A magician is not supposed to reveal his tricks, but it explains something that relates to an experiment.
One of the common things that help me to solve problems is to step out of the comfort area of sensible solutions. Some might think that I dismiss good science for the sake of it, but it is a jumping off point for me and not a way of life. An example of what I mean can serve better than any long explanation.
One day a fellow with great talent and education asked me to help him solve a problem that had eluded him for a week. From my perspective , I could assume that all "rational" explanations were covered and the only place to look was in the NULL space of common reasoning. It is my respect for their ability that allowed me to exclude any common design rule that I would have considered. The end result was that a ground pin was not soldered and the device performed normally as a low power device until the ground plane rose to meet input, like a tide covering a sand castle.
I assume all the cookies in the easy places are gone and if I really want to find something, I must wander into the mist.
There are things in science that constantly irritate me and don't seem to bother other people. An example is that force is one over radius squared and so the force is infinite as it approaches zero and is thus discontinuous as a function. In some cases energy is not actually real like when velocity alone is considered energy and the energy only exists by the difference between the observer and the object.
Recently I was doing the same experiments that revealed the nature of the thermal electric effect ( which they thought of as the "thermo magnetic effect" ). In my own style it seemed reasonable to step outside the box as Hofstadter was fond of saying. While testing some odd combinations there was a combination that produced something on the order of 9 milli-volts per degree change centigrade. I had been studying thermocouples and this was 1000 times what I had measured for various other metals. It has some interesting consequences. To be certain this is odd and I will have to do the experiments again, but however this happened it was not a measuring error. When I have time I will look into it further.
While studying Maxwell's equations it always reminds me of Maxwell's demon and there is a strange effect on the macro scale that makes me wonder. Obviously I can't sort fast and cold molecules and thus have an unlimited energy source, but there are weather satellites that monitor temperature about the world and I can say that some point A and some point B have a relative energy and isolate them. This is a thought experiment and I am not suggesting some alternative energy device, but in some ways it acts like his demon. Since there are thermal detectors in orbit and I can measure the temperature everywhere, it is theoretically possible to bottle A and combine it with B on some scale. Just an odd thought and I don't know what it means or even how to apply it.
I have also been considering what it means to be able to produce my own electronics with a 3D printer exponentially and in general the global profit from electronics is about a trillion dollars per year. Many things are made from glass. Silicon is a very common material in the universe and it stands to reason that it would be the material that gives the greatest advantage in terms of tools. It would seem to me that there are many beneficial things yet to discover in the universe and it is a lack of imagination that keeps them hidden.
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