I trust Newton's Law of Cooling far more than arguments from authority.
Nothing in this paper violates that law. It's not argument from authority. It's published experimental data. It is science!
The need to assist in "visualizing" condensation is a blatant falsehood. The evidence of condensation is liquid water, which is visible to the naked eye. Liquid water would have been equally visible on the surface of their magical heat sink which dissipates power without raising its temperature.
Keeping the condenser temp above the dew point is a red herring. Had they used a heat sink only, that criterion would have easily been met as the temperature of the heat sink would have rapidly approached equilibrium with the vapor temperature. Oh, but then a lot less water would condense, wouldn't it? I'm sure you must understand the importance of that.
Once again, I believe you are failing to understand the difference between basic science and engineering.
Visualizing and documenting droplet formation and growth as a function of MOF temperature was part of validating their theory. You can't adequately visualize this - even with the naked eye - if the glass is obscured by condensation and you certainly can't document it for publication without clear photographs. If they said "droplet formation and growth occurred in xx manner with increasing temperature over xx time period - we observed this through glass partially obscured by condensation and were unable to provide any clear photographic documentation of this" their paper would rightly be rejected by the reviewers!
If they were trying to deceive someone, why disclose the active controlling of the condenser temperature? They were trying to fully characterize the adsorption-desorption properties of MOF-801, nothing more. They were not attempting to build a working prototype.
Science is very different than engineering in this regard. You can't just build a "black box" and measure data in and out then derive a transfer function and be done. The point of science is trying to understand the underlying process. Sometimes that involves direct visualization. It often involves controlling variables artificially in order to gather data.
A
very obvious next step for this would be to build a prototype device with no TE cooled condenser and only passive cooling with adequate heatsinking and measure, refine, measure, etc to try and optimize water production.
Maybe it would work, maybe not. The theory and experimental data presented in this paper suggests that it should and it is worth building. That in a nutshell is what the authors are saying.
If a working prototype was built, THAT would be an engineering paper. As such it would not likely be published in
Science.
I think the authors of this study made a big mistake by using the term "Proof of concept device" when really it is just an experimental apparatus. In this case proof of concept != prototype.
Unfortunately - even though it was a small part of their paper - use of that term seems to have triggered engineers and others so inclined to focus on this part of the paper and to think it is an engineering study, therefore looking at it from that perspective (understandable since that is what engineers are familiar with). But even worse, it led to erroneous reporting by the media.