Home Propeller Head Plaza

Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

[ Follow Ups ] Thread: [ Display  All  Email ] [ Propeller Head Plaza ]
[ Alert Moderator ]

Not sure there is such a "handy guide"...

...which is the point, really. I worked very hard for 10 years to acquire a tenuous grasp of some of these ideas.

The only way to decide whether something like the chip can work is to start by listing the various ways that energy can be exchanged remotely--various types of radiation (electromagnetic at a wide range of wavelengths, particulate), heat, and several basic force fields--electric, magnetic, gravitational, strong, and weak (help me out physicists--have I missed anything?). There are also esoteric things that don't apply, like the various spin-spin interactions that act over very short distances and weird non-local quantum mechanical effects which also, for many reasons, don't apply here.

Count 'em off:
* weak force: too weak
* strong force: too short-range
* gravitational force: too weak.

That leaves the boring ones only: magnetic, electric, and the various kinds of radiation. If it's magnetic, then, well, the disk itself must be magnetic in order to respond (plus it would have to penetrate ferrous-metal casework); if it's electric, then it could only make a permanet change in materials that can be permanently rearranged by a weak electric field--not the case with CD materials, which may become polarized by electric fields but which will relax back to their lowest energy state as soon as the field is removed. Besides, there's no power source. That gets us to radiation of various kinds: could be electromagnetic (X-rays, gamma-rays, photons, etc.). Now some combination of these could actually arise from such a device, if the chip were radioactive--though they would be very easy to detect. Matter radiation (alpha, beta, ...) --with one exception which I'll mention momentarily--would be stopped by the thinnest casework. The one exception would be neutrons...but if the chip is a neutron source, I hope Geoff has kept up his liability insurance, and anyway, they would interact only weakly with the material the disk is made of.

So what does that leave us? Well, with cancer maybe (from long-term exposure, if it's a neutron source), or with some low-energy electromagnetic radiation (optical wavelengths and longer)...which would also be blocked by the casework.

That's pretty much it. The problem is that scientists are constantly discovering new concepts that sound enticing and can easily fool those who don't know much science (perhaps the chip works via...dark matter! Or quantum entanglement!) There's nothing to do here but to evaluate each proposal on its own (lack of) merits. But generally speaking, such esoteric concepts have no applicability to a system like this.

Respectfully,

Jim Austin

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
  Atma-Sphere Music Systems, Inc.  

Follow Ups Full Thread
Follow Ups
You can not post to an archived thread.

[ Top Top of Page ] [ Contact Us ] [ Support/Wish List ] [ Copyright © 2025, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]
[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]