Reply To: Mind, Spirit, Science connection?

[Henning]

redsnapper wrote: BTW – we have trouble building conventional photovoltaic devices with efficiencies higher than 25% – and we’ve been working at this, perhaps only semi-seriously, for the last 40 years. It does seem to me we might be ridiculously optmistic to think we can convert 80% of Xrays into electricity as early as three years from now. Is the argument that the entropy of Xrays is so much lower than that of visible light, that there’s reason for optimism

The problem with visible light is, it comes with low energy that needs to push up the electron one valence layer. See band gap for more details.

The x-ray photovoltaic works differently: it uses a potential gap (if I understood it correctly) of the several layers of the onion.

Might not explain it completely. Maybe someone else has better words for that…