The Secret Life of Lightning: The Science of Giant Tesla Coils | Greg Leyh

all right I'm Alexander Rose I'm the executive director here at long now and thank you all for coming out on this very warm October almost October I guess evening I think actually my connection to Greg started I think long before even Greg maybe knows it but the very first survival research laboratory show I ever saw when I was in high school was here in Fort Mason out in this parking lot and it kind of changed my brain and I'd grown up in a junkyard and Sausalito and building things and I saw these destructive robot theater and it it was something that I I kind of knew I was going to be connected to and thread through the rest of my life and I did a very short stint with them a little bit and when I was in high school but then went on to build robots for battle bots and things like that but several of people who work on the clock project like Chris Rand also at some point worked for survival research laboratories and then when Jim Mason started power tool drag races which was a drag races with tools or racers made out of hand held power tools I was competing in that and then Greg showed up with this wild box that was labeled like bajillion volts on it and like hooked it up to this saw and completely smoked the whole class of everybody else and like everyone realized that they were dealing with a different species of kind of of competitor and so I've been paying attention ever since then I've seen a lot of the Tesla coils that he's worked on and brought to various shows and so when I heard that he had a some theories on lightning and new ways to test out those theories I became really interested and Michael was really great and bringing this talk together and working with Greg on this so without anything further I'm gonna he's gonna Greg's going to do a fair amount of explanation of some of the work that he's doing as well as the ongoing projects and then and then I'm going to come up and we'll have a little bit of conversation efforts okay [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Ireland thanks for coming out tonight um the study of large-scale electrical physics is an active hobby of mine it's endlessly fascinating and surprisingly unexplored I started this work way back when three letter URLs were free for their taking so visit LOD dot org if you want to know more details about my research tonight I'd like to talk about three interesting electrical effects Oh which only occur on large physical scales Tesla's wireless power scheme super long discharges and relativistic effects in lightning such as the role that Einstein's special relativity plays during lightning formation Nikola Tesla was an inventor who probably needs no introduction in this room although Tesla is best known for his invention of the AC induction motor he spent a great deal of his life working towards sending power around the world without wires Tesla's idea was to place a number of high voltage towers at strategic points around the globe each tower would then capacitively couple power up to the upper atmosphere which Tesla believed to be reasonably conductive he based this on his work with rarefied gases in vacuum tubes it's also interesting that Tesla developed this whole scheme several decades before the ionosphere was discovered no doubt Tesla would have been a static to find out that there was already a prion eyes atmospheric layer up there in 1899 Tesla started working on the drive system for its towers this 51 foot diameter fence around the outside is actually the primary and secondary coil they drive this tertiary coil here which produces most of the voltage and there's Tesla sitting there he's rather proud of this double exposure that he did although everybody back east and the media kind of lost the notion that it was a double exposure and then they just think he was crazy this tertiary coiled here also sends high voltage up to a raised aerial on the roof of the building which Tesla used for measuring coupling to the upper atmosphere after finishing the drive system in Colorado Springs he started construction of this 180 7-foot tall tower at Wardenclyffe on Long Island this mushroom shaped metal structure on top is the high voltage electrode which would a couple power towards the sky unfortunately Tesla ran out of money halfway through the project and never got to throw the switch ultimately Wardenclyffe was torn down and scrapped in 1915 to satisfy Tesla's creditors so would it have worked there's plenty of arguments on both sides even today personally I was a skeptic after all radio transmitters today are far more powerful than Wardenclyffe yet they only deliver fractions of a microwatt to receiver antennas so how can Wardenclyffe possibly deliver kilowatts but then one day I witnessed uh bizarre electrical accident I actually caused this accident by leaving this poor cliff lead Canessa connected across the primary terminals of a coil but what's interesting here is that when the coil burned this clip lead the coil itself was disconnected from everything and actually stored away in the corner of the lab at the time we were running a similar coil across the room when somebody started yelling about smoke after finding the smoldering cliff lead hanging from the disconnected coil I just stared at it for a long moment in disbelief and wondering what in the hell just happened so of course the first thing we did was try to recreate the accident we pulled the stored coil out and set it up here as the receiving coil and the other coil we set up as the transmitting coil and both these coils are tuned to the same frequency and instead of a clip lead we gave the receiving coil 800 watts worth of light bulbs as a test load now I thought 800 watts would be more than enough but the receiving coil could actually drive these way beyond 800 watts if the transmitting coil got any closer than 5 meters this made no sense to me at all since the electric coupling between these two coils is so incredibly small it measured about 10 femto farad's which is 1/100 of a millionth of a millionth of a farad but later I ran some detailed circuit simulations which confirmed that even this amazingly small amount of coupling can pass dangerous amounts of power between well to well-tuned Tesla coils all through the magic of resonance after this discovery a friend Mike Kenan felt rather strongly that light bulbs were a terrible choice for a test load he thought since of X should be used to push his lazybone around so he built the first the world's first real Tesla Roadster there's an aerial up here and this aerial consists of a bunch of welding rods that form a disc shape and that establishes an area where it can collect electric field lines that ultimately come from the transmitting coil that energy goes down here to a little resonant transformer melted on the frame and this transformer can be quite small because the operating frequencies so high the transformer steps down the voltage to about 200 volts or so and runs this 180 volt Gare motor over here and then the gear motor is just linked to the drive axle under the seat that's all it is here's a short video clip of the Tesla Roadster in action at a Maker Faire a while back note that mike is wearing a heavy welding clothes he kept complaining about getting shocks from holding the steering grips it's too bad we didn't collect the energy from him as well oh when the cart starts moving you can see some lively sparking down here from the grounding chain that drags behind the Roadster [Applause] he could have kept going around and around but we had all this other stuff in the way these little carts that are rotating in place are smaller prototypes of Tesla roadsters that whatever the electric fields high enough they just start spinning in circles so would Tesla's Wardenclyffe tower have worked for near field applications absolutely even the accidental rig that we had could deliver over a horsepower a machine the size a Wardenclyffe could easily deliver 30 horsepower to local loads in the area what about far-field coupling to the ionosphere and beyond my intuition still says no but then again you could say my intuition has already been burned once by my experience with this in fact the Tesla could have hosted wireless drag races that Wardenclyffe over a hundred years ago more recently however a number of groups have tried to answer this question with computer simulations to simulate the entire cavity between the ionosphere and the earth and but it's a huge problem a simulation of this size presents over 10 billion degrees of freedom so nobody's quite gotten there yet being an experimentalist however I'm convinced that the fastest way to get at these answers will be simply to build a resonator tall enough to actually test the idea so what other strange things might Tesla have discovered if he was able to throw the switch on Wardenclyffe one very likely and completely unexpected result would have been super long discharges no doubt Tesla would have been fascinated by these even as they short-circuited the output of his Tower and destroyed nearby equipment what do we mean by super long discharges well if we want to make a regular spark in the laboratory and we have some suitable high voltage machine classical electrical theory states that it'll cost us about two thousand kilovolts per meter in order to break down the air and make a nice arc discharge the cost of breaking down air is well-documented and modern electrical insulators depend on this 2,000 kilovolts per meter value to successfully hold off voltages however super long discharges are a completely different beast they use some trick to reach across huge distances far greater than 2,000 kilovolts per meter would normally allow the first man-made super long discharge occurred in the 1960s at a high-voltage test facility in Siberia there are the ones shown in this photo this tower here on the left is called a Marx generator this one's about 90 feet tall and can produce about five million volts now normally five million volts should only arc about this far at 2,000 kilovolts per meter and you can see the designers of the tower had that in mind so imagine their surprise when arcs started coming on the top of this tower and shooting across hundreds of meters in this case across the field hitting this transmission line blowing out the insulators on the top of the tower and even hitting the the streetlights in the parking lot next to the building these wild arcs somehow managed to cross these huge distances with less than 100 kV per meter that's only a twentieth of what normal arts require I hate to say this but we still don't know how super long discharges pull off this trick we do know that it only happens at many millions of volts and in wide open areas this would be this would be a really great trick to understand however since these wild arcs ultimately limit the things we can do as fascinating as they were the super long discharges ultimately killed the researchers plans to develop multi mega volt transmission lines and because of this 1 million volts is about as high as transmission lines can go these days now the reason this is sad is because transmission lines need about 1,000 volts per mile of length in order to be efficient so a million volt line can only span about a thousand miles however a 10 million volt line would be able to start connecting the continents together so understanding how to control wild arcs at multi mega volt levels would allow renewable energies like solar to become cost competitive because then you could build huge solar plants and they could send power directly to their dark side of the planet 45 years later the forests have reclaimed most of the towers at the facility in Siberia but the mysteries behind super long discharges remain there's also another form of super long discharges which present us with a completely different set of problems storm clouds also have some trick to initiate very long discharges with surprisingly weak electric fields the fields actually measured inside the storm clouds are only about 50 to 200 kV per meter a small fraction of the classic 2,000 kV per meter normally needed to break down air it's really odd to think that in the 21st century we still don't know what this trick is however a couple russian physicist named Gourevitch ands ivan came up with a novel theory to explain this and they gave it a great name to boot relativistic runaway breakdown their theory starts with an Olympic field in the middle of the cloud arranged at some arbitrary angle usually they're mostly vertical now this field doesn't have to be strong enough to break down air it only has to be strong enough to accelerate free electrons a cosmic ray enters the electric field area and strikes an atom under the right conditions if it hits it just right the cosmic ray will knock off electrons at relativistic velocities now a curious property of relativistic electrons is that they're moving so fast that they actually shrink they effectively shrink due to their warped space-time which significantly reduces their friction in air this allows them to accelerate to near the speed of light until they eventually do hit other atoms and knock off more relativistic electrons eventually starting a chain reaction now the theory predicts that if the electric field reaches a critical strength of 200 kV per meter and spans a critical distance of 80 meters then this Avalanche can build up enough to the point where it can start a classical lightning discharge so in the late 1990s Reacher's we researchers started searching storm clouds for telltale gamma rays that would lend support to the theory but for many years they couldn't find anything at all it turns out they were looking from the wrong direction about ten years later NASA's Fermi gamma-ray telescope made an amazing accidental discovery described here in this video at any given moment about 1,800 thunderstorms aren't progress somewhere on the globe new observations by NASA's Fermi gamma-ray Space Telescope show the thunderstorms make antimatter the process starts with a terrestrial gamma-ray flash or TGF an intense pulse of gamma rays originating from thunderstorms these dots mark TGIF's observed by fairways gamma-ray burst monitor during the spacecraft's first eight months of operations researchers estimate that there may be as many as 500 TGFs each day on December 14th 2009 as ferry passed over Egypt it spotted a TGIF produced by a thunderstorm in Zambia the TGF was over the spacecraft's horizon where Fermi couldn't see it so how could fairly have detected it scientists or have 80g enough process begins the thunderstorms intense electrical field electrons within this field become accelerated upward above the storm where the air is thin the electrons can ramp up to speeds nearly as fast as the speed of light when they ultra-fast electrons encounter an atom they emit gamma rays very rarely one of these gamma ray photons grazes anatomy and transforms into a pair of particles one an electron is normal matter the other is antimatter the electrons opposite called a positron the gamma rays travel in straight lines but the charged particles spiral along lines of Earth's magnetic field and that was the route to fare me the particles created by the TGF wrote upward on magnetic field lines and then struck the spacecraft the positrons annihilated when they struck electrons at Fermi creating a flash of gamma rays for an instant fairnie became a gamma ray source and set up its own detectors a fraction of a second later some of the particles were bounced back along the same magnetic field line they again passed through semi and again the noose gamma-rays the spacecraft is observed this phenomenon and at least four other occasions so the next time lightning flashes and Thunder roars remember you may be witnessing antimatter in the making so thunderstorms really do produce both gamma rays and antimatter but the funny discovery raised more questions than answers why do the gamma rays head upwards rather than down are there other effects that work here that we haven't considered and perhaps most importantly are there ways that we could hack this fantastic gain mechanism it would be incredibly useful for instance if we had the ability to turn off lightning over populated areas these answers have eluded us for decades since floating around with instruments at the exact right place and right time inside a storm cloud is practically impossible now I wonder if anyone here looking at this problem has had the same thought as me that the best way to get at these answers is to simply recreate this critical electric field here on the ground where we can actually measure what happens in close detail now an electric field that's two hundred thousand volts per meter and eighty meters in length is only about 16 million volts total from end to end so I've spent a lot of effort working on possible ways to generate such a field and I'm happy to report that it's not completely crazy to do the most practical approach I found so far it's to set up to 120 foot tall Tesla towers it's faced about 300 feet apart mm-hmm at just eight million volts per tower oppositely phased the space between the towers can produce the critical field needed to start relative relativistic runaway breakdown now modern structural plastics that you would make these towers out of only support about seven thousand volts per inch outdoors and that's if they're well cared for so each tower needs to be a minimum of about twelve stories in height to support this much voltage this high it also places the runaway breakdown zone safely above the ground where it's easier to view with instruments here's a few interesting numbers that fall out of the full-scale machine design the design target for the output voltage is actually about twenty percent higher than the minimum sixteen MV required by the theory and that's because historically large electrical machines and large research machines always encounter some intriguing corner case that's just out of reach and I know many times including the Tevatron where they wish they could turn it to eleven the primary drive system for each tower includes 12 stations and each station has an array of the largest 6,500 volt transistors available in order to produce this aggregate primary drive currents now we're used to processors containing millions of transistors but a single one of these transistors this is the size of a phone book the transistors that we'll use here are currently used to power high-speed electric trains so to show that a 121 foot tall Tesla coil isn't completely crazy I thought I should demonstrate a one-third scale model of one tower so for the last five years I've been building this 40-foot tall fully functional scale prototype now even the scale prototype will be more than twice as large as the largest operating Tesla coil ever built so for me to build this without any funding this prototype necessarily explores new design ideas that significantly reduce the cost of construction and operation among these are a fully collapsible tower design and a modular massively parallel primary drive system to give you a rough idea of what this coil might look like running at two hundred forty thousand watts here's a short clip of a coil that I built about 20 years ago running at about eighty thousand watts this coil was called electrum and I built it as an art project for the gibbs art farm in new zealand electrum is currently the world's largest Tesla coil in this clip you can see electron reaching out to a streetlight that was unfortunately located too close to the tower in the world at full power the RK discharges reach out to 50 feet from the top electrode the unusual serum electrode allows the person to actually stand inside the electrode at full power aside from being incredibly fun writing the electrode millions of volts provided a rare educational experience the new 40-foot Tower will run at about three times this output power here's how the new 40 foot coil tower looks now in its a fully collapsed eight the secondary winding breaks into eight parts and they're all nested here on top of each other the entire machine is about 95% complete now however this photo was taken at a key moment the coil is leaving the lab space for the last time and going to a storage facility I recently lost my lab space here that I've had for the last eight years when real estate developers from New York bought the entire American steel site you might imagine their response upon seeing my workspace for the first time I knew I was in trouble when one of them asked will all of this stuff affect my DNA so I was promptly kicked out along with many other workshops and artists there including Gary Wilson and Karen who Salido the artists who actually founded American steel studios now eight years ago it was pretty easy to find another industrial space but nowadays even undesirable spots like American steel are being scooped up by developers so right now everything's in storage and the project is pretty much dead in the water but I have a plan to replace this lab space with one that can avoid the hazards of gentrification the plan is to get a custom cargo trailer and outfit it with all the tower components instruments and a workshop since the tower itself is fully collapsible the entire system can pack into a single 18-foot trailer there's many great desolate spots around the Bay Area that would make perfect test sites but they don't have usable buildings or utilities however a self-contained mobile lab could just roll into one of these sites set up perform experiments and then roll out all without needing any building space administrative overhead or hookups storing a trailer is also much much easier than finding reliable lab space in Oakland these days so right now the new 40 foot Tesla tower is almost ready to fire up but everything's in storage until the mobile lab is ready in order to get the 18 foot cargo trailer I started a fundraiser at elllo.org to make the fundraiser interesting I've added some unusual perks like frozen lightning an Electra mater II by Alberto Chu and a special high power demo of the 40-foot coil when it's ready it's been 10 years since I've hosted a public demo so maybe it's time for one more if you're interested in this kind of stuff check out the fundraiser it's at elllo.org at this point I guess I'd like to open the Florida Zandar we're just gonna do a little bit of stage change here so i'm i'm curious greg i I mentioned srl and I know that you've worked with them a little bit and so I didn't really close that loop but I you know the the early forms of survival research labs were very much about kind of pirate science as well and now you're creating your own savage engineering pirate ship for science for lightning science and did was your work with them kind of good inspire some of this thinking or is it just really based on necessity of oh yeah working with us or ill allowing one to experience social scenarios that you don't normally get to experience and to know to discover that the fabric that society is made out of it's actually kind of fragile and goes away in certain places I wasn't there with mark but I remember one story where he needed a big winch that was out at in a railroad yard somewhere and so he went out to get it and started unbolting it just in broad daylight and the police came by and said hey what are you doing he's I'm taking this railroad winds I need it for a performance and they said well you can't do that get out of here so they ran him off and and they were just flabbergasted that he was doing it in broad daylight as if he deserved it as an artist yes well the coiner of the term obtaining them as far as right now and i'm i think what's what's also interesting is that i mean you're trying to get to a fundamental in a very comment what's obviously a common phenomenon of lightning that is amazing that we don't understand and it always seems in these cases that an obscure russian research paper is the answer and how did you come across this theory and we're did you where did you find it oh well I I monitored geophysics especially anything having to do with the natural electrical phenomena like the global electrical circuit sprites things like that and they published it a little bit earlier but they published it widely in 2005 and my first reaction to that was I can't imagine gamma rays coming out of a lightning storm because that's a very classical effect right and then later on when Dwyer added the supplement of positrons I said okay I'm not going to believe that antimatter comes out of lightning storms that's just too much but then Fermi happened and everybody's still scratching their heads interesting and I think what's also really interesting here and I think gets us to a kind of a global impact is this idea that that by kind of cracking some of this phenomena some of our problems such as energy storage where you can bring power to the other side of the world really starts changing the landscape of our entire power infrastructure is to have you in your normal work I know that you've worked in some of these spaces do you want to talk a little bit about about that and how some of these alternative energy powers might be affected by that oh yeah well right now I used to work at Makani and they make these special windmills that actually eight bladed acrobatic planes that circle on it yeah some of you remember or Saul Griffith who's speaking and spoken twice and our other series is the founder of Makani right and the thing holding back renewables right now is storage the cost of storage is just too much so you end up with places like in Germany where they had so much they had a perfect storm of solar and wind to where the price of electricity went negative because they couldn't ship anywhere and that problem is going to get worse and worse as more solar comes online however it you had some way of selling that power directly to dark or calm areas for the price of electricity is high then suddenly it makes sense and they become competitive with other forms like natural gas right I mean an intercontinental electric grid yes change the landscape considerably we already do that in the United States where we shift power from hot hot places to cold places and from one time zone to the next yeah the biggest line in the u.s. right now is the Pacific in ertai it comes from the hydroelectric plants in Washington and feeds Los Angeles right Los Angeles is just draws it in from everywhere and that's a 1 million volt DC line at 2,500 amps and that's about as high as I go and that that just makes the run from Washington to Los Angeles right I remember the coal-fired power plant that was going to go up near Gerlach Nevada I was also going to feed LA as well when it took LA saying they didn't want to add that to the playa for them did not build that but and the why do you why do you think you're kind of alone in this space and why is where's where's the NASA research lab that's that's doing this I mean I know that you work you know for modern tech companies in your day job doing high voltage research so you know it's obviously need for your amazing skills but nobody is trying to figure out the fundamentals of lightning or the worldwide power grid strangely well else is busy doing en power and things like that to violate basic physics and if you want to look at what people are interested in just go to Kickstarter or IndieGoGo and look at the things that are raising all the money it's like for a little clip on for your iPhone nobody's really interested in you know pure research no like they used to be there's so many other things to think about and do and excel at right yeah and we were talking about this earlier but from I remember a conversation with Saul Griffith he he basically a kind of reverse engineer that the Google research budget is now larger than DARPA and clearly they're looking for different kinds of winds than DARPA would be in pure research so that's a it's an interesting problem when you have I think people especially from the software background working in the physical sciences and hopefully looking for the same kind of scaling effects yeah software people working in physics sound like a fish out of water what do you mean I can't undo that for questions and we have a microphone because we have people tuned in from our online audience so please do wait for the microphone so raise your hand and Michael here will get my microphone to you Andrew one of the weirdest Wikipedia articles I've ever stumbled upon was ball lightning it's like historic phenomena with all these different accounts of lightning like entering a room going around and then leaving a room I was just wondering if there's science on it or if you had a take on it well a lot of that's hard to unwind the anecdotal evidence sometimes it's just persistence of vision where there was a flash where it hit the ground that was in their retina just off-center a vision this was they try to look at it at wanders now that's one explanation other than that there hasn't been much progress however you can make plasmids in your microwave oven have you ever tried that you mean putting a metal fork and your microwave and turning it on well not a medal for it that'll double spark but that's not what you want you take like a ceramic cup and turn it upside down and then find some thin carbon mesh they call it carbon veil and put a little strip in there on top of the thing and set the microwave oven on just in our microwave upstairs okay keep going yeah you don't want to use it you know you don't want to do this and one that you normally cook food in because and what you'll get are these balls of plasma about this big around there like orange white and I'll just start floating around in there going and there's they're balls of conductive material because they're humming at the 60 Hertz that the magnetron is running at and inevitably they since they're lighter than air they hit the ceiling they bounce off the ceiling and before long all of the paint is peeled off the top so don't try it at home try it in somebody else's home yeah and I don't have a good explanation for them it I haven't looked deeply for one it's just one of those just one of those things at the bar okay my question goes back to the beginning of your talk with Tesla's transmission experiment he had one tower what was the phenomenon he was hoping to see that would show that his idea was working it's unclear to me he had plans to set up another tower in the UK somewhere and it'd be a smaller one just to listen so he was actually trying to get that signal all the way across the Atlantic he was trying to get power across the Atlantic yeah he had told JP Morgan that it was going to be a radio station and that's kind of how things fell apart nice you have any other questions don't over yes hi I'm sure there's a lot of pushback from Big Oil and maybe now what might be called big wind and big hydro but how as a community can we help the progression of this type of research when there's so much opposition with big money well he has an IndieGoGo campaign right now so you can fund that but I'll let I mean I think I mean are you do you feel as though you're hitting resistance so much is just apathy more apathy I mean I've talked with a number of institutions and people about doing this research and several are very excited and they say as soon as you have it built we want to come and do research very few philanthropic organizations want to give out capital equipment money gotcha we've got a question from the livestream about someone who saw the marks generator at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago I think this is many years back where they would split two by fours with lightnings and a huge thunderclap through the museum where do marks and Cockcroft Walton generators fit into this work is it the can you tell us what those are and are they a similar thing or something that it's there for a different technology Mark's generators can generate millions of volts and if you load them up with capacitance they'll split two by fours a coke off the Walton generator is a little bit different a Marx generator works by charging a bunch of capacitors in parallel and then you have some means to suddenly connect them in series and they form a high voltage where as a co-prophet you're using diodes arranged in a zigzag all the way up the capacitors and it acts like a bucket brigade and it just shuttles a charge all the way to the top and some amount of time it charges up to full voltage and both of these schemes can make millions of volts however I want to make eight million volts but I have to do it cheaply a Marx generator per volt that cost way more than a Tesla coil because if you make the Tesla coil right it's mostly air it's just a winding that does this whereas the the Marx Bank has all these capacitors all the way up there so it's a structure that holds a lot of weight and that structure also has to be a good insulator very expensive is that what that structure back again back to Russia there was that structure that that Russia built that would look like a whole series of diodes going up in and I think you talked about it at one point when we were first talking about the stock that it it ended up being too close to some grounding source oh the the big White Tower yeah yeah that was a March generator it was a bunch of capacitors I think that one had 90 or 100 stages in series and and the spark gaps were all lined up through the center if you get up in there look at it it looks really cool because there's just this vanishing point of spark gaps and they're all lined up in series because when the first one flashes they follow in a chain reaction the ultraviolet light from one of them lands on the electrodes of the other and actually helps break it down and you also mentioned about turning off lightning which I thought was interesting I was just out at the clock say where we're building the clock and we have a big huge crane tower at the top that's attached to all of us humans effectively because we're all on the crane platform and whenever there was lightning within five miles we had to stop working and and obviously lightning causes destruction around the world on some level and fires forest fires for better or worse depending on where you are what do you think that there's a plausible scenario for being able to control lightning on that level I think it's worth looking at because as I mentioned lightning uses this gain mechanism it doesn't have enough feel to generate lightning the start but this relativistic electron avalanche has a net gain and usually something like that that has gained it's pretty easy to wreck it and all you have to do is wreck it to reconcile that change to stop the chain reaction and not the Lightning is that theory the widely accepted theory at this point or is that it's not still a fairly it's one of them a terrific ins eivin's runaway breakdown is one of the main contenders however it doesn't explain a few things apparently it doesn't have quite enough gain to actually start a real lightning strike which is anywhere from thirty thousand to one hundred twenty thousand amps however Dwyer came up with a really novel mechanism where the gamma rays facing downwards can produce positron electron pairs just like in the NASA video but heading downwards and if you make a positron in that electric field it heads back upstream because it's positively charged and history is it can make it upstream far enough to where it eventually does hit something and annihilates it'll produce more relativistic electrons upstream again and it forms kind of this positronic feedback loop that could greatly increase the current in the Avalanche that was the point where I said no I I can't believe positrons can can you explain a little bit more about your design so you should the collapsed version of your coil but it inflate can you explain how it inflates and how that works and how you arrived that design what some of the advantages are how you're doing it yeah well essentially I needed a four-story structure that can hold a winding five feet in diameter all the way up there plus a big top electrode and the cheapest way to make a structure is to use all tension elements don't use any compression elements like in airplanes they try to make everything as tension as much as possible like a like a stretched skin wing so the main structure in the center is an in-flight double cylinder and everything's in tension except for the air which is in the middle that's under compression there's nothing else in there it's just all air and so you're using basically modern jumpy house technology that's right in fact the fabric the fabric is straight out of bounce houses we will learn how lightning works because about any bouncy house and we'll make up front what's even more remarkable is that entire 40-foot Tower I managed to get that through the sewing machine in my house to sew it all together so by some amazing feat of topology it all fit through there opening this big so after listening to this brilliant man talk about his life's work is there not someone in San Francisco in this room or listening online considering how interesting it is and how important it is isn't there someone who can fund this trivial amount of money that he's looking for I sure hope so people with real money have safeguards against too much fun Daniel so as long as we're talking about lighting suppression what about the Congress what about what about like energy harvesting from lightning and is there any serious thought there's just just overwhelmed anything at the light ministry lightning is really hard to get a handle on is that this really awkward impedance it's very high voltage and then also I occurred but really high voltage and you have maybe 350 million volts there that you can harvest so to get any appreciable amount of that you have to build a tower that can store 350 million volts it's pretty easy to make say a 10 million volt tower and so you can get 10 a 10 divided by 350 you can get that much of the lightning strike in your 10 million volt hour now you have this 10 million volts that you have to disassemble down to a little voltage that you can use and plug into the grid and so it's it's just a really awkward energy to get at almost like tidal energy is awkward in the other way it's it's all movement and no pressure and lightning is all pressure and little movement Gary so a minute ago you mentioned a feedback loop in the middle of your talk you said there was a factor of about 20 to 1 that doesn't isn't really explained by normal I guess so does that feedback loop answer the 20 to 1 yes Dwyer presented numbers for his positronic feedback loop easily reaches the 20 to 1 whereas the normal relativistic runaway breakdown Avalanche doesn't quite make it and we see positrons come out so maybe it matches the theory I think there's still a lot of unknowns there well I want to thank you for your presentation and I really encourage everyone to check out your three letter domain I think you probably auction that off for what you need for the rest to see you know the Lords of discipline the heavy metal band I'm sure looking for it but actually actually when I got this URL I wanted LOD calm but it has already taken so I looked up who LOD comm was and I ultimately figured out it was the Legion of Doom and so I sent them an email saying oh hi I'm your next-door neighbor at elllo.org so you delete you to doom huh and the guy was kind of like yeah that was us but we've all grown up now we have real jobs it's a UNIX consulting group of course it is so anyway thank you and I encourage everyone to check it out and and hopefully we are going to see this project both funded and then actually get to see it in real life and see if the obscure Russian paper is the truly the answer once again Craig's gonna be around here to answer some more questions and then hopefully run some of the tools in the back and Michael do you have a yeah and your I think Greg is you're getting demos going of your of the 40-foot one did you do you want to say something about about that as that's coming out yeah the plant is once I got the mobile lab set up where I can actually bring it somewhere and run it I would like to do some demos and I'd like to invite specifically the people here tonight to come see a demo right and here is a long no challenge going for all of our speakers thank you so much thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Long Now Foundation

Views: 16,924

Rating: 4.9029651 out of 5

Keywords: Energy, Science, Technology, Physics, Tesla, Electricity, Lightning, Thunderstorm, Discharge, Ionosphere, Volts, Watts, Gamma Ray, Anti-Matter, Survival Research Laboratories, SRL, Power, Grid, Infrastructure

Id: ntIBDVCfATA

Length: 54min 6sec (3246 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 21 2020