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Artificial Lightning Excess Aqueous Electron e(aq) Low Energy Pair Production In Water |
We aren't going to harness, harvest, convert, extract or capture lightning.
We're going to make it.
Just like nature does.
What follows is the text of a speech that I, the guy at the bottom of the page, wrote in early 2018. It's conversational and as much in my own voice as possible. Rather than letting it literally collect dust any longer, it is now also web content.
It is quite long by webpage standards, so I would suggest starting slowly with digestible portions of the concept found at the links below. The speech is written for those with at least some familiarity with the idea of artificial photochemical "lightning", and since it is an entirely novel approach, those links might be the best place to start.
Artificial Lightning Startup - Generating Low Energy Pair Production Of Electrons In Water
Artificial Lightning Seen as Clean Energy Breakthrough
(Old) pitch slides with comments
Introductory webpage
Investor webpage
Ads and images
Hello and good morning.
This is a talk about the Low Energy Excess Aqueous Electron or the e, parentheses, a - q, e(aq), also known as Artificial Lightning.
They're both electrons brought about by visible light interacting with water, whether in a cloud or a laboratory.
So they're basically the same thing, but Artificial Lightning is easier to visualize.
First, I'll explain the mechanism as seen in the lab and the physics behind it. Then I'll talk a little bit about lightning.
Then, I'll tell you why this should be pursued as an electrical energy generation and storage source.
I'll describe why this has apparently been overlooked, because I find it hard to believe myself.
And then, I'll rant about why this is a breakthrough innovation, how great it is blah blah and et cetera.
Finally, I'll make a few suggestions about what has to be done here, and ask for your help.
I will use repetition and gesticulation, like a big blue photon, a little gamma photon, tiny electron, which might get a annoying. And probably the occasional "finger quote".
And I'm afraid it's going to get technical, but all of this is on webpages you can read later.
Alright, so what is this e(aq), Low Energy Excess Aqueous Electron thing that's probably Lightning?
Well, according to the scholarly articles and papers I've spent years reading and re-reading, there are numerous types of loose electrons in water, water ice or water vapor in clouds, but this one, called "excess" and "low energy" is unique.
It's called "low energy" because it's big and slow.
It's called "excess", because it's stuck or trapped in a cavity between clusters of molecules, and not interacting.
Or, in other words, it can be in storage.
It's unique because it appears seemingly out of nowhere, after wavy light particles called photons are shot into a water cluster of a few molecules.
Water being H2O, a basketball with two tennis balls stuck on it.
These are typically photons from the high end of visible light, ranging from a dark blue violet color to barely invisible ultraviolet, what you might call "tanning rays".
Down around "red", the electron will fall apart and decay to white light.
Now, a photon is just a wavy particle of light, ranging from large radio waves, we can only read with devices, to smaller temperature waves we can feel with our skin but not see, to even smaller visible light waves we can see with our eyes, all the way to tiny invisible high energy wavelength particles like gamma photons, two of which makes up a typical electron. It's all "light".
Think of a photon as a moving figure eight infinity symbol, and when two of them merge cross-wise, an electron is formed.
And after a low energy e(aq) forms, it can absorb even still more light. That's the visible blue seen in water, ice or sometimes lightning, which is where "electric blue" came from.
So when you see blue in ice or water, think of this talk. That's trapped energy, just like the heat trapped in coal or uranium.
Now at this point, it's very important to differentiate. The e(aq) is not a normal-sized electron that was already there and got knocked loose somehow.
That's usually called ionization.
Nor is this the photo-electric effect pushing existing electrons, like in ordinary solar.
Those both involve normal-size electrons which are much smaller and high energy.That kind interacts in water as expected. They aren't trapped and stored.
We don't care about those electrons.
We care about the ones that mysteriously appear from two photons of visible light.
We care about the ones that are trapped, that are the wrong size and in the wrong place.
We care about the ones that are not interacting normally. Which means they're stored, like in a battery, until released.
That release, called "ballistic motion", can be controlled in several ways, by another photon pushing it, sound, a magnetic field, an electric field, a gravitational field, or even mechanically, like if I shake this bottle.
Then BANG! BOOM! FLASH!
Suddenly the big, low energy electrons shrink to normal size and all rush together to what's called the conduction band, where all the other loose, ionized normal-sized ones already are.
And in the lab, the conduction band can be captured on electrodes, which incidentally happen to look like little lightning rods.
And then they go on in life to do useful work.
But, remember they might suddenly fall apart too, and decay back into visible light emission, flashing quickly to white with a little touch of "electric blue".
That happens with light from lower down in the visible range, it's too low energy.
As I mentioned before, the threshold for that is somewhere in "red".
If the electron is too big and too slow to shrink quickly enough, it'll collapse and flash.
The lab reports spell this out pretty clearly, and it makes sense.
Once again, this is unique behavior. A normal electron in water does not act like this.
On top of all that, all the stuff around the low energy excess electron is out-of-whack and unexplained.
The water molecular arrangements are often described as, quote, "unclear".
Things seem to have happened out-of-order for normal ionization to have happened, too fast, too slow or not-at-all.
Things that should have happened didn't, and things that shouldn't have happened, did happen.
Nothing is where it's supposed to be.
The extra photons are left unaccounted for, as are unmatched protons, and the expected ions that seem to be missing.
If this was only hydrogen atoms stripped of electrons as one would expect, what happened to the unpaired protons?
Again, it's all inconsistent with ionization and normal electrons.
Yet somehow things realign themselves far quicker than expected and quickly return to normal.
When you're reading the scholarly articles and papers about this, right about here is where the usual familiar lingo disappears.
The hard science gets very squishy and they have to step out of their world for a moment.
To be fair though, most of this is happening on the very edge of measurement.
We're talking about very tiny objects acting in short time spans.
So the usual empiro-metrics won't work here. Charts, graphs and numbers alone will not suffice.
Things have to be described in plain language, words and phrases like, quote, "unknown", and "not (well) understood" come up.
Things are described as, quote, seemingly, probably, possibly, caused by: "decaying exitons", "excited polarons'', "polarized excitons", or caused by "changed nuclear arrangements" in a "non-linear absorption spectrum".
Esoteric physics terms appear in chemistry and biochemistry articles, like, "waves", "energy packets", "wave packets" and "quasiparticles".
They use words like "generated" "forms" and "created" to explain this, where like "ionization", would usually be.
One of the better papers says the electron might be "squeezed" out.
But at some point, the energy is too low for that, and the electron appears anyway.
The e(aq) we're talking about is not from "excitement" or "CTTS" charge transfer to solvent", but quote "something other than excitation".They're always spherical too, not complex orbitals that look like balloon animals, which is a happy coincidence.
The best explanation involves overlapping hydrogen orbitals that "feels" the extra charge. This, from a national laboratory.
They even they put "feels" in quotes, it's so precious.
But these papers are done by experimentalists, not theorists, so they don't have to explain everything.
They can get away with it. I'm not mocking here, just laughing at myself trying to understand this.
Also, these experiments are often very general in nature. They do as much as possible then they move on to next thing.
It's not like they're focused on the low energy excess electron here either, it's only an oddball detail and loose-end among a zillion other things they have to consider.
What I've just described, the useful and interesting part, is buried under tons of mundane ionization stuff.
There might be four paragraphs in sixty more of other mind-numbing gibberish.
One or two sentences here and there are readable in these papers. It's not a narrative story like I'm telling you.
It's not, "This happens while that happens after the other thing." It's all out of order.
Dark violet is "3.0 eV" to these people. They don't even think in nanometers, like normal people.
The point is, even after you've digested all this, though they don't come out and say it clearly, they're making new electrons.
This is a big distinction, from what's done in current generation, solar and battery technology, which only pushes, pulls or stores e-x-i-s-t-i-n-g electrons. (twice)
Here, we are making them.
What we have here are big, odd-sized electrons which are made from visible light, which are trapped and stored until released, when suddenly they shrink to normal size and move very quickly to a conduction band with other electrons, or else they decay with flashes of unraveling white and blues. (twice)
This can be done ten to the fifteenth, 10^15, a quadrillion, fifteen zeros, times a second, in very dense water.
This gives us unprecedented energy storage, plus generation, plus density.
This is why we have to strongly consider the e(aq) as a possible new energy source.
By the way, what's described sure looks like lightning, doesn't it?
I mean you have light, water, sudden electricity and sudden visible flashes. What does that tell you?
It took me a while to see that. I had been looking for something else.
And what's missing here implies lightning, too.
Ever hear of a weather forecast for proton showers on Channel 4 Action News with Sally Wiggin? I don't think so.
But we don't care anyway, it's a good thing.
Because the physics makes perfect sense without any excess protons.
It supports the argument that photons are merging to create one electron.
Since we're generating new electrons from light, there's nothing to balance.
So explanations of irrelevant unknowns aren't needed.
The stuff that is missing, should be missing. The stuff that is out-of-place, should be out-of-place.
The other stuff that is too slow and couldn't happen, didn't happen.
The things and stuff that are too fast to have happened, couldn't happen and didn't happen.
And everything is in the wrong order, right where it should be.
The missing stuff shouldn't be there anyway.
It should be that way. This is good.
Because we already know it is possible to form new electrons from light. It's no mystery.
Tiny invisible gamma photons merge to form normal-sized, higher-energy normal electrons the same way.
This is done by shooting gamma photons one-by-one at other gamma photons stuck in a nucleus, or by firing gamma lasers at each other diagonally, or with high-energy collisions in particle accelerators.
Electrons can decay back into gammas the same way, we just can't see a flash with our eyes, because the wavelength is too small.
A device is needed for that.
And logically, since visible light causes the low energy e(aq) to appear. We can reasonably infer decays back to the the visible. FLASH!
As you heard me say earlier, even "red" photons have created an e(aq), but those often decay to "white".
This stuff is from the basic quantum theory. We just haven't used this part yet.
This is Einstein's mass-energy equivalence demonstrated by light energy becoming electricity, an electron with mass.
We're simply using water as a lens, focusing the visible light in on itself and entangling it.
The overlapping photons in hydrogen orbitals "feels" like an extra electron, because that's what it is.
This is just like those wavy Feynman diagrams showing gamma photons coming together to form electrons and decaying back to gammas the same way they came.
Some of you have seen those.
That's why the "energy packets", "wave packets", "wave" language is very telling. It seems like a Feynman influence.
He was a national lab guy at some point, so it's gotta be okay, for us chemists to say that, right?And because that Feynman gamma stuff is called "pair production", you might call this Low Energy Pair Production.
Think of it that way if "Artificial Lightning" is too corny and "The Low Energy Excess Aqueous Electron" is too cumbersome.
That's roughly what I was looking for, some kind of reverse inside-out photosynthesis electrolysis shortcut.
Then I realized that "Low Energy Pair Production" was probably Lightning.
And later I realized "Artificial Lightning" will get eyeballs and is easy to remember.
How's that for "pivoting", start-up types?
Anyway, it all seems obvious in hindsight, when I put it this way, but believe me folks, it's not spelled out like I just did.
And communicating all this is harder than it was finding it in the first place.
But enough with the science homework headache stuff. Let's get intuitive with lightning here. Remember what Einstein said, intuition is the gift, and rationality is its servant.
Let's think about lightning for a moment, which most of us have seen.
We see visible sunlight going into water clouds, and sometimes later suddenly electricity shoot out of them accompanied by flashes of blue and unraveling white.
That sounds like what I was just babbling about, doesn't it?
It's a continuum of white clouds, white snow, glassy ice, white light, blue ice, blue water, electric blue and on-and-on.
And because of bright white lightning at night, we certainly can infer that it seems like they're full of stored electrons and visible light.
We can't see trapped electrons in a cloud, like in the lab, but certainly can infer it.
They're stored and trapped until released, just like a battery.
They're not ionizing and dripping in some continuous process. It's sudden. BANG. FLASH. BOOM.
Human beings have seen all this with their own lying eyes since they crawled out of the cave.
And coincidentally, it happens to look a lot like what's buried in dusty drawers at national energy laboratories.
Yet the scientific conventional wisdom about lightning is so scant, simplistic and superficial that it's embarrassing for me as a human being to mention.
So I won't spend much time now complaining about what doesn't exist.
But I will give you a quick anecdote. There's a certain highly-cited lightning expert, a professor with numerous patents about how to handle it, an author of many scholarly articles and books.
He knows all about every aspect of lightning, except what causes it.
He has a line in his books something like "go ask a physicist".
But fine, he knows everything else about it. He's done enough already.
Then, just for example, there were a couple of November 2017 articles about lightning in, Nature and Science Daily, two very highly esteemed and scholarly publications with great graphics.
(If only I had those artists, this would already be a unicorn IPO by now.)
Anyway, they discuss how lightning strikes in Japan near a nuclear power plant, were generating antimatter in the atmosphere.
These articles have everything in there since the Big Bang, except Godzilla.
Yet at the end of them, like so many similar ones, there's always one sentence -- "the cause of lightning remains unknown".
Just like the good professor.
Somehow this slipped by, folks. It's so dumbfounding, it took a dummy dumbbell average dummkopf to find it.
I mean, what, air finger quote, "they" don't know about something as common as lightning would fill libraries with old wives tales.
And when contrasted with the antimatter speculation and a lot of other, quote, hashtag "science" fairy tales, this makes me not worry too much about being a tin foil hat.
There's not a lot of logic happening around this.
So you have to ask yourself ,"How the hell hasn't someone already looked at this?"
If I were you, I'd be thinking the same thing. How is this guy the first to seriously look at this? Impossible.
But I think you might've maybe possibly also already realized that lightning generally looks the same as the lab results I told you about. Visible light is going into water clouds, seemingly causing electrons, which are trapped and stored until released, when they suddenly join together and rush to a conduction band, just like lightning bolts, accompanied by flashes of decaying white and blue.
And both the "knowns" and "unknowns" roughly correlate once again.
There are no dripping electrons, and never any loose protons to speak of.
But, it is true that we can't see the traps and shrinkage. We can only see behavior at the macro-level and make inferences.
Hey. D'jver hear DJ Firefly forecast of a light drizzle dusting of electrons?
How about proton bolt conduction bands after sundown?
Me either. Maybe let's help this guy.
So, where are the Top Men Of Science?Somebody had to figure this all out a long time ago, right?
How would it come down to a clown like this guy?
Well, we can't blame them too much. You can tell some of the working chemists would like a better look at this.
Almost every scholarly article has a note to that effect, some stronger than others.
But they're specializing in writing grants supporting ever-fractaling pigeon holes, Mandelbrotian niches of infinite subcategories and silos of factoids, as directed by policy bureaucrats.
They're also focused on their own work. They're not a drive-by tourist like me with no professional reputation to protect.
They each have a singular focus on, for example, water chemistry, theoretical physics, experimental physics, energy, meteorology or biochemistry. They are not generalists.
Don't get me wrong, they made this possible.
But they punch the clock and go home, as is natural.
They're not paid to imagine dragons and unicorns.
And as some of you might know, but might not say, energy innovation development is iterative and incremental.
It's generally following quarterly results and budgets, and is lagging behind curmudgeonly sciences and politics.
So the group-think and conformity tends to stay in motion.
Private sector engineers tend to be interested in what will get them a job, (guilty), so are led by economic demand, or maybe some Silicon Valley trend.
Scientists, tend to work on what's prestigious, like God particles, gravity waves, anti-neutrinos, dark matter, time crystals, string theory and multiverses.
Also, they're virtue-signalling sheep-like trendoids, as is academia generally.
So, compared to all that fun stuff, "lightning" is old Ben Franklin, Tesla kid stuff from 500 years ago.
There's a gap between engineering and science, too. And I won't even go there.
There just is no overview of any of this, besides a few writers and academics commenting in hindsight, years later, after it happens.
These criticisms are not entirely my original thoughts here, by the way.
I'm parroting these writers of history and philosophy of science, while also enjoying my own experiences now with this.
We tend to improve what we have until something better comes along, which makes sense and is human nature.
The "something better" is always disruptive, and seems absurd at first, like this.
History is replete with accidental breakthroughs, too. Also, mistakes and unintended consequences play a large part.
Ironically, in this case, perhaps some of the best energy research will have come from biochemistry.
Because the e-a-q is a hazard to DNA.
They're using more straight-forward obvious language like "created", "formed", "generated", and glossing over certain telling aspects.
So this follows the same pattern of technical innovation, we've seen time and again.
It often takes some random tin foil hat that comes along to claim you can fly without feathers despite the peer-reviewed types denying it.
That's how the tinkering hobbyists, dropouts in a garage, low level patent clerks or Ohio bicycle mechanics end up on Apple computer boxes.
So history shows that big changes come from these unexpected places. This fits the profile.
Or even obvious things like lightning get overlooked, but sooner or later, someone will notice anyway.
I was just curious about something else and found this.
And ever since I was in the 1993 WTC bombing, I've been big on "see something say something".
It's inevitable and idiot-proof because it's hardwired in nature.
For me now, it's mostly fun and interesting.
The advantage is being inspired by beauty and simplicity.
That makes it easy to persevere.
I believe in this and am in it for the long haul.
But it will be a challenge of course, because this is entirely new, unprecedented, different.
We are proposing making new electrons from light.
And because we're making new electrons, not just pushing and pulling existing ones, it's a vastly more effective process.
We're using water as generator, as a lens combining and merging and entangling light and making new electrons.
We're mimicking lightning, but making it continuous, and will control delayed releases for storage.
And we're using both water and hydrogen as battery. That's also new.
That's complete and utter disruption. In theory, of course.
Time is used more wisely, because our steps are combined.
We're using more of the fourth dimension, less of the other three.
I call it "energy density plus time".
We're using cheap abundant materials. We'll be faster, cleaner and more-easily distributable.
This could be last source of electricity we'll need for quite some time.
Did I mention zero carbon?
You couldn't make up a better ideal energy source fantasy than this.
So of course it will seem impossible to you right now at first. It's too good to be true, like sliced bread was.
This will likely move through the stages of truth: first it's ridiculed. Then there is violent opposition.
Finally, it becomes self-evident. Which this already has been for billions of years.
This thing is irresistible natural perfection, combining elegance, beauty and simplicity.
Remember what Hermann Weyl and Paul Dirac said about choosing beauty. If you have an option of solutions to a problem, choose the beautiful one.
When you debunking numbers types start to figure what could come out of a small amount of water with such a small input, and at what rate, your heads will explode.
"One point two one" 1.21 gigawatts indeed, Doc.
But because our lightning is artificial, it's always on. No sudden BOOMS.There will be no flashing or banging, just smooth and silent glowing, from every cluster.
It'll be a glassy ice set up in an optomechanical metamaterial.
Say, did you know that liquid water in carbon nanotubes will act like ice? That's pretty convenient to know, isn't it?
Yeah.
And unlike current solar, the e(aq) can be saved in place for use later, like a lightning storm cloud at night.
It will be accessible long after sundown when old solar is sleeping.
Because it's a battery. Made of water. Rechargeable with visible light. Air quotes "Let that sink in".
Or, you can also call this solar to the 10 to the 15th, or "solar quadrillion "X". Fifteen zeroes everywhere, folks.
It's not Uber for Bookface, "3X or 10X", like you're used to.
Or, you can call this the self-recharging generating bottomless semi-conducting water battery.
And I'm only talking Ice VII here, which occurs naturally in our environment. Not the 26 other ones we can make.
Who knows what can be done with water wires, conduction and semi-conduction?
The thing will no doubt push protons, if you asked it to.
Of course it would.
This is all the rainbow unicorn stuff everyone ever dreamed of, all-in-one.
Water and visible light are available on the Moon, Mars, outer space and wherever fine products are sold.
And s-p-e-a-k-i-n-g of planets, let's mention the Earth too, now.
Now you're gonna hear a cheap emotional ploy from an agnostic on climate change, a leaning-hard skeptic.
When you clean energy hawks finally tire of dirty silicon, filthy lithium, nasty old stinky perovskites, ugly hideous solar panels and bird-killing, butchering, noisy incongruous wind turbine eyesores, inevitably you'll take a look at this.
Because, as they say, "you will be made to care". Even you.
When you lifestyle-types in Shadyside dreaming of a natural energy solution using the renewable, organic, bespoke, artisinal, sustainable Sun and sustainable, bespoke, renewable, organic, artisinal, materials like water, look up in the sky and think.
What if you could only reverse-engineer nature for an energy miracle, what would it be? Would you try it?
How much sense does that make? You literally get rainbows with this stuff.
I mean, this is your rainbow unicorn wish list dream come true.
And if it quacks like a black swan, it's going to make money.
Even if I'm only half right, which I doubt, but you don't, and it turns out the best we can do is just stripping electrons from water and recycling them, this is still going to be a major development.
Not to mention any unintended consequences.
It's definitely some kind of major progress, no matter which way you look at it. So laugh now and get it over with, if you need to.
Still have doubts? Look out the window and see the prototype, which happens to be an archetype.
It's right in front of our face.
So we have to make an effort to develop this thing, especially you believers. And especially you believers with money.
OK, now I'm going to Wrap It Up and Wind It Down
This could be the new paradigm.
Some of you are already getting it.
It already feels like watershed (get it, pun not taken) moment.
And this is a big change... (Fake Obama voice) ... change we need.
This is the time when human beings stopped pushing and pulling electrons and learned to make them from light, harmonizing with nature in an optimal way.
This is the place when human beings began to make more efficient use of materials, processes and time.
This is where the Photon Economy began. Here and now.
The Too Much Information Age is over. No more Snapchat for dogs.
Let's kick this civilization up a notch. It's all about light & matter now. Forward and into the light.
It's the Photonic Age of optomechanics, metamaterials and nanotechnology, dawning right here in River City.
Who knows what innovations will follow? Where would it lead? Surely, others will see the light (pun not taken).
Then the Vulcans landed.
So that's THE MISSION, folks. Sunshine In A Bag
But to start this journey we've got to get this Artificial Lightning thing off the ground.
I need a couple of people to agree this could be a thing, confirming, vetting this idea.
I need ground floor type advisors and technical collaborators.
Then we'll need an overall strategy.
Is this a startup, a crowdfunding project, or an environmental movement?
And I really need some promotional creative graphic artists to make my stuff pop.
So, go read my corny "zero stage" webpages for the general public.
And you should know that there's more to this than meets the eye on those pages.
The best stuff is offline for legal reasons.
If you want to know about those, ask me.
You can contact me in the usual ways. I'm on Twitter. LinkedIn, and my email is out there. I'm glad to answer questions.
Let me leave you with this thought from Plato. Beauty is the ideal made visible. (Twice)
Wouldn't the ideal energy source be something as beautiful as visible light in exploding electrons out of water, with a rainbow afterward?
I think it's obvious that what Einstein said about simple solutions and answers applies here, too.
Here we have visible light creating electricity in water.
It's right in front of our eyes, flashing and banging for attention.
We've either ignored it or just haven't noticed. In any case, no one seems to be looking at it.
When you technical types get around to the details, you'll see the incomparable beauty of ideal simplicity.
It's not complicated at all, nature is hardwired for this.
So help me make this breakthrough, for all of us.
Thank you.
