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I'm no scientist, and I don't have government funding to start the project, but someone needs to develop Photon Energy for widestream use. It would replace electricity which may soon no longer be a viable option for the World. There is a way to get pure energy from Photons and to use it all over the World to power things with. Like I said I wouldn't begin to understand how to do this but someone out there who has access to government funding or large scale private funding and who is educated in this area should be working on this every single day until they figure it out.

Photon energy being sunlight? There's a lot of that around.

Current energy consumption across the whole planet, both industrial and domestic, from all energy sources including fossil and nuclear and renewable, is 15 million Megawatts. The photon energy of the sunshine falling on the Earth's surface is half a million times bigger than that.

If you don't want to convert some of that to electricity and use the existing distribution networks (pylons and such), what had you in mind?

Or is this a different use of the words "photon energy"?

I pulled the numbers from World energy resources and consumption - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia if you want a quick look at what it says.

TruthBringer;1286244 wrote: I'm no scientist,



No you are not. I however am. Id liike to clear that little tid bit up right from the start.



and I don't have government funding to start the project, but someone needs to develop Photon Energy for widestream use.


I will develop Photon Energy for you.

Thank you.

Nomad (Mad Scientist)

Back in the 70's there was a lot of funding being put into solar research. Then Reagan got elected and killed it off. He even removed the solar panels that Carter installed on the white house. It's not good for business when you are in the pocket of big oil.

From a humanitarian point of view, solar power is great. Clean energy, that's virtually free. From a business standpoint, it's a horrible idea though, because you can't impose fees on it and make an obscene amount of money.

That is, until some corporation or military power asserts ownership of the sun

spot;1286263 wrote: Photon energy being sunlight?




You know what I think it could also have to do with the Sun, except I think it has to do with more photons themselves. Studying them and breaking them apart (not literally) but looking at them closely and figuring out how they work, and where they get their source of energy from, etc. What propels them throughout the Universe, and how we could use them to power other things.

The Sun might be one form of Photon Energy yes, but I think we can go deeper than that and get even better results by looking at them more closely.

As far as what the other person said about companies not being able to make money off it at the moment (even though the technology has not been fully developed yet), I don't think that's going to matter once electricity doesn't cut it anymore.

TruthBringer;1286776 wrote: The Sun might be one form of Photon Energy yes, but I think we can go deeper than that and get even better results by looking at them more closely.


I've often suggested that the trick to communicating is to use words to mean the same thing to both people. If you have a couple of people in a market and one's selling trousers, the other calls trousers rabbits, says "I'd like rabbits please" and the trouser merchant shrugs and points to the nearest pet shop, neither gets much out of the exchange.

I'll jot down a few words and then you can tell me which ones you're not happy with, how's that?

Voltage is a good starting point. A ton of metal can be loaded up with so much electricity that it's at five million volts compared to everything around it, but it can be perfectly insulated so that the electricity can't leak. It's like having a lake at the top of the Himalayas. It just sits there, no water goes in, no water comes out, it's perfectly safe to swim in. A man could be sat on the ton of metal and not get a shock even though it has so much electricity on it. If the lake were thrown off the Himalayas and hit a passing Sherpa ten thousand feet below then the Sherpa would get quite a shock. "Danger: High Voltage" means don't get in the way of the lake if it's hurtling through the air. Being at a high voltage is dangerous only because at some point you need to get off the mountain and it's tricky to come down on a path instead of fall off a precipice.

Bear with me, you said you're no scientist, my position is that the only thing missing is an agreed common vocabulary.

The reason electricity is used to do work a long way from the source of the energy is that it can be moved efficiently along power conductors without losing voltage, just like water can be piped long distances without losing pressure. If you turn on a hydrant in the street, the pressure spraying the water out is being made miles away in a header tank. Without the pipe the water wouldn't arrive. If the pipe leaked the water wouldn't arrive. It's the same with distributing electricity from power stations. You'd be furious if the powers that be decided to broadcast energy into everyone's homes as microwaves or laser light, you'd think the leakage would cause cancers or headaches or worse. Confining electricity in insulated conducting wires is what we've done for the last hundred years because it's efficient and comparatively safe. You could perfectly well store the energy released in the power station chemically as nitroglycerine and pump it through tubes into houses and explode it in your kettle to boil water but it's less safe. Electricity is safer.

The electricity isn't the power source, it's the medium used to transport the power. Just like the water in the Himalayan lake isn't the power source, it's full of power only because it got pushed to the top of the mountain first. The power in the lake is stored, it came originally from whatever carried the water that high to begin with. The electricity in the wires carries the product of the power station, which takes in coal or oil or uranium or sunlight and uses it to generate a voltage on the distribution network. Find something safer than electricity to carry the power and you've invented a new industry but you've not found a new power source. The electricity distribution system takes something very common, electrons, and pushes them under pressure, voltage, down confined channels, wires, from which they don't leak unless there's a wiring fault. Push protons down a proton tube, or water down a high pressure hose, and you've got an equivalent distribution system except it costs more to build.

The sun isn't a form of photon energy, it's a ball of gas bound together by gravity because it has a lot of mass. The gas is hot so the electrons can't cling to the nucleus of each atom. The naked nuclei bang together so hard that very occasionally they fuse into a heavier nucleus. The heavier nucleus is lighter in weight than the original two naked nuclei and the residual mass flies off as a photon which splits into lower energy photons as it collides with other bits of the sun. If a photon manages to get out into space and hits the Earth it's called sunlight. That's photon energy. There's an energy source, the fusion. There's an energy transport, the photon. There's work done on the Earth when the photon gets absorbed by whatever it hits. The reason it's a good source of power to replace fossil fuel or uranium is that there's such a huge amount of it by comparison and it's going to keep on arriving in the same quantity for billions more years. That quantity is a half million times greater than current world energy consumption, by all means harness it, it's already there and it's free for whoever catches it, it's not even taxed yet.

You noticed "the residual mass flies off as a photon", earlier? The properties of a photon consist of carrying a quantity of oriented energy from one place to another, nobody's ever found anything else there. It's oriented in the sense that, if you were to think of it as an arrow, it has a top side marked by a distinctive feather. People can catch a photon and know which direction is up. Other than that oddity it's just a small packet of energy. By all means break one apart, you end up with two less energetic photons going off in different directions, the total energy they carry is the same as the original one. Anyway, that's a few answers to your questions. Where do they get their source of energy? The loss of mass in nuclear fusion in the sun. What propels them through the universe? The laws of physics. As science gets different notions it describes those laws in different terms. We might change the description of what propels them through the universe, each description is more or less informative and predictive but the photons keep on moving regardless. Changing the science doesn't change the properties of the universe.

Excellent post, Spot. Thanks for the lesson.

spot;1286820 wrote: I've often suggested that the trick to communicating is to use words to mean the same thing to both people. If you have a couple of people in a market and one's selling trousers, the other calls trousers rabbits, says "I'd like rabbits please" and the trouser merchant shrugs and points to the nearest pet shop, neither gets much out of the exchange.

I'll jot down a few words and then you can tell me which ones you're not happy with, how's that?

Voltage is a good starting point. A ton of metal can be loaded up with so much electricity that it's at five million volts compared to everything around it, but it can be perfectly insulated so that the electricity can't leak. It's like having a lake at the top of the Himalayas. It just sits there, no water goes in, no water comes out, it's perfectly safe to swim in. A man could be sat on the ton of metal and not get a shock even though it has so much electricity on it. If the lake were thrown off the Himalayas and hit a passing Sherpa ten thousand feet below then the Sherpa would get quite a shock. "Danger: High Voltage" means don't get in the way of the lake if it's hurtling through the air. Being at a high voltage is dangerous only because at some point you need to get off the mountain and it's tricky to come down on a path instead of fall off a precipice.

Bear with me, you said you're no scientist, my position is that the only thing missing is an agreed common vocabulary.

The reason electricity is used to do work a long way from the source of the energy is that it can be moved efficiently along power conductors without losing voltage, just like water can be piped long distances without losing pressure. If you turn on a hydrant in the street, the pressure spraying the water out is being made miles away in a header tank. Without the pipe the water wouldn't arrive. If the pipe leaked the water wouldn't arrive. It's the same with distributing electricity from power stations. You'd be furious if the powers that be decided to broadcast energy into everyone's homes as microwaves or laser light, you'd think the leakage would cause cancers or headaches or worse. Confining electricity in insulated conducting wires is what we've done for the last hundred years because it's efficient and comparatively safe. You could perfectly well store the energy released in the power station chemically as nitroglycerine and pump it through tubes into houses and explode it in your kettle to boil water but it's less safe. Electricity is safer.

The electricity isn't the power source, it's the medium used to transport the power. Just like the water in the Himalayan lake isn't the power source, it's full of power only because it got pushed to the top of the mountain first. The power in the lake is stored, it came originally from whatever carried the water that high to begin with. The electricity in the wires carries the product of the power station, which takes in coal or oil or uranium or sunlight and uses it to generate a voltage on the distribution network. Find something safer than electricity to carry the power and you've invented a new industry but you've not found a new power source. The electricity distribution system takes something very common, electrons, and pushes them under pressure, voltage, down confined channels, wires, from which they don't leak unless there's a wiring fault. Push protons down a proton tube, or water down a high pressure hose, and you've got an equivalent distribution system except it costs more to build.

The sun isn't a form of photon energy, it's a ball of gas bound together by gravity because it has a lot of mass. The gas is hot so the electrons can't cling to the nucleus of each atom. The naked nuclei bang together so hard that very occasionally they fuse into a heavier nucleus. The heavier nucleus is lighter in weight than the original two naked nuclei and the residual mass flies off as a photon which splits into lower energy photons as it collides with other bits of the sun. If a photon manages to get out into space and hits the Earth it's called sunlight. That's photon energy. There's an energy source, the fusion. There's an energy transport, the photon. There's work done on the Earth when the photon gets absorbed by whatever it hits. The reason it's a good source of power to replace fossil fuel or uranium is that there's such a huge amount of it by comparison and it's going to keep on arriving in the same quantity for billions more years. That quantity is a half million times greater than current world energy consumption, by all means harness it, it's already there and it's free for whoever catches it, it's not even taxed yet.

You noticed "the residual mass flies off as a photon", earlier? The properties of a photon consist of carrying a quantity of oriented energy from one place to another, nobody's ever found anything else there. It's oriented in the sense that, if you were to think of it as an arrow, it has a top side marked by a distinctive feather. People can catch a photon and know which direction is up. Other than that oddity it's just a small packet of energy. By all means break one apart, you end up with two less energetic photons going off in different directions, the total energy they carry is the same as the original one. Anyway, that's a few answers to your questions. Where do they get their source of energy? The loss of mass in nuclear fusion in the sun. What propels them through the universe? The laws of physics. As science gets different notions it describes those laws in different terms. We might change the description of what propels them through the universe, each description is more or less informative and predictive but the photons keep on moving regardless. Changing the science doesn't change the properties of the universe.


I'd just like to thank you for your thorough post about that stuff. I am no good in that field.

I still can't get over the feeling that there is more to directly using Photons for energy than currently meets the eye. I agree with you that up until now no one has produced the technology able to harness the energy of Photons directly from the Photons themselves, and to turn that into raw pure energy such as electricity, but I still think it can be done. Somehow. Some way. And I'm not referring to the current use of Solar Panels, Although they are useful as well, though not as efficient in some areas of the World as in others. Whatever the new technology turns out to be that will end up replacing electricity in the future, which is bound to happen, because technology does evolve just as we do, I do believe that Photons are going to play a big role in it.