over the entire disk, yet there is still no radiation.

Could somebody talk a little bit about what is going on here qualitatively?

If the current density vector field J doesn't change with time, then there is no radiation because the electric and magnetic fields induced by the charge and current will be independent of time, with ∂E/∂t = ∂B/∂t = 0.

When the charge is distributed evenly over the entire surface of a spinning disk, or evenly around its rim, then at every point of space the current density J will be independent of the time t.

If the charge is placed on a spot that isn't centered on the center of the disk, then the current density J will change at points on that spot's trajectory. When a fixed point of space intersects the charged spot, the current density will be nonzero, but the current density will go to zero at that point when the charged spot moves away from the point. In that case, the current density J will be a cyclic (periodic) function of time at every point, ∂E/∂t and ∂B/∂t will not be identically zero at all times, and radiation will ensue.

What is going on at the individual charge level? How does an individual electron decide whether it is going to radiate or not? Is it sort of a net effect deal where all the individual electrons are radiating no matter what but in the evenly dispersed charge case the radiation from individual electrons cancels out any net radiation? Or does somehow the distribution of charge prevent the electrons from radiating at all?

Because charge is quantized, you could say that a perfectly uniform distribution of charge is not possible. On the other hand, quantum mechanics tells us we cannot simultaneously measure both the position and momentum (hence current) of an electron with perfect precision. If we can't measure an electron's position and current with enough precision to detect changes in the current density at some position, then we won't detect any radiation (because detection of radiation would be one way to detect changes in the current density at a position).

In terms of a spinning disk, a constant current density is maintained so long as every charge that moves away from a point is immediately replaced by another charge moving into the point. That isn't quite true, but with 6×10¹⁸ electrons per second in an ampere of current, and a charge confined to the surface of the disk so there's only a small area perpendicular to the current through which the current flows, it's a darned good approximation.

It's important to note here that any direct current would have essentially the same issue. No one would claim that an unvarying direct current running through a straight wire will radiate just because the charges are quantized. No one should claim that a uniformly charged and uniformly spinning disk will radiate either.

Could somebody talk about what's going on energy wise here? When the charge is unevenly distributed the system is losing energy. Where is that energy coming from? Is the spinning disk slowed by the radiation or is the disk losing mass?

I'll leave that one for the physicists to answer.

 

[Ziggurat]

That depends. If the charge is placed evenly around the rim of the disk, then the charge is not the same over the entire disk, yet there is still no radiation.

You're right, but I don't think you're being as clear as you could be, so let's make this a little more explicit. If the charge is azimuthally symmetric (and the rate of rotation is constant), there is no radiation. Evenly distributed throughout the volume of the disc counts, evenly distributed around the rim counts, increasing from the center outward can count, etc. I suspect that this is actually what dave meant, though the point is worth clarifying.

Could somebody talk about what's going on energy wise here? When the charge is unevenly distributed the system is losing energy. Where is that energy coming from? Is the spinning disk slowed by the radiation or is the disk losing mass?

Unless you're driving it with a motor (which means you're inputting energy which is then radiated away), then the disk will indeed slow down. I guess you could also say that it's losing mass, since a spinning disk has more mass (due to having more energy) than a stationary disk, but there's no other kind of mass loss going on, and that's not as useful an answer as just noting that the disk would slow down without something to drive it.

 

[davefoc]

You're right, but I don't think you're being as clear as you could be, so let's make this a little more explicit. If the charge is azimuthally symmetric (and the rate of rotation is constant), there is no radiation. Evenly distributed throughout the volume of the disc counts, evenly distributed around the rim counts, increasing from the center outward can count, etc. I suspect that this is actually what dave meant, though the point is worth clarifying.



Unless you're driving it with a motor (which means you're inputting energy which is then radiated away), then the disk will indeed slow down. I guess you could also say that it's losing mass, since a spinning disk has more mass (due to having more energy) than a stationary disk, but there's no other kind of mass loss going on, and that's not as useful an answer as just noting that the disk would slow down without something to drive it.

Thanks for the responses. As to the energy question I was excluding friction, as I think you assumed, so the issue of the motor is also moot, the disk is spinning and it doesn't matter what caused that. So I take it from your answer that the disk would spin indefinitely if the charge is azimuthally symmetric and it would slow down if it isn't, presumably because as the energy is radiated away a force is produced that impedes the spinning of the disk.

One interesting implication here is that photons that are emitted have some angular momentum otherwise angular momentum would not be conserved as the disk slows down. But how can a photon radiating in space have angular momentum?

ETA: There is another issue associated with this. How does it effect things if the material the charge is placed on is a conductor or an insulator. Electric fields move through wires much faster than electrons so is the field in a heterogeneous conductor also heterogeneous regardless of how few charges there are in the conductor?