Alien life theories

[Joshex]

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-havent-we-found-aliens-yet-2016-1

Or, as is often suggested, it is possible that extra-terrestrial life is taking great pains to avoid us.

YES! finally my theory makes it into the spotlight! although as a little snippet at the end...

[Vee]

what a letdown. when I saw a thread called 'alien life theories' started by Joshex i immediately lamented there not being enough mice in the universe to click that link as much as it deserves. then it's just a link to an article.

[Joshex]

what a letdown. when I saw a thread called 'alien life theories' started by Joshex i immediately lamented there not being enough mice in the universe to click that link as much as it deserves. then it's just a link to an article.

lol, it's true I have a few theories that are way out there about aliens, most were developed as story or game premises for fictional universes then made me think if they couldn't be somewhat true.

If you would like to hear some of those I'll gladly supply some, I just thought If I was too manic here the thread would get too much flaming and eventually locked by agge.

#1: Life on Jupiter. You'd think that with Jupiter being so far from the sun it would be pretty cold, especially since it's not in the so called habitable zone of our star. A not very well known fact however is that we have tried to send a probe to Jupiter in the past.

the probe descended into Jupiter's atmosphere to find that it was actually warm, then hot, then 115 degrees Centigrade hot before the probe's instruments failed. and even in all that time of descent (hours) it never hit the surface. Several theories have been produced from this information, 1; the probe failed when it hit the surface (which is how scientists have somewhat given a probable distance to the surface of the planet from), 2; Jupiter doesn't have a surface it's just a big ball of gas like a very very small star, 3; (the theory no one will talk about) the surface is much further down, meaning the actual planet is much smaller than visibly suggested making the gravitational pull under the clouds much less that on the exterior, the probe also descended at the equator meaning there might be lower temperatures on the planet near the poles which would be habitable.

the reason 3 is refuted is because our understanding of gravity requires the mass of the planet to be the generator of the pull force, but what if we're wrong?

The famous storm on the southern hemisphere of Jupiter (it's been spinning non-stop for over 100 years) was recently recorded in high definition by a passing satellite we sent out. There's a massive perfect triangle in the middle (presumed to be a glimpse of something on the surface), and it's rotating. Me thinks it's a GIANT wind turbine taking advantage of upper atmospheric currents to power the planet.

However with all those layers and layers of electromagnetically charged storm clouds no signals will be able to get through and no light can be seen through such a thick horde of clouds.

there could be neighbors much closer, and for that matter stronger and possibly larger than we've ever thought.

but again it's a wild idea, and definitely has no proof behind it, and with the hostility and temperature of those storm clouds there is no interest in losing more equipment and thus no interest in any more missions to find out whats below those clouds.

the heat however could and most likely is internal, it could be a greenhouse gas effect trapping the heat below the thick clouds so even slow amounts of heat gain add up, it seems way to cold to be any sort of solar/compressed burned gas/exploding atoms activity. It could be more like prehistoric earth to put it in context. maybe that's where the dinosaurs came from? (for the sake of nostalgia; the terrible thunder lizards style) DINOSAURS, with semi-automatics!

ok I troll. it was just too tempting not to troll.

[Vee]

I see no reason not to extend this to say we've not encountered other life because it was all wiped out by the Jupiterian(?) dinosaurs.

[Joshex]

I see no reason not to extend this to say we've not encountered other life because it was all wiped out by the Jupiterian(?) dinosaurs.

yeah it could be!, maybe they ate it all!, after all, if they made it to earth that means they were space worthy! heck maybe they can only inhabit hot planets, maybe global warming is caused by undetectable energy waves from the Jupiterian Dinos as they attempt to reclaim earth! maybe we are all just a crop that's grown overripe! they may have multiple planets they colonize with "puny humans" and other "puny animals" and come to them in a cycle to harvest!

and after they harvest they clean up, by removing all signs of knowledge and civilization except the most primitive, so the next batch of humans and animals have to start from the basics all over again! but when they clean up sometimes they are sloppy! that's why there's evidence of prehuman civilizations!

and here we sit, thinking we're all tough with our heavy artillery and nuclear war heads, heck even attempts at getting superpowers are futile, cause before they come, they raise the temperature so all we can do is lay on the ground panting.

too hot to fight back.

why us? we are convenient, firstly by nature we produce hordes and warehouses full of food, we do all the effort and gathering for them, and we are conveniently geared to evolve our practices and knowledge so that by the time they come to harvest we have invented preservatives and methods of mass food storage that make it last nigh forever and have so much in storage that it can last for hundreds of years, because we know the people that own it wont dare give it away or sell it cheaper if they are over stocked, greed is inbred into us. Secondly we all have the inbred habit to array ourselves neatly into confined harvest areas called cities and neatly into drawers called houses separated out by things we call bedrooms.

imagine a row of apartment buildings like corn in a corn field, gotta pick all the ears, window by window.

isn't it convenient that there was some "clean wipe" right before we came around but then there were no more dinos?

heck maybe all those "land glyphs" on earth and other planets were the doings of past humans who figured it out and wanted to leave some sign to those after them of what had happened so we don't befall the same fate! or maybe it was left by the dinos as some sort of marker over where past cities used to be to better cover it up.

all that greed, all those IPs and monopolies and ownerships, all that greedily stored money, they will all disappear, and the next batch will start fresh without overbearing ownerships restraining people from competition, people can just go get their own stuff as they want it for a while.

heck maybe that's how they justify using us as livestock, we are just so corrupt and wicked that eating us is doing the universe a favor.


hehe and that's how quick trolling can lead to way far out conspiracy theories!

Edit; and all those alien abductions! they are samplings! and the anal probings are testing for sugar levels in our bloodstreams! and those bits of metal people say the aliens left in them, they are tags that leave a traceable genetic marker or change the genetics so the offspring of that person will be best for harvest!

[Baaleos]

Statistically speaking, the chances of there NOT being life out there besides our own, is very, very,very low.

The chances of that race being advanced enough to reach Earth however is remote.
It is true that our own understanding of the universe is still 'in-development'
But given what we know about the universe - relating to the maximum speed an object can reach. (Only neutrino's have been observed to have the potential to out run light).

So the only realistic (if not theoretical) way for an object or other intelligence to reach Earth would be to work around the laws of relativity, using a sub-light propulsion that bends space, instead of trying to outrun light.

So, once again, this is another criteria we are putting on any alien life out there.
If they are to reach Earth in less than a few 100 years, they would need to have developed the holy-grail of space travel, some sort of wormhole propulsion - or put themselves into stasis.

If they put themselves into stasis just for the purpose of coming to Earth.
The question would be : Why?
They would have to have had a really good reason for coming all the way from their planet hundreds of light years away - on a journey that most likely would take upwards of 500 years.
The only conceivable reason I can think of for an extraterrestrial race to justify the expense of such a journey would be desperation.

Eg: Their own planet was at risk.
or
      They were short of natural resources.

Both of those scenarios would suggest the aliens would want to either coexist ON earth, or to conquer Earth.


The only reason I could think for an alien race to make peaceful contact with us, would be if they did come to a peak in their evolution where they achieved the apex of technological advances.
Making exploring the universe cheap and fast.
If you can get from Earth to an alien planet in the blink of an eye, for 0 cost, your more likely to be in a happy mood.
If it took you 500 years to do so, and cost a shit load of resources, then you might be a bit pissed off and want compensated.

The other potential way of alien contact being made, is the avoidance of physical contact, but instead the theory of mental contact.
If it were possible to transmit a consciousness - or some sort of transcendence from physical form to 'beyond' form.
Then the laws of relativity may not apply - making it possible to explore the universe at fast speeds.

[worldweary]

There would be no shortage of natural resources.Anything on earth would be most likely be found in the asteroid belt or other planets or the stars themselves.If they are smart enough to travel through space
they would watch us first.I know I would not be in a hurry to help us into space.

[Arcana]

Statistically speaking, the chances of there NOT being life out there besides our own, is very, very,very low.

The chances of that race being advanced enough to reach Earth however is remote.

The problem with both statements is that we do not yet have enough information to calculate those odds accurately.  The error bars for both calculations are about 100%.

We currently extrapolate from an example of one, which is statistically dangerous.  We look at how life developed on Earth, and conclude that because life began so soon on Earth after it formed, the odds are good that the statistical likelihood for life to develop in any environment hospitable to it is high.  If the odds were low, it is more likely that life would form much later, because in effect we'd have to wait long enough to "beat the odds."  But again: that's extrapolating from an example of one. Similarly, we look at the history of life on Earth and note that while life has existed for about three and a half billion years, intelligent life capable of sustaining a technological civilization took almost all of that three point five billion years to arise, which suggests that either the odds of it happening are low, or it requires a lot of things to happen in a particular order that simply take a lot of time.

Suggests is about the best we can do, given a sample size of one.

It is true that our own understanding of the universe is still 'in-development'
But given what we know about the universe - relating to the maximum speed an object can reach. (Only neutrino's have been observed to have the potential to out run light).

Neutrinos have not been observed exceeding the speed of light.  That turned out to be what most scientists were betting on: a subtle flaw in calibration of instrumentation.  Given that neutrino oscillation has been confirmed, the odds of neutrinos being superluminous or even light-speed particles drops substantially.  Neutrino oscillation implies neutrinos have mass, and thus cannot move at the speed of light (they can, however, move so close to the speed of light that it is currently impossible to measure the small speed difference - this fact is what makes it possible for neutrinos to sometimes *appear* to move faster than light: they move so close to the speed of light that any tiny error in measurement can tip the measurement in favor of superluminal velocities).

So the only realistic (if not theoretical) way for an object or other intelligence to reach Earth would be to work around the laws of relativity, using a sub-light propulsion that bends space, instead of trying to outrun light.

The Fermi paradox does not rely on advanced civilizations gaining the ability to travel faster than the speed of light or have any other way around the light speed limit.  It postulates that even if a civilization uses relatively slow spaceflight options, the ability for that civilization to *eventually* reach our part of the galaxy starting from anywhere else becomes a certainty on galactic timescales, if they exist at all.  If the best we manage to achieve is 1% of the speed of light, and furthermore it takes us a century to colonize a planet once we reach it at 1% of the speed of light, we can still cross the galaxy from end to end on a time scale of about twenty million years.  Note that if it takes us ten thousand years to reach that level of technology before we can even try, it still takes us twenty million years to accomplish this, because twenty million years plus ten thousand years is twenty million years.

If they are to reach Earth in less than a few 100 years, they would need to have developed the holy-grail of space travel, some sort of wormhole propulsion - or put themselves into stasis.

You're assuming aliens need to reach us from their home planet in one lifetime jump, but the Fermi paradox takes into account colonization.  And it doesn't presume all intelligent life tries to colonize the galaxy or even wants to.  It asserts that it only has to succeed once.

The other potential way of alien contact being made, is the avoidance of physical contact, but instead the theory of mental contact.
If it were possible to transmit a consciousness - or some sort of transcendence from physical form to 'beyond' form.
Then the laws of relativity may not apply - making it possible to explore the universe at fast speeds.

You don't need to presuppose violations of the laws of physics.  You could simply presuppose an alien race builds artificially intelligent robotic explorers.  That's the scientifically possible way to "transmit consciousness" across large distances and timespans.  Technology can create immortal explorers.

[Arcana]

There would be no shortage of natural resources.Anything on earth would be most likely be found in the asteroid belt or other planets or the stars themselves.If they are smart enough to travel through space
they would watch us first.I know I would not be in a hurry to help us into space.

Everything on Earth is plentiful in the rest of the galaxy except the lifeforms on it.  Raw resources like water and atmospheric gases are not just plentiful throughout the galaxy, but plentiful even within our own solar system.  There's just as much water on Europa as on Earth, but without any pesky infestations that want to argue over the right to it.

[Vee]

Everything on Earth is plentiful in the rest of the galaxy except the lifeforms on it.  Raw resources like water and atmospheric gases are not just plentiful throughout the galaxy, but plentiful even within our own solar system.  There's just as much water on Europa as on Earth, but without any pesky infestations that want to argue over the right to it.

I'm sure someone here will call dibs on it as soon as Brita technology advances enough to deal with heavy radiation

[Arcana]

I'm sure someone here will call dibs on it as soon as Brita technology advances enough to deal with heavy radiation

In space, no one can hear you scream "dibs."

[Vee]

Somewhere Michael Collins is saying 'too soon'.

[worldweary]

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

And yet it moves.

[Arcana]

And yet it moves.

Except there's a dark side to that quote, and its name is "Apollo One."

[Joshex]

It is true that our own understanding of the universe is still 'in-development'
But given what we know about the universe - relating to the maximum speed an object can reach. (Only neutrino's have been observed to have the potential to out run light).

Actually I'll have to correct you,

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/4-cosmic-phenomena-travel-faster-190300819.html

this article provides facts that there are actually 4 confirmed cases of objects traveling faster than the speed of light, however it also lies and attempts to explain away this fact with a terrible strawman. It says that only particles with no mass can travel at the speed of light because according to Einstein's theory of relativity if it had mass would have to have limitless infinite energy to do so.

Electrons have mass, electrons in a nuclear reactor travel faster than light. BUT NO! they can't possibly /REALLY/ be traveling faster than light because Einstein said so! if general relativity and special relativity were proved broken our entire physics model would collapse for a while. and no one in the scientific community has the balls to deal with that situation.

Planets in the universe have a mass, some planets have been observed traveling faster than the speed of light, it has been explained away as "they only appear to be traveling faster than light! we suspect they are moving around the universe in the opposite direction from us at a speed less than light speed and thereby look like they are moving faster due to the direction of travel". Bollocks.

I've actually run tests, using light, light can travel slower and faster than the speed of light it all depends on what you do with it.

for example it was confirmed in labs in the 1940s that light has no mass because it cannot carry a pigment from one surface to another and deposit it. This has been proved wrong, light can indeed carry and deposit pigments meaning it has a mass that current science doesn't understand, or it confirms light can move slower that the speed of light and thus gain a mass yet still move at a speed greater than electromagnetic waves. In fact that's how solar panels work, silicon has a naturally high number of electrons but not enough to be radioactive, it's the fact that it is a transparent material that makes it work, light can go in and when it does the mass of the photon will bump an electron out of place and into motion from where it can be harvested as electricity, in theory this creates a hole in the material and the material will adjust it's matrix to fill the hole. However from my studies this is false, this would mean that the material would grow smaller as it's matrix adjusts and as it is in majority electrons, that shift in size would be visible (at one point it would fit snugly on the face of your calculator, and when it's burnt out it would have a distance between it and the edge). For this reason it is safe to assume that the hole is being filled, with what? a slowed photon from refraction and impact, however it's not guaranteed that the photon will become an electron, and thus the hole is filled but not always with a usable component. Photons are part of matter. yeah I know that adds to the theory that we are all just holograms, and it's technically true if my hypotheses are correct.

I'm sure someone here will call dibs on it as soon as Brita technology advances enough to deal with heavy radiation

not many people actually know what makes a material radioactive, I do, it's easy to know as well, the periodic table is conveniently arranged by atomic composition, the ones on the far left and right are radioactive albeit by either too many electrons or too few.

Nuclear waste that is left over after it goes through a nuclear reactor is a case of too few electrons, a nuclear warhead is the opposite, and a nuclear meltdown or radiation leak could be a combination of the two.

the way to fix it is to take responsibility, (something no one in charge will do) and find out what the case is, if it's a case of "too few" the proper method of disposal is to make the material inert by subjecting it to electromagnetic radiation for a very short period until it has a balanced number of electrons to the safe threshold capacity of it's neutron(s). instead, they just find a pond to bury it under there for hundreds of years till the radiation causes a sinkhole and the pond collapses.

if it's a case of too many electrons, then it needs to be drained a bit but not completely, using energy to spin a faraday disk (or a brush disk from a newer generator) over the affected area is actually the best method to collect excess electrons, the only consolation is both methods of making a material inert require energy that is either equal to or exceeds the energy created by the initial nuclear reaction. so no one wants to spend the money to make that energy to clean up after themselves.

It's a bad loop. A greed driven catch 22. The methods to clean it up exist and could be done over the course of several years per place, but instead we just leave it to naturally regulate over millions of years at the cost of environmental damage. and yes it could have an effect on the global temperature. Could it be the real cause of global warming?

In space, no one can hear you scream "dibs."

Indeed, IP means nothing in the galactic federation, in fact it may be against the constitution. Life, liberty and happiness, no wait that's the US constitution (the american dream). Life, liberty and happiness has records explaining it, liberty is the right for every citizen to own land and carry out business, even competition.

IP was developed in Britain under the monarchy (before the days of prime ministers), to quote "as a right to monopolization", monopolization is supposed to be illegal in the US of A according to the constitution. The way liberty was defined was basically that if you could make it, and someone else figured out how to make it, they could legally do so and sell it for a better price without paying any royalties (called royal due to their origin) or usury. It's called valid competition, and was a mechanism to still greed and keep the economy balanced between poor and rich and to keep the economy growing. We can thank ourselves for not sticking up for our rights, now we have a system were everything goes to the top and they have decided they only need us in small amounts, we have inflation and our financial analysts see deflation as a terrible thing. in the UK they underwent a short period of economic deflation last year, guess what, they apologized for it and said they don't expect it to be for long.

We were technically supposed to reject and refuse to acknowledge IPs held by other nations to allow free use of technologies etc. in our country without paying royalties, but our politicians got all chicken on us and gave in to international demand. Plus there were a bunch of people in the US who preferred to have the international rights to their inventions, so really we did bring it on ourselves, we got greedy and though it was protecting us so we allowed IP to be registered in our country, nay, we demanded it.

If only we hadn't, the CoH battle wouldn't even be happening, we'd have reverse engineered it a long time ago because there would be no legal consequences and no way for anyone to seek action against us in US court. It's just valid competition after all, that and marvel could never sue NCSoft, heck the whole legal system would be much simpler. But people would have to lower prices to keep in the market (which was the intention, that companies would fight based on quality, quantity /and/ price, they don't fight on price any more, not till they've already made millions off it and I wouldn't call a small reduction /once/, a price fight). Meh I could rant of how it could have been for pages, but it's no use because it isn't that way now, or at least no one would or would want to fight for it.

[Codewalker]

Except there's a dark side to that quote, and its name is "Apollo One."

Technically AS-204 since it was a ground test and not the actual mission, but I fully support NASA bending the rules on that one to retcon it "Apollo 1".

There's a reason that I start a new game of KSP, I always name my first three long-term orbital shuttles Grissom, White, and Chaffee.

/salute

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

Except there's a dark side to that quote, and its name is "Apollo One."

To be honest i was referencing the apocryphal quote attributed to Galileo Galilei (in a single book 120 years after his death), as a way of commenting on how amazingly successful the space program was despite that, but yes, there is a dark side.

[Arcana]

Technically AS-204 since it was a ground test and not the actual mission, but I fully support NASA bending the rules on that one to retcon it "Apollo 1".

Technically, it wasn't really a retcon because the Apollo test flights known as Apollo 1 and Apollo 2 were only given that designation unofficially, as they (and all Apollo launches) were officially known by their flight designations. 

And actually, although the terminology is sometimes used loosely, AS-204 wasn't given the designation of Apollo One, that designation goes to the mission officially intended to launch AS-204 with the Grissom, White, and Chaffee crew, which never launched.  AS-204 actually did eventually launch, as part of the Apollo Five lunar module test mission.

[Arcana]

for example it was confirmed in labs in the 1940s that light has no mass because it cannot carry a pigment from one surface to another and deposit it. This has been proved wrong, light can indeed carry and deposit pigments meaning it has a mass that current science doesn't understand, or it confirms light can move slower that the speed of light and thus gain a mass yet still move at a speed greater than electromagnetic waves. In fact that's how solar panels work, silicon has a naturally high number of electrons but not enough to be radioactive, it's the fact that it is a transparent material that makes it work, light can go in and when it does the mass of the photon will bump an electron out of place and into motion from where it can be harvested as electricity, in theory this creates a hole in the material and the material will adjust it's matrix to fill the hole. However from my studies this is false, this would mean that the material would grow smaller as it's matrix adjusts and as it is in majority electrons, that shift in size would be visible (at one point it would fit snugly on the face of your calculator, and when it's burnt out it would have a distance between it and the edge). For this reason it is safe to assume that the hole is being filled, with what? a slowed photon from refraction and impact, however it's not guaranteed that the photon will become an electron, and thus the hole is filled but not always with a usable component. Photons are part of matter. yeah I know that adds to the theory that we are all just holograms, and it's technically true if my hypotheses are correct.

I was going to post a correction.  Then I read this.  You guys are all punking me, right?  This is some sick revenge for making you all read a statistics lesson.  You know, if my posts make your eyes bleed that badly, just report me to the moderator or shoot me.  Don't do... whatever this is.  I knew that once Stuxnet weaponized the internet, it was only a matter of time before the Geneva protocols on torture were thrown out the window.

I'm going to save this post, and one day when Neil deGrasse Tyson bad mouths Star Wars again I'm going to tweet it at him, just to see if he swallows his own chin.


The really sad part is that if physics was even half as weird as Joshex thought it was, we wouldn't have to wait for CoH to return.  We could all just stand outside during lightning storms with spearmint lifesavers in our ears and eventually acquire superpowers.


When I read the part about the photovoltaic effect causing solar cells to shrink, I actually thought about explaining band gaps and semiconductor junctions and electron-hole tunneling for a moment**, and then realized I was trying to fix a broken television by hitting it repeatedly with a working television.  I have two nieces and a nephew.  The younger niece and the nephew are at the age where they love to ask "why" repeatedly.  I'm the only person that will sit there with them and answer that question, over and over again, about anything.  No matter how tired I am, no matter how busy I am, I will try to explain any question they ask, even when I know they are less interested in the answer and more interested in seeing how long I will last.  Everyone asks me why I do it.  If they saw my face when I was reading this post, they wouldn't need to ask.


** Got a B+ in semiconductor physics.  The only B+ I'm proud of.  One of the only grades I ever cared about ever, actually.  That B+ got me my first real job in my chosen profession in a roundabout way, and a free vacation in Sequoia National Park.  It's a long story.

[Vee]

You maniacs! You really did it! You broke Arcana! Pancake pancake you all to pancake!

[FlyingCarcass]

Personally I wouldn't be too surprised if it turned out life was relatively abundant in the universe, at least in the microbial form.

[Joshex]

I was going to post a correction.  Then I read this.  You guys are all punking me, right?  This is some sick revenge for making you all read a statistics lesson.  You know, if my posts make your eyes bleed that badly, just report me to the moderator or shoot me.  Don't do... whatever this is.  I knew that once Stuxnet weaponized the internet, it was only a matter of time before the Geneva protocols on torture were thrown out the window.

I'm going to save this post, and one day when Neil deGrasse Tyson bad mouths Star Wars again I'm going to tweet it at him, just to see if he swallows his own chin.


The really sad part is that if physics was even half as weird as Joshex thought it was, we wouldn't have to wait for CoH to return.  We could all just stand outside during lightning storms with spearmint lifesavers in our ears and eventually acquire superpowers.


When I read the part about the photovoltaic effect causing solar cells to shrink, I actually thought about explaining band gaps and semiconductor junctions and electron-hole tunneling for a moment**, and then realized I was trying to fix a broken television by hitting it repeatedly with a working television.  I have two nieces and a nephew.  The younger niece and the nephew are at the age where they love to ask "why" repeatedly.  I'm the only person that will sit there with them and answer that question, over and over again, about anything.  No matter how tired I am, no matter how busy I am, I will try to explain any question they ask, even when I know they are less interested in the answer and more interested in seeing how long I will last.  Everyone asks me why I do it.  If they saw my face when I was reading this post, they wouldn't need to ask.


** Got a B+ in semiconductor physics.  The only B+ I'm proud of.  One of the only grades I ever cared about ever, actually.  That B+ got me my first real job in my chosen profession in a roundabout way, and a free vacation in Sequoia National Park.  It's a long story.

actually it's one of the contending hypotheses for how solar panels work, there are two main contenders, the one you stated and the one I stated. neither has been definitively proven.

one hypothesis is that nothing fills the gap it just becomes a non-conductive hole that may lead to the material's inability to produce electricity.

but when you consider that more electricity goes through a solar panel than the material has natively, you need to consider outside forces adding electrons, for this condition one hypothesis is electrons are absorbed from other materials in contact with the panel or from the air, however considering that they run in space with limited amounts of equipment connected to them and no air; we should consider solar alchemy as the recharge source.

solar alchemy proposes a cycle where atomic components become over charged and emit part of their charge (one of their force particles) as a photon to regulate, the photon can be slowed however back into the form it started as where it can become part of an atomic component again. this hypothesis suggests that all light is part of matter and thus has a mass although it be a very small one. it interacts with masses by manner of field collision even though it's field is incredibly weak. it also proposes where all the matter goes after getting devoured by blackholes, solving one of the mysteries of the universe.

In a solar panel with all those electrons there's a ton of fields, these fields cause the photon to bounce around and lose speed (in the process knocking out electrons from their spots) until eventually the photon escapes or slows down enough to emit a stronger field where it either gets absorbed by a like atomic component or bonds with other like force particles to become a new atomic component.

if you start asking why a photon's field can be weak when it's moving at the speed of light and strong when it's slow, then you border on knowing the secrets of the universe.

I could start a thread to explain that if you like.

[Codewalker]

Personally I wouldn't be too surprised if it turned out life was relatively abundant in the universe, at least in the microbial form.

Or that many planets support plant life which looks suspiciously like the woods around Vancouver.

[Arcana]

actually it's one of the contending hypotheses for how solar panels work, there are two main contenders, the one you stated and the one I stated. neither has been definitively proven.

Solar panels aren't just randomly assembled and people pray they work.  They are engineered.  We understand how they work do differently than we understand how cars work.  You can say that there are two theories on how cars work, one in which gasoline is injected by a fuel pump into the pistons of an internal combustion engine and ignited, which causes the fuel to burn and expand causing the piston to rise and deliver that power to a crankshaft that turns and provides power to the drive wheels, or there's another theory where the gasoline makes the engine itch and when it tries to scratch the wheels spin.  The problem is that cars are designed and constructed, not magicked together.  We know what all the parts do because we put them there to do specific things.  We know how solar cells work because we put all the parts there.  We engineer them to capture photons of a particular energy and we know they do because we test them.  We know they generate electricity due to the photovoltaic effect because we design them to do so.  They create a voltage in exactly the way they are designed to do so.  That voltage them induces a current in any circuit they are connected to, in exactly the same way voltages always do.

The world is an endless series of black boxes to you, Joshex, because you don't know how anything works, and you think everyone is just randomly guessing so your guess is as good as any other.  But people actually know how this stuff works.  It is not a guess.  The "theory" of how solar cells work is not just a guess: scientific theories are not guesses.  Scientific theories have to pass a huge amount of tests, have to make huge amouints of verified predictions, to become scientific theories.  And how a solar panel works isn't even a scientific theory.  Semiconductor physics is a set of scientific theories that have been rigorously tested.  How a solar panel works is just an assemblage of those no different than the parts of a car.  Solar cells are technology.

it doesn't help that you seem to have no idea whatsoever what the actual theory of photovoltaics are or how semiconductor structures work.  No scientific theory says electrons get knocked out of the structure and permanently leave behind a "hole."  Electrons and holes migrate under the influence of an electric field to the opposite sides of the semiconductor where the electrons on one side fill the holes on the other side.  And the "holes" (they are also called phonons) aren't actually holes in the solid structure but actually holes in the conduction band of the structure: they are a way to describe an electron state equivalent to the absence of an electron in a band of electrons.  It is analogous to the hole created in traffic when a car takes the off ramp.  It is not really a "thing" but it can move like a thing, at least for a while.  It can be filled by another car, which creates a whole behind it.  In traffic, the hole eventually closes; in semiconductors the hole persists until filled by a free electron that must obey certain rules, including overall charge neutrality.


You are why we have Science in the first place.  It is so easy to simply fail to understand what the current best theories of how the universe functions are.  It is so easy to convince yourself that you can do equally well or better by just randomly thinking about it in your bedroom until it sounds good in your own head.  But we know that such guesses are almost always wrong.  How do we expect to learn anything about the universe if every one of us is so bad at guessing how it works?  Science.  We demand that any guess about how the universe works be tested.  We demand that any such guess make predictions about how the universe works that we can verify.  We even demand that it make predictions about phenomena we haven't directly observed yet, so the guess cannot have taken them into account.  We demand that these guesses explain everything we know, and also accurately predict what we don't know until we find out.  When it does that enough times, we assume it is not luck, because guesses are never that lucky, and we decide to call that guess a scientific theory.  Any future theory must do *better*.  If it sounds good to you but it cannot do better, then we don't care.

We build theory upon theory; conjecture, verification, and acceptance, with each generation of scientists building upon the foundations of the previous one. Sometimes correcting them, but usually expanding on them.  We build the structure of Science larger than any human being could construct in their lifetime, so that future generations will know more about the universe than they could possibly figure out in their lifetime.  We do this with a process that reduces the likelihood that any of our guesses is fundamentally flawed.  Newton built on the discoveries of others, even though his advancements were genius themselves.  And the strength of Newton is that we still use Newton's laws of motion today.  They were not perfect, but they agree with reality most of the time to a pretty high degree of precision.  We use Einstein because his predictions are better, more accurate, and work under more conditions than Newton.  But Einstein *agrees* with Newton for most common experience cases: it *has* to, because we verified Newton under those conditions already.

We didn't all just stand around and make guesses about how solar cells worked.  We observed the photovoltaic effect.  Einstein actually won the Nobel prize for his work on the photoelectric effect, not relativity.  His theory - which was verified through experiments - laid one of the foundation stones for the quantum mechanical theory of semiconductor physics we have today.  A theory that was assembled, piece by piece, through careful observation, rigorous testing of conjecture, and finally acceptance as theory.  The theory *allows* us to understand how the physics works so we can build solar panels in the first place.  We couldn't do that if we didn't understand how they work.  Solar cells have parts, no different than the transistors and capacitors in an integrated circuit chip.  Those parts all perform functions in the cell, each of which is carefully tested.  Each part does what it is designed to do, or the solar cell wouldn't work.  And with every solar cell we design and that then performs exactly the way we expect, the precision of the theory describing how semiconductor physics works under those conditions gets re-verified and refined.

We are at the point where we are making atomic structures in silicon that are literally only hundreds of atoms big.  And we're putting that almost science-fictiony technology into basic consumer products that billions of people have.  We're basically techno-mages when it comes to silicon.  The fastest and densest computer chips and memory use structures so small that they operate quantum mechanically (technically, all semiconductors do, but I think the people who understand the distinction will know what I mean).  There isn't even anything like "current" in them in the classical sense.  Electrons behave as confined quantum entities, and we can even observe Heisenberg uncertainty messing with those devices.  We design them to account for these quantum effects, but the fact that we can actually observe them and *use* them, is yet another confirmation of those quantum theories.  They aren't just unobservable guesses.  We don't just *think* we understand quantum mechanics: we manipulate quantum mechanics.  We make quantum mechanics our bitch just so we can make better iPhones and Playstations.

None of that could happen if we were just guessing.  None of that could happen if we thought they way you do, that Scientific theories are just authoritarian dictates of people who are no better than you are at figuring things out from scratch without having to verify anything.

The day the first primate picked up a rock and smashed it with another rock to make a knife, we became tool wielders.  But the day two of us argued at the campfire over which kind of rock was the best one, and everyone else picked the one that seemed to cut the mastodon up quicker, that's the day we became scientists.  Building upon the knowledge of our predecessors in a way that builds a solid foundation for our successors is why we aren't still arguing at that same campfire over the same rocks.  It is how we get from rocks to spears to slings to wheels to pottery to writing to agriculture to iron work to steam engines to airplanes to space shuttles to the Galaxy VR.  Science does that, and Science has rules.  You should learn them.

[Aggelakis]

I kind of want to make a subforum that is "Joshex Spouts Off Nonsense" and restrict his posting capabilities to that subforum only......

[Arcana]

I kind of want to make a subforum that is "Joshex Spouts Off Nonsense" and restrict his posting capabilities to that subforum only......

There's a conjecture that says that as parents have become more concerned about the health of their children and try to protect them from things like allergies and infections they are creating so clean and antiseptic an environment for them that ironically they are becoming increasingly vulnerable to allergies and infections because the immune system requires priming.  If you aren't exposed to a little dirt, grime, and pathogens, your immune system becomes less able to fight them off as you get older.

Unless it becomes abusive, I tend to think the antidote for misunderstanding is education, not censorship.  Plus, I spent more time than I probably should have to see if there really was some sort of "solar alchemy" theory of photovoltaics out there that I needed to educate myself on, if for no other reason than to understand what its major misconceptions are, and I couldn't find anything of consequence.  I did find a site called "little alchemy", and supposedly there's a way to make a solar cell in that.  I'll let you know what I find out.

[Arcana]

Solar cell = Sun + Tool

Sun = Fire + Sky
Sky = Air + Cloud
Cloud = Air + Steam
Steam = Water + Fire

Tool = Metal + Human
Metal = Fire + Stone
Stone = Air + Lava
Lava = Earth + Fire
Human = Earth + Life
Life = Swamp + Energy
Swamp = Mud + Plant
Mud = Water + Earth
Plant = Rain + Earth
Rain = Water + Air
Energy = Air + Fire


Solar cell = (Fire + (Air + (Air + (Water + Fire)))) + ((Fire + (Air + (Earth + Fire))) + (Earth + (((Water + Earth) + ((Water + Air) + Earth)) + (Air + Fire))))


Some of these things are logical, some weird.  River + metal = bridge?  Okay I'll buy that.  Plant + fire = tobacco?  Sure.  Energy + Explosion = Atomic Bomb? Seems like a reach.  Plant + Cloud = Cotton?  Err...

[https://littlealchemy.com]

[Aggelakis]

Plant + Cloud = Cotton?  Err...

Cotton balls look like little plant clouds. ^_^

[Vee]

I spent more time than I probably should have to see if there really was some sort of "solar alchemy" theory of photovoltaics out there that I needed to educate myself on, if for no other reason than to understand what its major misconceptions are, and I couldn't find anything of consequence.

You think the Illuminati just lets their alchemists and sorcerers post all their findings on Pinterest?

Well ok, sometimes they do, but sometimes trying to make immortality potions produces a fantastic brownie recipe (assuming you have a decent supply of aqua vitae in your cupboard.)

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

I kind of want to make a subforum that is "Joshex Spouts Off Nonsense" and restrict his posting capabilities to that subforum only......

As much as it aggravates the people who feel compelled to reply to his stream of semi-consciousness posts it does make for some thoughtful and educational posts in the course of debunking the latest bout of Joshex graphorrhea. Generally the clarifying posts more than make up for the incoherence and generally wrongness of the original post. Honestly, granting Joshex a forum title of [citation needed] would be better in my opinion. And if he doesn't want it i'd be happy to have it, regardless of how accurate or useful it might be.


Honestly, if he'd occasionally post one of his... text things... with some sort of disclaimer that this is just something he heard or thought up while trying to figure out how padlocks work starting from the premise that each one contains a tiny metal lizard instead of stating everything like it's something verified and supported by credible sources it would go a long way.

[Vee]

Who are we to question the credibility of the tiny metal lizards?

[Pengy]

I've gotten some of my best build advice from tiny metal lizards.

[Arcana]

As much as it aggravates the people who feel compelled to reply to his stream of semi-consciousness posts it does make for some thoughtful and educational posts in the course of debunking the latest bout of Joshex graphorrhea. Generally the clarifying posts more than make up for the incoherence and generally wrongness of the original post. Honestly, granting Joshex a forum title of [citation needed] would be better in my opinion. And if he doesn't want it i'd be happy to have it, regardless of how accurate or useful it might be.


Honestly, if he'd occasionally post one of his... text things... with some sort of disclaimer that this is just something he heard or thought up while trying to figure out how padlocks work starting from the premise that each one contains a tiny metal lizard instead of stating everything like it's something verified and supported by credible sources it would go a long way.

I think the problem isn't crazy theories, but the characterization of the current scientific theories as something that is either trivial to dismiss or complete guesswork.  I don't think that is a fair claim unless you can actually demonstrate to understand them well enough to make that judgment.  And these elements of scientific knowledge are not difficult to find in 2016.  It isn't like this is 1976 and it would take hours of time to learn this stuff in a library. 

Quantum mechanics is going to survive Joshex, and everyone else challenging it with similar ideas.  What concerns me, and what I tend to respond to, is less the craziness of the ideas, and more the impression that whether Joshex's ideas are right or wrong is a question of their wackiness.  It isn't.  Even if they were not wacky, they should still be treated with suspicion because as I tried to emphasize, Science is not about people just making strange guesses to publish books.  There's over a century of science behind how solar panels work.  There isn't a single "theory" of how solar panels work, our understanding of how solar panels work is based on *hundreds* of scientific ideas tested and refined over decades.  Our understanding of the quantum nature of light goes back to observations over a century old, and theories first proposed by Einstein himself.  Our study of semiconductors is almost two hundred years old, and advanced over decades as different scientists conducted experiments on different materials.  Modern semiconductor research is about eighty years old, and goes back to experiments done at Bell Labs.  The physics behind semiconductor junctions - the basis for things like the transistor - start to become formulated at that time.

Science advances incrementally, building on past reliable theories and observations.  We didn't just "invent" an idea about solar cells.  We assembled them out of bulk materials we've been studying since the 1800s, using semiconductor depletion zones we've been studying for decades, exploiting variations on the photoelectric effect that was explained by Einstein a century ago, and using fabrication techniques that have been refined over the last fifty years.  We use quantum mechanics to describe how solar cells work because its the same quantum mechanics that was used to describe n-p junctions decades ago and has worked with accuracy and precision ever since.  We understand how electric current in solar cells works because it is basically the same way electric current has been understood to work since the days of Faraday.

There is no "theory on how a car works."  It is the chemistry of gasoline combustion, the physics of gas expansion, the mechanics of torque, the eletromagnetic action of the spark plug, the turbulence of fuel injectors.  Most of what people think of as individual, single Scientific principles are actually conglomerations of theories and ideas working together in a system that has been refined over a long period of time.  Thinking you have a better idea presumes any single idea can replace what you want to replace.  No single idea can replace all the Science that explains how cars work.  No single idea can explain how solar cells work.  No single idea can replace the Standard Model of physics, the overall theory of General Relativity, the theory of cosmic expansion, the evolution of complex organisms, the theory of anthropogenic climate change.  These things which we sometimes talk about as if they were single ideas are large, complex systems of interlocking Scientific theories, each of which has been independently confirmed many times over and whose overall nature continues to be refined in the present.

What I hope people who read my posts realize, if they take nothing else from them, is that Science is not about Big Ideas and who gets to authoritatively decide what Science Thinks.  Science is about assembling the ideas and observations of individual human beings who live flawed and short lives and creating a larger, deeper, more complete understanding of the universe than any one person could ever achieve alone.  What I know stands on top of the work and thought of millions of other people who lived over thousands of years.  Science is how we take all of their accumulated knowledge and ideas, not all of which was right, and make something that is collectively greater than the sum of its parts.  I know what the Sun is made of, even though I have never been there.  I know when the Sun will finally die, even though I will never live to see that day.  I know those things not because I'm guessing, and not because I just blindly believe someone else's guess.  I know those things because of spectroscopy, and physics, and astronomy.  I know what the Sun is made of better than I know what is in my brother's pockets right now.  That's the power of Science, but that power exists only when we recognize how it actually works.

[Aggelakis]

Honestly, granting Joshex a forum title of [citation needed] would be better in my opinion.

He, uh...he already has that. O.o ?

[Joshex]

I think the problem isn't crazy theories, but the characterization of the current scientific theories as something that is either trivial to dismiss or complete guesswork.  I don't think that is a fair claim unless you can actually demonstrate to understand them well enough to make that judgment.  And these elements of scientific knowledge are not difficult to find in 2016.  It isn't like this is 1976 and it would take hours of time to learn this stuff in a library. 

Quantum mechanics is going to survive Joshex, and everyone else challenging it with similar ideas.  What concerns me, and what I tend to respond to, is less the craziness of the ideas, and more the impression that whether Joshex's ideas are right or wrong is a question of their wackiness.  It isn't.  Even if they were not wacky, they should still be treated with suspicion because as I tried to emphasize, Science is not about people just making strange guesses to publish books.  There's over a century of science behind how solar panels work.  There isn't a single "theory" of how solar panels work, our understanding of how solar panels work is based on *hundreds* of scientific ideas tested and refined over decades.  Our understanding of the quantum nature of light goes back to observations over a century old, and theories first proposed by Einstein himself.  Our study of semiconductors is almost two hundred years old, and advanced over decades as different scientists conducted experiments on different materials.  Modern semiconductor research is about eighty years old, and goes back to experiments done at Bell Labs.  The physics behind semiconductor junctions - the basis for things like the transistor - start to become formulated at that time.

Science advances incrementally, building on past reliable theories and observations.  We didn't just "invent" an idea about solar cells.  We assembled them out of bulk materials we've been studying since the 1800s, using semiconductor depletion zones we've been studying for decades, exploiting variations on the photoelectric effect that was explained by Einstein a century ago, and using fabrication techniques that have been refined over the last fifty years.  We use quantum mechanics to describe how solar cells work because its the same quantum mechanics that was used to describe n-p junctions decades ago and has worked with accuracy and precision ever since.  We understand how electric current in solar cells works because it is basically the same way electric current has been understood to work since the days of Faraday.

There is no "theory on how a car works."  It is the chemistry of gasoline combustion, the physics of gas expansion, the mechanics of torque, the eletromagnetic action of the spark plug, the turbulence of fuel injectors.  Most of what people think of as individual, single Scientific principles are actually conglomerations of theories and ideas working together in a system that has been refined over a long period of time.  Thinking you have a better idea presumes any single idea can replace what you want to replace.  No single idea can replace all the Science that explains how cars work.  No single idea can explain how solar cells work.  No single idea can replace the Standard Model of physics, the overall theory of General Relativity, the theory of cosmic expansion, the evolution of complex organisms, the theory of anthropogenic climate change.  These things which we sometimes talk about as if they were single ideas are large, complex systems of interlocking Scientific theories, each of which has been independently confirmed many times over and whose overall nature continues to be refined in the present.

What I hope people who read my posts realize, if they take nothing else from them, is that Science is not about Big Ideas and who gets to authoritatively decide what Science Thinks.  Science is about assembling the ideas and observations of individual human beings who live flawed and short lives and creating a larger, deeper, more complete understanding of the universe than any one person could ever achieve alone.  What I know stands on top of the work and thought of millions of other people who lived over thousands of years.  Science is how we take all of their accumulated knowledge and ideas, not all of which was right, and make something that is collectively greater than the sum of its parts.  I know what the Sun is made of, even though I have never been there.  I know when the Sun will finally die, even though I will never live to see that day.  I know those things not because I'm guessing, and not because I just blindly believe someone else's guess.  I know those things because of spectroscopy, and physics, and astronomy.  I know what the Sun is made of better than I know what is in my brother's pockets right now.  That's the power of Science, but that power exists only when we recognize how it actually works.

one correction in both your posts and although there's more I could say, I wont because I don't to get into that here yet. silicon is a natural material /discovered/ in nature. man didn't invent it based on semiconductor theories, man found it and realized it fit the description and applied them to it. also when he did apply them to it it was a theory with incomplete evidence behind it ergo a guess that later underwent many trials to ascertain whether that looked like it was true for the material.

[Vee]

Idk how you got that Arcana was saying humans invented silicon out of any of that. But it should have occurred to you that if you did get that you were reading something wrong.
Besides, everyone knows silicon was invented by dwarves.

[Arcana]

one correction in both your posts and although there's more I could say, I wont because I don't to get into that here yet. silicon is a natural material /discovered/ in nature. man didn't invent it based on semiconductor theories, man found it and realized it fit the description and applied them to it. also when he did apply them to it it was a theory with incomplete evidence behind it ergo a guess that later underwent many trials to ascertain whether that looked like it was true for the material.

Silicon is an element, but solar cells aren't made out of pure silicon.  Solar cells are made out of doped silicon, silicon which has been infused with trace amounts of other elements such as boron or phosphorous.  These impurities fundamentally alter the conductive bands of the bulk material by either adding or subtracting electrons from the conductive layer (by binding them to the valence layer).  In a chemical sense, both sides of an n-p junction are almost pure silicon.  But in an electrical sense the two sides are totally different, composed of fundamentally different substances.  It is this difference that creates the functional components of semiconductor circuits.

These specially crafted semiconductors are materials not found in nature: they require extremely pure silicon crystals with precise amounts of specific impurities in the crystalline lattice of the silicon.  They are engineered materials.

[Arcana]

Normally I don't consider this important to discussions, but in this case I'm going to make an exception.  I don't just know this stuff because I read a book and/or thought about it in the bathroom.  I spent four years *working* on stuff like this, and I have personally performed some of this work.  Doping, photoresists, the whole nine yards.  I actually made these things and tested the things I made with my own two hands, and worked among people doing novel research into silicon materials science.  I helped them file the patents in some cases.  I wasn't there when Einstein published his theory of general relativity and I never met Darwin after he published Origin.  But I know what semiconductor structures are and how they work because I made them myself.  I have first hand knowledge of how you make them, and how the process by which you make them changes the measured properties of those materials.  The theories of semiconductor mechanics provides an overarching way of understanding the physics, but there's no question about the specifics of what they do and how they do them, because that's just observed fact, not theory.

[Aggelakis]

... also when he did apply them to it it was a theory with incomplete evidence behind it ergo a guess that later underwent many trials to ascertain whether that looked like it was true for the material.

A scientific theory isn't a guess. If it's a guess, no scientist is going to call it a theory. They would call it a hypothesis.

[Arcana]

You know what?  Time to go on the offensive, rather than just react on defense.  While the technical details of this stuff can get very complicated, the actual base principles are not that difficult to understand.  Let's just head this off at the pass.  This is how semiconductors work in general, and how solar cells work in particular, and in very particular how our understanding of them is rooted in a lot of other science, from physics to chemistry to quantum mechanics.

Silicon is what chemistry calls a "group 4" element (technically, these days it is called group 14, but it was group IV when I learned it, and semiconductor jockeys still call these materials group 4 for reasons that will become evident in a bit).  It includes elements like carbon, germanium, and lead.  These elements all share certain similarities when it comes to chemical properties because all of them have the same configuration of their outer electrons.  Every atom has a nucleus with some protons and neutrons at the center and electrons orbiting around it.  The electrons form shells with some closer and some farther away, like satellites orbiting the Earth.  However, quantum mechanics limits which orbits electrons can be in: they can't just arbitrarily orbit the electron.  These quantum mechanics-restricted orbits are called "orbitals" or "shells" and we can calculate what they are for every atom.

The group IV elements all have four electrons in their outermost electron shells, and those shells all have the same basic shape and properties, except for their size (distance from the nucleus).  Because how two atoms interact is mostly a function of those outer electrons - because those are the ones that can bump into each other and interact - that's why they tend to be similar chemically.  Similar, but not identical.

This outer shell of electrons can theoretically hold up to eight electrons: four pairs.  There's actually a quantum mechanical reason for this.  There is a principle called the Pauli exclusion principle which states that no two fermions can have exactly the same quantum state.  It is sort of the quantum mechanical equivalent to the "two things can't occupy the same space at the same time" rule.  Electrons are fermions, and when an electron is in an orbital of an atom all of its quantum numbers are defined except for one: spin.  Electrons can have one of two spins, which classically can be thought of as "clockwise" and "counterclockwise" although in quantum mechanical terms it isn't really (we usually call them "spin up" and "spin down").  So if no two electrons can have the same quantum numbers, once an electron enters an orbital shell only one more electron can do so: an electron with opposite spin.  After that, you can't put any more electrons in there because then you'd have two electrons trying to "occupy" the same quantum state.

The silicon atom would like to fill up that outer orbital - to be more precise, full orbitals have a lower energy state.  Things tend to want to fall into low energy states because once there, it takes extra energy to kick them back out of it.  So these silicon atoms would love to grab four more electrons and fill them.  But in a crystal of silicon it can't do that, because it is surrounded by other silicon atoms that all want to do the same thing, just as hard.  However, in a crystal of pure silicon something interesting happens.  Two neighboring silicon atoms each have one unpaired electron in an orbit facing the other, and each wants to steal the other's electron to fill its orbital.  What happens is the two electrons pair up because that's the lowest energy state for *them*, and then start orbiting *both* silicon atoms.  Heisenberg uncertainty allows them to basically "smear" themselves out throughout both orbits, and while each silicon atom is not happy to have to share, they both find it is better than not having anything at all.  In physical terms, the energy state of a pair of electrons orbiting both is lower than each silicon atom having only one electron in that orbit.  It is a lower energy state, so the electrons "fall" into that state, forming what chemistry calls a "covalent bond."

These bonds are pretty strong.  That's what gives silicon crystals their strength: they are actually very strong.  Silica glass' strength comes from that silicon bond, and the fact that with the ability to make four such bonds in all directions you end up with an extremely strong structure.  But because they are that strong, pure silicon is extremely non-conductive.  If you think about it, if electric current is about moving electrons, and all the electrons are tied up in these strong covalent bonds, none of them will move when you apply a voltage, unless the voltage is really really high.  Basically, pure silicon is an insulator.

But what if I mess up that happy structure?  Suppose I were to remove one silicon atom and replace it with something like phosphorus.  Phosphorus has five electrons in its outer shells, not four.  When you stick phosphorus in there, the silicon still tries to pair up with phosphorus and make four covalent bonds, but then there's one electron left over.  That electron *cannot* occupy the orbital it was in originally because Pauli exclusion kicks it out.  Basically, its four friends get room mates for the four bedrooms, and now it has to sleep on the couch.  That means it gets kicked farther away from the phosphorus nucleus, and the bottom line is that it is now much less strongly connected to that phosphorus.  And moreover, if it moves in any direction it will run into silicon atoms that also have full orbitals.  No room at the inn, and it can't find a home.  Although this leaves the phosphorus atom electrically charged (it has one less negative charged electron) that atom is surrounded by trillions of electrons that dilute that charge.  The electron doesn't "see" it very well, and is free to roam around.  Now, if you apply a voltage, that electron can move with the voltage and provide a current.  I've just magically turned silicon from an insulator into a conductor.  That's what semiconductors basically are: materials we can adjust the conductivity of by changing their structure.

Had I stuck a boron atom in there instead, boron has three electrons in its outer shell instead of five.  What happens then?  Well, silicon still tries to make four covalent bonds but it can only make three.  Boron then runs out of electrons to pair up.  One of the silicon atoms ends up with a hanging electron unable to form a covalent bond.  Here's the tricky part.  What happens if I apply a voltage now?  Well, I said that in pure silicon nothing happens because all those electrons are held in place by strong bonds, and the voltage can't move them so no current.  You might think the same thing happens.  Ah, but the situation is different: we have a hanging electron trying to pull an electron from one of its neighbors because it is just hanging there.  It cannot, because it is basically pulling with the same force its neighbors are using to hold its electrons.  That tug of war is a draw, so that silicon atom gets stuck with an unpaired electron.

Imagine a row of chairs each with someone sitting in it.  Now imagine each person is holding a ball in each of their hands, except for one guy in the middle.  He has one ball in his left hand and nothing in his right hand.  He wants to have a ball in his right hand so he tries to take the ball away from the guy sitting to his right.  He can't because they are equally strong: he tries to pull the ball away, the other guy tugs back, and the net result is that nothing happens.  Now imagine that there are strings tied to each ball, and we can tug on them.  It we start tugging on those strings and pulling all of the balls to the left, what happens is that the guy who was trying to yank the ball to the left from the guy on the right now wins: we helped him steal that ball.  Now the guy to the right has only one ball, so *he* tries to steal one from the guy to *his* right.  And because we are helping him by pulling to the left, he also wins.  Notice that the *balls* move to the left, but it kind of looks like the "empty hand" is moving to the right.

That's what happens to silicon with that boron atom in there.  Under voltage the electrons start moving in the direction of the force, while the "hole" moves in the opposite direction.  If we think of the "hole" as a positively charged thing in a sea of negatively charged things, then it is as if a positively charged current is moving in the opposite direction that (negatively charged) electrons would move.  It isn't: it is a bit of an illusion.  But the descriptions both describe the same situation: negative charge flows in one direction, while the absence of negative charge (positive charge) flows in the opposite direction.

And that's how we make silicon semiconductors.  We take silicon, which is an insulator, and we dope it with other atoms.  This creates either a set of loosely bound electrons which can move much more easily, or a set of loosely bound "holes" which can move much more easily, and this allows us to control silicon's conductivity.  We can engineer silicon to do what we want it to do electrically.  And based on the laws of chemistry and physics, we can calculate exactly how silicon's behavior will change depending on what we do to it.  These calculations work, which tells us that our understanding of how the pieces work is probably correct.  Almost certainly correct, given the fact that in effect all of the billions of transistors mankind has created over the years test and retest those calculations by functioning as designed trillions of times a day.

How do we get from here to solar cells?  One bite sized step at a time.  Next time we should get from how semiconductors work to what happens when we start sticking them together.  To me, that is one of the most interesting things in all of physics, and the modern world is essentially built upon what happens in that specific situation.

[DarkCurrent]

I didn't realize marijuana could be smoked via internet connection.

This thread is good for that at least.

[Arcana]

Okay, so we have silicon, and we're sticking things like boron and phosphorus in it to make it have some extra electrons floating around - we call this "n-type" semiconductor - or some extra "holes" (aka deficit of extra electrons floating around) - what we call "p-type" semiconductor material.  Time for a magic trick.  Suppose we stick an n-type semiconductor and a p-type semiconductor together.  Or we just make them side by side in the same block of silicon.  What happens?

Well, remember that on the n-side we have all the silicon atoms happy with covalent bonds in all directions, but we have some extra electrons floating around.  And on the p-side we have a lot of unhappy silicon atoms that don't have enough electrons to make four covalent bonds in all cases: we have "holes" on that side.  Guess what?  The electrons that got "kicked to the couch" on the n-side drift to the p-side, where those silicon atoms grab them and use them to fill their orbitals.  And the silicon atoms grab them with enough force that once there they can't easily get back out.  More and more electrons drift across the neutral zone and get captured by silicon atoms that got stuck without enough partners.

As this happens, the n-side gets "depleted" of free electrons, while the p-side gets "depleted" of holes.  The free electrons fill the holes.  But as they do, they leave behind more and more positively charged phosphorus atoms, each of which was more than happy to kick the electron out.  And the p-side gets more and more negatively charged silicon atoms that grabbed one more electron than they ordinarily would have.   The p side now has more electrons than originally and becomes negatively charged on average, and the n side becomes positively charged.  That creates an electric field.  We've known since the 1700s that electric fields form between positive and negative charges, and it is no different inside of a semiconductor.  For the most part, most of the silicon structure on both sides of the junction are electrically neutral.  But right at the junction there's a significant charge difference and that creates a strong electric field.  This electric field tends to push electrons and holes away from the depletion zone, so at some point the electric field that forms as the depletion zone forms stops any more electrons from jumping across and filling holes.  The depletion zone stops growing.

Okay, so what?  Well, that depletion zone is a problem.  We made silicon into a conductor by doping it with phosphorus which created a situation where there were extra mobile electrons floating around (we call this the conduction band of electrons), or by doping it with boron which created a situation where there were extra mobile "holes" in the structure.  In the depletion zone, all the free electrons paired up with all of the free holes and got stuck there.  Now there's nothing to move around.  In effect, the depletion zone created an insulator in the middle of our two (semi-)conductors.  We're back to having no electricity flow any more.  But there's a catch.  The depletion zone was created because those mobile electrons dropped into a lower energy state by pairing them up with the holes, and formed an electric field in the middle which then stopped the depletion zone from growing any bigger.  What would happen if we were to apply an electric field in the same direction as the depletion zone field.  Basically, the depletion zone would get bigger.  The bigger the depletion zone, the bigger the field and vice versa.  Since the depletion zone is basically an insulator, as it grows the junction would oppose the flow of current more and more.  It would fight against any attempt to flow current in that direction.  But if we try to send current in the opposite direction, by applying a field that is in the opposite direction of the depletion zone field, the depletion zone field would get smaller.  The depletion zone would shrink, and the insulating layer would also shrink, which would make it easier for current to flow.  The higher the voltage, the smaller the depletion zone and the less resistance to current.  In this direction, current flow rises rapidly with voltage.

In other words, the n-p junction is a kind of one-way valve for current.  Current can flow easily in one direction, but can't flow every easily in the other.  We call these things diodes.  And diodes are one of the fundamental building blocks of the computer age.  For example, lets say I stick two of them together, to form something that looks like n-p-n.  Two diodes end to end.  That looks worthless: the n-p part can only pass current in one direction but the p-n part can only do so in the opposite direction.  Isn't that just an insulator?  If I try to shoot electrons from one end to the other all by itself, pretty much.  But that sandwich has two depletion zones.  If I try to push electrons across the sandwich, one of them will get bigger and the other one smaller, because they are pointing in opposite directions.  If I *then* apply an electric field in the middle, I can make that bigger one also bigger or smaller.  In other words, if I try to constantly push current across this sandwich, an additional voltage I apply to the white part of the oreo cookie will determine if that current gets across or not.  And the main current can be very large while the middle voltage can be relatively small: it only has to overcome the depletion zone.

We call these things transistors, and they can function as both switches and as amplifiers.  When you can make electrically controlled switches and electrically controlled amplifiers, you can make computers by doing nothing more than printing different impurities onto a chunk of silicon glass.

Chemistry tells us how covariant bonds work and how valence electrons behave.  Quantum mechanics gives a more accurate description of how these things work in a bulk solid.  Physics tells us how electrons and holes combine, and how electric fields are formed by separation of charges.    We use all of these scientific principles to engineer a set of materials that simply do not exist in nature normally, because they require exceptional purity of silicon combined with very specifically chosen impurities placed in just the right places.  Using these principles, we create wires, amplifiers, diodes, switches, transistors, flip-flops, NAND gates, adders, multipliers, clocks, memories, counters, decoders, multiplexers, CPUs, GPUs, and the Galaxy S5.  From fundamental physics and chemistry, modified by quantum mechanics and materials science, we take chemical elements, mix them together in just the right ways, apply a voltage, and make computing engines.

One more stop to go before we arrive at the PV system on my roof.

[Arcana]

First a minor correction.  I said earlier that a hole was just the absence of an electron free to move about.  I'm getting old, and device physics was like thirty years ago, give me a break.  Technically, the holes aren't in the conduction layer, they are in the valence layer.  Electrons jump up from the valence layer to the conduction layer.  Not important, but just a technical detail that slipped my mind.

So how do we get to solar cells?  Well, fundamentally speaking, solar cells are just depletion zones, just fabricated with very specific specifications.  Recall that depletion zones are areas in between n-p junctions where all the free mobile electrons jumped the fence and combined with the holes on the other side.  At some point an electric field is built up that stops more electrons from entering the DMZ.  What happens if a photon of light hits an atom inside the depletion zone?

Well, if it has the right amount of energy, it can dislodge an electron, knock it out of the valence bond it is in, and free it temporarily from the grip of those silicon orbitals.  If that happens, the electric field in the depletion zone will yank it across the zone, dumping it on the far side.  It is going to want to get back because now that side of the junction is negatively charged.  But it cannot go back where it came from, because the depletion zone electric field keeps kicking it back.  But if there is another path it can take, like say if there is an electric circuit from one end of the junction all the way around to the other side, then the electron will take that path, loop around the circuit, and end up back on the other side.  In doing so, a current will flow in that circuit.  Light, striking the zone and knocking free an electron, creates electric current as the electron tries to get back home.  The depletion zone prevents it from taking the short path, forcing it to take the long path.

To make a really good solar cell you want it to be as efficient as possible in doing this.  One way is to "tune" the depletion zone so that the amount of energy necessary to cause an electron to jump out of its orbital and get free is about the same as the energy a lot of the photons striking it have.  Individual photons have different energies depending on their wavelength - their color.  The theory that photons have different energies and those energies are quantized meaning they can only take on certain values and not all possible values is what won Einstein the Nobel prize I referred to earlier in the thread.  It is kind of ironic that the man known as the father of Relativity, a man who was never comfortable with quantum mechanics, won the Nobel prize not for for his work on Relativity but rather for his foundational work on what became quantum mechanics.

By understanding the physics behind how atomic bonds work, how atomic structures work, and how different atoms affect the quantum nature of electrons in a material, we can engineer materials with the properties we want, including building them so that the depletion zone is as big as we want, so the energy that the material absorbs from sunlight is as wide as possible, so that the material is optimized to absorb the wavelengths of light that are most common and carry the most energy in sunlight, and does so in a way that generates the most free electrons in a way that can generate the most voltage or current.  Learning how to apply those theories in a practical way to create the materials in the best and most cost effective way allows us to create semiconductor cells that generate small amounts of electricity from sunlight.  We take a lot of those cells, stick them all on a panel, combine the electricity they generate into a large single output, and you have a panel that can generate enough electricity to be useful.  Put thirty on a roof and add an inverter that converts that electricity from direct current to alternating current compatible with what the power company sends to my house, and you have a residential PV system.

Chemistry, physics, quantum mechanics, materials science, electromagnetism: they combine to allow us to understand atomic elements, covalent bonds, valence and conduction bands, depletion zones, electric fields, the photovolatic effect, and bingo: solar panel.  There's no "theory" on how solar panels work.  There is the theory of the atomic structure of matter, the Pauli exclusion principle, the quantum nature of orbitals, the covalent theory of chemical bonds, Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, the photon nature of light, Heisenberg uncertainty, electron spin, electron pairing, current diffusion, majority carriers (I didn't cover those two, sorry), doping, annealing (heat treating doped materials so the doping atoms distribute themselves evenly throughout), electron potentials, and the technology of materials science manipulation.  That's the "theory" of solar cells.  Two hundred years of Science.

Anyone who claims to have a better one, has to start by tossing all that stuff out and coming up with their own versions.  Versions that will explain how all these things work as well as the current theories do.  And they do very, very well.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

He, uh...he already has that. O.o ?

Wow, i... uh, have no excuse for that post. It, um, well, as soon as i see his name i just immediately start going through the post and i think i just try to blank out everything after that. Or something. Honestly i'm not sure i forgot he already had that title between reading his last post and making mine. *sigh* Moving on.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

I think the problem isn't crazy theories, but the characterization of the current scientific theories as something that is either trivial to dismiss or complete guesswork.  I don't think that is a fair claim unless you can actually demonstrate to understand them well enough to make that judgment.  And these elements of scientific knowledge are not difficult to find in 2016.  It isn't like this is 1976 and it would take hours of time to learn this stuff in a library.

No, the problem is a tendency to assume that what is at most a passing introduction or glance at a subject is equivalent to actually studying the subject. The same sort of armchair reasoning appears in virtually every post on every subject, whether it's science, law, a certain Superhero MMO, computer programming or most any other topic. It reminds me most of the armchair naturalists in Europe and England centuries back that would read a few accounts and look at a few sketches of an animal and from there produce dissertations going into great detail about that animal and its habitat that often bore no resemblance to the actual thing. (In the cases where the animal existed at all.) So no, it's not the craziness that's the problem, it's apparently believing that ad hoc extrapolating from the most superficial familiarity with a topic is the same as being an expert.

[Arcana]

No, the problem is a tendency to assume that what is at most a passing introduction or glance at a subject is equivalent to actually studying the subject. The same sort of armchair reasoning appears in virtually every post on every subject, whether it's science, law, a certain Superhero MMO, computer programming or most any other topic. It reminds me most of the armchair naturalists in Europe and England centuries back that would read a few accounts and look at a few sketches of an animal and from there produce dissertations going into great detail about that animal and its habitat that often bore no resemblance to the actual thing. (In the cases where the animal existed at all.) So no, it's not the craziness that's the problem, it's apparently believing that ad hoc extrapolating from the most superficial familiarity with a topic is the same as being an expert.

There is certainly a lot of that as well on the internet, where everyone is apparently an expert in law, science, engineering, math, and kung fu.

But I think it is more than that.  I think when you don't investigate a topic deeply, when you don't try to understand a subject at a fundamental level, when you only know a scattering of superficial Cliff Notes versions of it, you tend to start seeing the subject as nothing more than a scattering of disconnected guesses that masquerade as fact.  Sure, some guy claims continents drift around and sure some other guys claim that explains a lot about the shape of the continents, but so what?  My theory that giant Kaiju bit off parts of the continents to make those shapes is just as good a theory.  Better in fact because it is more interesting.  And my ideas should be just as important as anyone else's.

So much more goes into these theories; they explain so much observations - including the fact that we can actually *observe* continents moving today with GPS.  To know if a competing theory is "better" than the established theory, you first have to know if the new theory does just as good a job of explaining our observations as the prevailing one.  If you don't even know what those are, how can you possibly know if your competing theory is any good?

Most spheres of knowledge are so much more than the superficial glance you can get from wikipedia, or in fact any internet search.  And if you try to pretend you know them when you don't, the people who do know them will spot you like a bonfire in a fireworks factory.

[Twisted Toon]

Kaiju are real?!? Does that mean that Pacific Rim was actually a documentary? 

[Felderburg]

[https://littlealchemy.com]

I uh.... I got an atomic bomb. Before anything else of note so far.

I also got it from combining air + fire to get energy, and added an explosion to it. So... Yeah.

[FlyingCarcass]

I uh.... I got an atomic bomb. Before anything else of note so far.

I also got it form combining air + fire to get energy, and added an explosion to it. So... Yeah.

North Korea would appreciate it if you didn't copy its nuclear program.