There is nothing in the paper or the hype to confirm they were hoping no-one notices or that readers should be delusional. Nor is there a hint of a claim that there exists further orders of magnitude improvement in the near term or at all. The paper states 50mW/m2. It states it in the heading in big print right up front.
In the abstract, it states
We achieve 50 mW/m² nighttime power generation with a clear night sky, with an open-circuit voltage of 100 mV, which is orders of magnitude higher as compared with previous demonstrations.
The "which is orders of magnitude higher as compared with previous demonstrations" refers to the open-circuit voltage of exactly one previous demonstration,
B. Zhao, M. Hu, X. Ao, Q. Xuan, Z. Song, and G. Pei, Sol. Energy Mater. Sol. Cells 228, 111136 (2021), who only managed to obtain 9 mV open-circuit voltage, and didn't bother to compute the electric energy density. Furthermore, they later refer to
A. P. Raman, W. Li, and S. Fan, Joule 3, 2679–2686 (2019), a nighttime black emitter and a TEG, which demonstrated 25 mW/m² electric power density –– enough to power a LED, as they state in the abstract –– and
describe how to increase that to 0.5 W/m² = 500 mW/m².
I do not know if you just glanced over the paper to see if you see anything odd/infuriating/unmeritorious, wilfred, but I certainly read it with very hopeful interest. (Because regardless of my attitude towards this paper, I'm actually still hopeful and optimistic that real meritorious science is still being done, and whenever I start reading an interesting article, I am
always hopeful/interested/glad and looking forward to learning something new; I
never read articles to try and find something to put down.) Instead, what I read, was very cleverly worded –– I'm not at all surprised that casual readers do not notice the insiduousness of the wording, because it passed even the seasoned reviewers and editors at Applied Physics Journal; I'm in awe of the scientific writing advisors these authors had at Stanford University! –– with zero scientific merit.
In particular, they chose a single experiment to compare the open-circuit voltage to (Raman et al. in Joule 3, 2019), and based on that, claim "orders of magnitude higher". It is a SINGLE experiment they compare to, and a SINGLE order of magnitude (9 mV to 100 mV is a factor of 11). So that alone is two demonstrable errors/misleading statements in the abstract.
They reach 20% of the potential electric power density described possible in an earlier paper (by Raman et al., linked above, where they mention "Pathways to performance > 0.5 W/m² using existing commodity components exist"), reaching twice the experimentally demonstrated electric power density in that paper, and yet are perfectly happy to mislead readers by a tricky sentence in their abstract, so that careless readers – as shown in this thread before I pointed it out! – believe that the 50 mW/m² is somehow "orders of magnitude better than before". Hell, since they only used a 153 cm² = 0.0153 m² panel (with 0.765 mW = 765 µW output), the measurement error and accidental unaccounted for energy sources could easily explain all differences they had to the earlier 25 mW/m² paper. It is actually more likely that the Stanford authors just used a slightly better TEG, as commercially available TEG efficiencies range from basically zero to 8% (depending on the temperature difference, with higher temperature differences yielding better efficiencies); it is estimated (including in this paper) that the radiative cooling power is in excess of 50 W/m², which means that the efficiency reached in this paper is 0.1% (one thousandth), at about 3 degree Celsius or Kelvin difference.
Because the earlier 2019 paper
does mention that existing commodity components can reach 500 mW/m², the fact that "Nor is there a hint of a claim [in this paper] that there exists further orders of magnitude improvement in the near term or at all" is a deliberate, misleading
omission: there
is at least one order of magnitude improvement
in the electric power density to be gained
right now, using commodity components. The authors of this paper clearly read the earlier paper carefully, and just chose to ignore that, in the hopes of elevating their own results.
I reiterate: after carefully reading the paper and at least the abstracts of the key papers this links to, with initially a very open and hopeful mind, all I found in this paper was crafty psychological manipulation of the readers, with basically zero scientific merit, zero improvement from or additional information to a two years previous experiment they themselves link to. I believe the fact that this paper was selected as a featured article in Applied Physics Letters shows the decline of physical sciences.
wilfred, barycentric, bsfeechannel, and others: I respect you, I just believe you are horribly mislead in this particular case. There is limited funding available for scientific research, and what is available, is almost exclusively dependent on articles published on journals like this one was, Applied Physics Letters. My objection is that there is no scientific merit in this article; and because it was so well written that it became a
featured article, it is a perfect example of exactly why the entire field of physical sciences is in steep decline.
You disagree. Fine. Please, point out something in what I've written in this thread that you disagree with,
and explain why. Your
opinion is worth exactly as little as mine; basically nothing. Only the reasoning and logic actually matters, because those can be argued and their merits compared fairly and in a useful manner. We don't learn anything useful by comparing opinions, but we can learn a lot by comparing the reasoning and arguments our opinions are based on. That is also how science is supposed to work. Besides, even the best of us – like say Einstein with respect to the Cosmological Constant – change their opinions when presented with suitable counterarguments or experimental proof. (I hope to emulate them, not because I am deluded to think I'm at their level – heh, I know I'm not, and freely admit it! –, but because it
works.)
There is a reason for the old adage that for evil to prevail, good men only need do nothing. Similarly, for the scientific domain to become filled with garbage, we only need to ignore the garbage. We did that, still using it as the only reliable quantitative metric of scientific merit, and now we're knee deep in shit even in Physics. (I'm using "knee deep" quite carefully, since approximately 25% of peer reviewed articles in Physics are garbage, either incorrect or just bullshit based on unrepeatable and unprovable claims. In other fields, like in humanist sciences, they're drowning in shit, because there citations form disconnected clusters among groups of authors, and many already object to even trying to apply the scientific method in their own fields. Decolonisation of science and all that.)
That is why
I rail against this. Dave does it for completely other reasons. By claiming us "naysayers" and mischaracterising the reasons why I do this, you are only soothing your own personal feelings about this stuff. If you did not care, you'd just skip this thread. Because you
do care, at least enough to respond, I believe that you are aware of this at the subconscious level, but because your chosen conscious beliefs of what science is today and what gets published are in disagreement, you suffer from cognitive dissonance; and instead of working out why, you attack those who caused the dissonance.
If there was merit in your disagreement, you would have pointed out where the error in my own posts were. You pointed out none, though.
Because of that, I do ask you that you point out the specific parts in my posts you disagree with. You see, if you cannot or will not, the most likely reason for that is indeed the cognitive dissonance. I would also like to ask you too to read the abstracts (behind the links above), compare the linked articles to this article, and review the reasons behind your own opinions (as to why this article should indeed merit being featured in Applied Physics Letters). To repeat, being published (or even featured) in a respected journal is not irrelevant; it is important, because it really is the only quantitative measure of scientific merit today that those who grant funds for furher research use. (Although citations and per-author retractions and corrections give a much better overall picture, they do not yield a simple quantitative measure.)
If something I've written here offends you, I hope you take the time to actually pinpoint what I wrote that offended you, and let me know. It wasn't intentional, I assure you: I am against your opinion because I believe they are based on faulty logic or assumptions and lead to less than desirable consequences in the field of science. I am NOT against you personally. If I didn't care about what you write here, I'd simply ignore you.
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