Jim Baen's Universe

Nonfiction articles

My Father's Watch

Written by Stephen Euin Cobb

If you thumb through a new and freshly printed physics textbook from any university on Earth, you will be looking at the culmination of centuries of careful work by thousands of dedicated scientists; such a book is a treasure beyond description, easily comparable to the lost library of Alexandria. If you doubt this valuation, imagine what price it would bring if you could take it back in time a hundred years. Or conversely, what would the large governments of the world pay right now for a similar book published a hundred years in the future?

But as wonderful as is the information in a new physics textbook, someday it will all have to be rewritten. Some chapters will be rewritten within decades, some may take millennia, but all will require change.

This is because every scientific explanation of the physical world, whether we call it a theory or a law, eventually has to be modified to remain accurate under conditions that were not foreseen by its original creator. Newton's laws of motion were correct until we applied them to velocities near that of light or within a powerful gravitational field. Under those conditions, Newton's laws are now superseded by Relativity. And Relativity also was correct, until we discovered such things as the wave nature of particles and instantaneous action at a distance which is where quantum mechanics now supersedes Relativity.

Because we are continually applying them to new and untested situations, every law and every theory must eventually be adjusted. So while it would be comforting to pretend, for example, that the laws of thermodynamics are greater than the laws of Isaac Newton and will never need adjustment as his did, it would also be naive. Eventually we will discover places and situations where they do not apply as we understand them today.

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When I was in my early twenties, during the second half of the nineteen seventies, my father got a new watch and gave me his old one. Thrift is a concept that runs strong in my family. An item no longer needed is not thrown away; instead, you look around and find someone who can use it and you give it to them. I suppose this is a form of recycling, but that's not the point.

The point is that old watch, with its two tiny bits of welding spatter melted permanently into the glass which covered its dial, never needed winding. The natural movements of the wearer's wrist during the course of a day would wind the mainspring.

This was done by a simple device hidden inside: just a little weight mounted on a rocker arm. When the rocker arm pivoted to the left a spur caught one of the gears of the mainspring and rotated it, tightening the mainspring a very tiny amount. When it pivoted in the opposite direction the spur slid across the gear without catching and so did not rotate it in the opposite direction which would have loosened the mainspring.

That these ratcheted back-and-forth pivotings of the rocker arm occurred at random did not matter. By pivoting thousands of times during a day, the rocker arm tightened the mainspring to its limit and kept it there.

For centuries, simple devices like that have sparked the minds of naive inventors with the dream of designing a magical machine that would run forever. Usually this dream machine was powered by the very same momentum which it produced. Technically, this would make it the mechanical equivalent of an audio feedback loop, a physical manifestation of a vicious circle.

The designer's naivety was, of course, displayed in the failure to understand that all machines are subject to friction. Usually this friction is created as surfaces rub against one another in bearings or gears, and sometimes it is a product of electromagnetic induction, in which the free electrons (those not bound in atoms) within wires or other metal parts are shoved around within those wires and metal parts and, by being shoved, rub against the substance of the metal itself, producing the form of friction we call electrical resistance. In cases where metal parts have an irregular geometry, free electrons are sometimes shoved into a corner or narrow place within the part from which they cannot escape, and by being squeezed together, produce a static electric resistance as well.

Friction is universal. Human beings have never made any device that was not subject to friction.

Even on the nanoscale, friction is universal. But while some things are the same down there, some things are very different.

For example, on the scale at which we human beings experience things—sometimes called the macroscale—"temperature" is a mysterious quality of substances that we can feel, but which usually remains invisible. If, however, you could see things on the nanoscale "temperature" would be neither invisible nor mysterious. On that scale it is the obvious and random physical motion of individual objects and/or the vibration of their parts.

Only by reducing temperature to absolute zero will things actually stop moving and vibrating. This is because temperature is defined as the amount of movement or vibration on a molecular, atomic or subatomic level. Temperature and movement are not similar or somehow related; they are the same thing exactly.

On the nanoscale, random motion and vibration are universal and unending. On this scale there is never a pause and never a rest; which brings me back to my father's old watch. If it could be shrunk so small that it too was of the nanoscale—so small that its component gears and screws and housing might each be composed of a single large molecule—I wouldn't have to wear it for it to wind itself. Its molecular-sized rocker arm would rock of its own. Not with a uniform beat, of course, but with a frequency both random and perpetual, driven by the thermal vibrations within the rocker arm itself.

Yes, you read that correctly. And yes, you know what it means. There may be thousands of ways to design a patentable machine on the nanoscale which will convert the endless parade of random vibrations which we call "room temperature" into usable energy: not just nano-spring winders, but nano-fluid pumps or even nano-piezoelectric generators coupled to nano-diodes for shoving electricity along a wire or squeezing it tightly into a battery. (Piezoelectrics are those materials which produce an electrical voltage when squeezed or flexed. And diodes are a type of resistor with a high electrical resistance in one direction and a low electrical resistance in the other—thus allowing electrons to flow in only one direction.)

I suppose all this is analogous to extracting energy from the random up and down movement of ocean waves. They too are random, universal and never stop. The difference being that ocean waves are large while the vibrations within molecules are small. (There are those who might protest that waves are driven by wind, but it seems unlikely that a rocker arm will care if it is rocked by big wind-driven waves or by tiny heat-driven molecular vibrations.)

Imagine, if you will, an integrated circuit chip which, instead of containing a CPU or the circuits for random access memory, contains nano-piezoelectric generators driven by their individual molecular vibrations and arranged in a thousand layers of a million generators per layer. Or imagine a grid work of nano-fluid pumps driven by their molecular vibrations built into a sheet of Mylar plastic making it a self-powered filter through which fluids could pass in only one direction. Or maybe build these pumps into the rubber of toy balloons: you buy them at the store, take them out of the bag, set them on the table and watch as they inflate themselves, sucking air straight in through the rubber—or toss them in the tub and let them become water balloons.

Do you fancy yourself an inventor? With very little effort you can probably work out three or four much better designs in an hour. Now, multiply yourself by thousands of other people who will also read this article. Feeling crowded? It gets worse.

U.S. patent law has a clause which states that no patent may be granted for a device described in any publication which has been publicly available for more than one year. Thus the publication of this article has set a deadline for all those who wish to patent a device based on the description I have just provided you. This means you'd better get moving. You have less than one year.

During the next decade or two we will enter a new era of endless, nonpolluting energy. Welcome to the future. Tag. You're it.

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While I first thought these thoughts in the late seventies, others have from time to time thought them too. Unfortunately, because so much enthusiastic quackery has been put forth by those who mean well but who are, shall we say, innocent of any rigorous scientific understanding, there rests upon this subject a terrible stigma. Snake oil is given greater credence.

Change to this situation will not come slowly. It will be sudden, or never. Only by demonstration will it receive credence, and only when that demonstration is replicated by others will it be accepted by scientists in general. And this is the way it should be. Science is based on experiments conducted in the real world, not theories we find pleasing to the ear.

But we must also remember that resistance to change in science is powerful because it is based partly on science and partly on emotion. Einstein, brilliant as he was and in spite of all evidence, argued against quantum mechanics for decades; and to his dying day never accepted it as real. We humans are, after all, only human.

I have waited thirty years to write this article. And through those thirty years have held my tongue, describing these ideas to no one. Mostly this was because of the hideous (and justifiable) stigma attached to the subject; but also because never before has human technology reached a level where these ideas might reasonably be expected to bear fruit. With our first but increasing forays into the realm of nanotechnology, that day is now upon us, and I feel that it is time to speak.

If you would like to read more on this subject, without wading through the ocean of quackery from which it must extricate itself, here are a few recent scientific reports. But I must warn you: the ocean is out there and it is waiting to swallow you.

Georgia Institute of Technology

Royal Society of Chemistry

Science Daily

Nanotechnology Today

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You can learn more about Stephen Euin Cobb here.

Or about his podcast here or here.

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