Perpetual Motion Machine Raises $12M from Investors

A company called Casimir Ink claims they have a microchip that harvests energy from the quantum vacuum using the Casimir effect. They just raised $12 million to commercialize it. Their website literally calls it the world's first unlimited power supply and their founder says millions of devices will operate for years without a battery ever needing to be replaced or recharged. Well, wow. Let's have a look. The announcement comes from Harold White, a former NASA scientist who has previously claimed he can build a propulsion device that extracts energy from the vacuum and wants to build a warp drive that works with energy from the vacuum. Here is the recent announcement in his own words. So, we have engineered a nanoscale structure that interacts with the quantum vacuum in such a way that it harvests continuous energy. I listened to his talk and looked at the website and here is how I understand the new device. It works with the Casimir effect, which is real and genuinely interesting physics. If you place two uncharged metal plates close together in a vacuum, they'll attract each other. The reason is that the presence of the plates themselves changes the structure of the vacuum, which effectively creates an under pressure between the plates resulting in an effective attractive force. The effect is real and its existence has been confirmed in the laboratory. White now says, "Okay, look, if these plates attract each other, there's energy being generated from that. The only problem is that it's a one-off energy release and he wants to make that continuous. " He says there'll be electrons tunneling into the gap between the plates and because of the vacuum difference, they're more likely to go in the space between the plates than out. So, what you do is put something in the middle to siphon off the electrons which will create a current. White claims that his team indeed measured a current. He informed a website called Debrief that across these tests we observed device outputs ranging from millivolts to volts a picoamp current levels well above our instrumentation's noise floor. The company's press material site a paper by White published in Physical Review Research in March which they describe as providing the theoretical foundation for why engineered Casimir cavities produce usable electrical energy. What are we to make of this? First, we talked about the paper when it came out. It's got nothing to do with the Casimir effect or extracting energy from the vacuum. They probably just mentioned this to impress people who didn't read it. More importantly, the Casimir effect simply can't produce continuous energy. It's already wrong to claim that the standard Casimir effect generates energy from the attraction of the plates because you had to put in the energy to bring the plates into place and the space between the plates is vacuum. It's the ground state. It's the state of lowest possible energy. If an electron tunnels into that place voluntarily with some probability, it will not voluntarily leave that place. Hence, no currents. But, they say they measured something. Yes, but look at the numbers. Millivolts to volts sounds impressive, but the current is picoamps. Pico is 10 to the minus 12. If you calculate the power that makes optimistically 10 picowatts, their commercial target is 37 microwatts. So, they'd have to stack a million or billion of these things together to get a microwatt. Still, you might say, "Hey, a picowatt is a picowatt. " True, but technically, you can extract energy from any tiny deviation from equilibrium. That's everything from tiny temperature differences to humidity gradients or salinity gradients in water material boundary layers and so on. It's nothing to do with vacuum energy. It's to do with the fact that there is real energy all around us in teeny tiny amounts. And femtowatts to picowatts is exactly the regime where contact potential differences between dissimilar materials, thermoelectric effects from tiny temperature gradients and instrumental offsets live. These are known effects that can produce more power than this. The thing is done that you can't scale up these energy gains because while you can extract a picowatt from a gradient at room temperature, you can't extract a kilowatt from it. The energy simply isn't there. It's a solid 10 out of 10 on the meter. The Casimir effect is genuinely interesting, though the interesting part isn't the force or the pressure. It's that it actually gives you a negative energy, which physicists will tell you doesn't exist. What this means or what if anything we can do with it is an open question. So, I'm all for people

studying the Casimir effect, but it isn't going to build your perpetual motion machine. The lead investor into the product said, "This is based on 100 years of science and we're finally approaching a commercial product. " He's right about the first part. It's based on 100 years of science, but that science says you can't do this. Hi guys. This is what I look like without makeup, and this video does not have a sponsor, which means that I paid to bring it to you. If you enjoy my science news, please consider supporting me either on Patreon or right here on YouTube. If you already support me, thank you so very much. Without you, this channel would not be possible.