Morgan Morrigan wrote:Just came across this myself, but all the old repair guys always found that the old caps in the back of the parts bin almost always had a small but measurable charge.
would be easy enough to test for. He says negative ions help "settle" the passives. would flow an ion generator over em a couple days, and then try one in a faraday cage, and one in a regular box, and see if you get any difference. he says you cant move em at all, and was using a via, with fishing line tied thru, to make a pull contact switch.
I think they are just trapping some of the "field effect" charge from the suns mag field, but since no one actually tests for whatever that brand of static is, guess we wont ever know.
there is lots of interesting stuff coming out of the nano antenna folks the last couple years, from wifi trapping, to un-explained stuff.
As for capacitors, this is a verifiable effect of electrolytic capacitors. In fact I just pulled out MY random capacitor parts bin and measured 10-15 of them, and almost all had 40mv to as much as 2v. There is nothing magical about this though as this can be caused by dielectric memory / dielectric absorption or simply the fact that they contain electrolytes which will create a battery like effect.
Obviously our surroundings are full of electrical / magnetic energy, crystal radios work with only the power of the waves they pull out of the air. Connect any random piece of metal to a diode and you will measure something coming out of that diode in reference to ground.
This is the basic effect that allows all radio communications to work, but can it be used to generate enough power to do anything else?
I don't know, I would love to see some verifiable, repeatable proof though.