Broken Planck

[Henry Musikar]

Century-Old Physics Law Violated (Seriously)

A study in the journal Nano Letters shows that the well-known rules of heat
transfer from a nonflective object, called Planck's blackbody radiation law,
break down if the object can be brought close enough to another object while
still not touching it. 
Steve Mirsky reports. 
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=century-old-physics
-law-violated-09-08-05 

In 1900, legendary physicist Max Planck described the way energy gets
dissipated from any nonflective object, called a blackbody. But even Max
said if something else is really, really close to the object, his law might
not hold. 

Now physicists from MIT have finally shown that if you can get another
object near enough to the blackbody, but still not touching it, Planck's
blackbody radiation law really does break down. Which is good news for you. 

The researchers had been able to put flat plates a millionth of a meter
apart. Which was still too far away to see any effect. But with glass beads,
they achieved separations of only 10 billionths of a meter. And the
radiation flow was up to a thousand times greater than Planck's law
predicts. The study appears in the August issue of the journal Nano Letters.


It's good news because of potential applications. For example, computer data
storage and solar energy devices are all less efficient because of heat
buildup. If tinier distances can be achieved in these real-world devices,
such waste could be made to walk the plank.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb2kBFqrZx8 

Henry Mu
Sr. IT Consultant
http://astore.amazon.com/tdcoccamsaxe-20/