On Tue, Apr 2, 2019 at 5:23 PM Mason Green <masonlgr...@hotmail.com> wrote:
*>So far I’ve thought of two possible classes of device that could do this. > The first is the “giant atom”, consisting of two spheres of equal but > opposite charge orbiting each other at an extremely long distance (long > enough that dark energy becomes significant). At such a distance, dark > energy would cause the objects’ orbits to spiral further and further apart. > On the other hand, because the objects are charged, they radiate away > energy as they orbit, and this radiation provides a braking force that > would cause the objects to spiral closer together. If the two effects are > perfectly balanced, the orbits would be stable and the system would keep > radiating away energy forever—energy extracted from the acceleration in the > universe’s expansion.* That would indeed be like a giant atom, so we would have to have a quantum theory of gravity to know if that would work, and we don't have such a theory. Quantum theory tells us those orbiting changes could not be in just any old orbit but can only be in discrete quantized orbits, and the energy radiated away would not be continuous but would come out in chunks . Maxwell's equations are only approximately correct. > *> The second device consists of an extremely long spring. Due to dark > energy, the spring experiences a fictitious force pulling it apart. This > force is stronger when the spring is fully extended, due to the longer > distance between the ends. Thus an oscillating spring would experience an > oscillating force, and have energy continually added to it, increasing the > amplitude of its oscillations.* > I don't think that would work, if it did then if you hung a spring vertically from a hook in a gravitational field and gave it a small oscillation the spring's oscillation would get larger and larger until it tore itself apart. But that's not what we observe. John K Clark > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
