Collective Electrodynamics. What is it and why is it important?
Compared to an individual electron we live on a big scale. Electrical devices that make useful amounts of power or do useful work on our scale are big. This really doesn?t matter if we are pushing bulk electric currents around ? that?s akin to pumping oil through hydraulic pipes. It?s a bulk thermodynamic process; it?s simple; it?s brutish; it?s reliable and serves us well? but we want to work smarter now. We want to design fancy things like room temperature superconductors and devices that tap electron spin energy. These are not bulk thermodynamic process ? these are things that require precise control of the behavior of electrons. The problem is how to make all the free electrons in a big device behave as one controllable collective. The answer is to apply a large EM bias ? the bigger the better . Large electrostatic and/or magnetostatic potentials. To put it another way: working near equilibrium if for dumb thermodynamic processes, to work smarter you need to get away from equilibrium ? the further the better.
And now to explain what that means?
Collective Electrodynamics is a phrase made famous by one of the world?s foremost physicists, Carver Mead. In his book Collective Electrodynamics Mead elegantly describes how electrons behave collectively as one to give rise to some of the most startling devices such as superconductors. Mead then goes on to explain that given devices such as superconductors and lasers we would have formulated the science of electromagnetism in a far simpler and more elegant manner that the current mess we have inherited.
I am not going to regurgitate the truly excellent work Carver Mead documents in his book ? you should all read the first chapter at least ? it?s freely available on line here
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/94/12/6013.pdf and you should really buy his book and study it. It is a true inspiration and a revelation.
What I am going to add that is new is the idea that electrons can be made to progressively behave more collectively by application of electromagnetic bias ? that is by raising the absolute electrostatic and magnetostatic potential of a system you raise its collective behavior.
This is a new concept that I want to establish before we collectively (pun intended) fall into a narrow intuition from just one example ? superconductors. Most people have heard of superconductors ? most people also know that the onset of super conduction happens over a fairly narrow (low) temperature range for any given superconductor material. This has already led to the intuition that the collective behavior of electrons is an all or nothing thing ? you either have superconduction or you don?t. There is also an intuition that these sorts of macroscopic quantum effects don?t happen on a big scale at room temperature ? wrong!... every one reading this now is sitting with arms reach of a pretty large quantum device ? the Giant Magneto Resistance head in your hard disk drive. This is something that relies on the quantum interaction of electron spin and magnetism on a giant scale ? thus the name GMR ? Giant Magneto Resistance.
Now ? I propose that here is a lot of energy we can get from the spin of fermions ? electrons in particular. The practical question is how do we control and tap the spin of an electron? (1) Without being specific, or even having to know exactly how we can deduce how many independent degrees of freedom this would require ? 3. So if this is right we just need to control say the charge gradient, the magnetic gradient and acceleration of an electron ? three things. Right? but even if I am right we aren?t going to do much useful work with the energy from the spin of one electron ? even from a device that could process lots of electrons really fast. Ideally we want a technology that could control and tap spin energy from all the free electrons in a conductor ? where the direct result would be electric current to drive all of our familiar machines.
(1) Randal Mills Blacklight power process has already demonstrated that we can tap electron spin energy by dropping the electron in a hydrogen atom below its ?ground? state. The problem is that the Blacklight process takes place in a hot plasma where energy extraction is difficult.
OK ? now our problem is that we have to control three independent parameters and have untold billions (many more than that actually) of electrons all doing the same thing at the same time. The problem is that they wont ? electrons (spherical spinor waves) are slippery little things. Their spin is in all three dimentions at the same time and unless you bring al three degrees of independent control to bear on one electron at one time then it will just move energy from one axis to another ? inducing a neighboring spinor (electron or proton) to shift it?s spin energies to the other axis so that everything averages out.
It?s just like a ferromagnetic material with no net magnetic field externally ? internally it has just as many magnetic domains (I am speaking generally here) as in it?s fully magnetized state but half of them are opposing the other half and we don?t detect any net external magnetic field.
We need a way to input three (or however many) independent controls into a common region (wire) and have all of the free electrons behave as one collective whole. A way to do this is to raise the electromagnetic potential ? get it as far away from equilibrium as possible. You do this with static electric or magnetic potential.
Let me pause here and give a simple analogy that may help visualize what I mean. Imagine a 6 foot beach ball. Someone has told you (correctly) that if three of you stand 120 degrees apart around it and you punch it in sequence than it will orbit in a circle ? a perfect analogy for 3 phase EM devices. Lets imaging that the air pressure is like voltage.
What happens when you try punching the ball in sequence if the ball is at equilibrium with the surrounding air pressure ? nothing probably. Without any pressure the ball is flabby ? you can punch it all you like, as fast as you like for as long as you like and nothing much will happen. You can put a lot of energy into your punches but the problem is that the ball is too floppy and the air inside just moves around without any effect.
Now you put a little pressure into the ball ? it starts to respond to your punches. It wobbles and you find that if you time the punches just right that all three of you may be able to get it orbiting. This is better but not perfect yet.
So now you pump the pressure up a lot ? to almost bursting point. The ball is so stiff now that it behaves as one solid ball? the air inside is now behaving as one collective thing.
The same thing happens with electrons. You can progressively push a system into collective behavior by increasing the pressure ? by moving it away from equilibrium. This allows you to then apply different controls (inputs) to different points and have the effects combine within the collective whole. Now you can finally try to rotate the collective set of electrons in three directions at once ? which will increase or decrease the overall spin. Without the static bias all that will happen is that electrons in different parts of the device will move in different ways ? you may get some interesting effects as the intervening electrons blend the different inputs but you won?t get the effects combining in any one electron.
In case any of you are skeptical that electrons can be made to behave collectively under normal potential or magnetic fields just stop and consider an inductor. The inductance of a coil is proportional to the square of the number of turns. If two turns gives 1x units of inductance then doubling the turns will give rise to 4x units of inductance. This is due to the collective behavior of electrons in the inductor. But, I hear the engineers scream, the nonlinear inductance to turns ratio is due to the electrons being all affected by the magnetic field they are creating ? not collective behavior. That explanation is just hiding real understanding ? a field is not anything real it?s just a mathematical construct. We want to look deeper into the actual mechanism of the electrons in the inductor interacting with one another. OK the engineers say ? if you want to be that basic then electrons interact one-one via exchange of photons. AH ? and there in lies the problem. If the only sort of interaction that was possible was a one-one exchange of photons then a nonlinear relationship of turns to inductance could never arise. The fact is that electrons in an inductor are acting ever more collectively as you increase the turns and the shared magnetic field generated when current is applied.
So ? does that mean that we could potentially make a room temperature superconductor by raising the static potential high enough ? in principal yes. It also implies that we could raise the Tc of superconductors by operating them at high static potential.
So what does this mean for TPU style devices ? in these you have three inputs at a fundamental and two higher harmonics (or some arbitrary higher frequencies). If there is any chance of these three inputs combining to activate one effect then the electrons with a full fundamental wavelength must be made to behave collectively. Rather than relying on the signals themselves to raise the voltage in just the right way, time and places it?s far more reliable to just raise the static potential of the part of the device where the waves are combining ? this may be the collector and /or the whole arrangement of drive and collector coils. A combination of electrostatic and magnetostatic biases may work best ? or a high gradient of one or both. The exact, best and safest conditions need to be determined experimentally. The only certain thing is that to reliably see interesting effects you should have as large a static bias potentials, and as many as you can apply.
Sigh ? late again and too much caffeine to keep going. I?ll have to get back to ?work? for a rest
There are more supportive arguments progressively increasing collective behavior of electrons as static bias is increased but I hope the preceding explanation is sufficient for readers to grasp the principal. I actually realized the principal in practice as I was adding magnetic rollers to a device I made ? which I should video one day as it is an excellent example of the conservation of momentum in an orbital system ? something I have never seen before. Anyway ? the point is that the transition to collective behavior in normal electromagnetic systems we deal with is very real ? it?s not just theory.
Sorry for the absence of pretty pictures and animations ? they take a long time to prepare and I didn?t have any on hand for this topic.
Cheers
Mark Snoswell.
Oh ? in case any of you really get this and are now wondering if that by controlling the spin of electrons we could control their mass the answer is yes ? and much more. This is the gateway to coupling of EM and gravity ? or in more rigorous terms coupling the two fundamental classes of space-time distortion: torsion and curvature. It?s all about control ? not brute energy.
