Davey Andrews is a man of the 21st century.  Isaac Newton was a man of the 17th century.

Davey Andrews is a good Christian, whose faith in God is strong.  Isaac Newton was a good Christian, whose faith in God was also strong. 

Davey Andrews is a mechanical engineer, but not a very good one.  Isaac Newton virtually invented mechanics and engineering, and was very, very good at it.

Davey Andrews has blind faith in the Bible, but when it comes to science books, Davey doesn’t understand or trust the equations, and has to see things work with his own eyes.  Isaac Newton also had blind faith in the Bible, but when it came to science books, Isaac virtually wrote the book, and used his own equations to accurately calculate the workings of the solar system.

Davey Andrews was educated at a modern university in California, with hundreds of knowledgeable professors available, and had free electronic access to the entire world’s information.  Isaac Newton attended Cambridge, and had access to library books, but his greatest works were produced in isolation, mostly by candlelight in his bedroom at Woolsthorpe.

This is the story of how Davey met Isaac.

The device shown in the above photo would never have been found in Isaac Newton’s laboratory, because he would have used simple mathematics to calculate that it wouldn’t work.  Davey Andrews designed and built the device shown above, wasting other peoples investment dollars, in full cognizance of Isaac’s simple equation.

The simple equation is Q = kA(dT/dx).  Q represents heat moving through a solid object.  k represents how well the material the object is composed of conducts heat.  Metals like copper have a high k, and insulators like plastic have a low k.  A is the cross-sectional area through which the heat is constrained to move, just like water is constrained to move through the cross-sectional area of a pipe.  dT/dx is called the temperature gradient, which can be thought of as the pressure difference between the inlet of a pipe, and the outlet.  The smaller the cross-sectional area A, the greater dT/dx must be to move the same amount of heat Q.

To get a feel for this equation, imagine holding a one-inch diameter copper rod at one end with your hand, and sticking the other end into boiling water.  You will soon feel the end you are holding get very hot, and you will quickly be forced to drop it.  Now imagine the rod you are holding is replaced by a thin copper wire of the same length.  The only parameter that has changed is A, the cross-sectional area, which is much smaller for the small diameter wire.  Clearly, you will be able to hold onto the wire for a much longer time than the larger rod.  This is because as A gets smaller in our equation, Q decreases proportionately.  The thin copper wire simply cannot transfer heat as well as the rod.

Presented below are the results of thermal calculations which were available to Davey Andrews, who nevertheless chose to ignore them and proceeded to build the device depicted earlier. 

The upper chart is a thermal model which illustrates the large gradient dT/dx that occurs naturally in the laser sensor, while the lower graph demonstrates that the sensor will get glowing hot within 10 seconds, while the heatsink will only heat up 5 degrees in the same time period.

Now let’s discuss the device itself.

The postage-stamp-sized grayish square between the four small white ceramic posts, suspended in mid-air via tiny gold-plated tungsten wires, is a laser power sensor made from a very thin tile of aluminum nitride.  When a laser beam is focused on the tile, it heats up very quickly and changes its electrical resistance.  This change in resistance can be measured easily, and used to infer the input power of the laser beam.

The company where Davey Andrews works is attempting to market products from this technology.  One of the hurdles they face, is that the small, thin tile isn’t very useful for experiments involving high power lasers, because it gets too hot, too quickly.  Davey’s boss Parker Jimson, who despite being a PhD physicist also chose to ignore Isaac Newton’s equation, instructed Davey to build a conductive heatsink to cool the laser sensor, so that it could operate for longer experiments.

Isaac Newton would have laughed at this thick-headed suggestion, because merely attaching a heatsink does not alter the tiny cross-sectional area A of the aluminum nitride tile, or the size of the thin wires, and therefore could not possibly remedy the thermal “bottleneck” that causes the tile to get excessively hot.  Imagine driving home from work, and you’ve just entered a 10 mile stretch of one-lane highway, filled with bumper-to-bumper 5 PM traffic.  Now imagine trying to relieve this congestion by adding an eight lane freeway at the far end, 10 miles away.  Clearly, you would not experience any improvement in the flow of traffic, until you were within a short distance of the freeway.

Newton’s mirth would be replaced by open-mouthed astonishment if he then saw what Davey built to compliment his ill-advised and impotent heatsink.  Surrounding the heatsink, as one can easily see from the photo, is a sheet metal cowling, intended to allow a fan to blow and circulate room-temperature air around the heatsink.  This would be a wise addition, if the heatsink itself had any chance of getting hot.  But Newton’s equation proves that it won’t get hot, because very little heat is flowing into it.  Blowing room temperature air on an object that is essentially at room temperature itself, transfers zero heat to the environment.  Returning to our traffic analogy, adding the cowling would be like building the eight lane freeway downhill on a steep grade, so that the few cars entering it from the congested one-lane highway could accelerate dramatically.  Back at the opposite end of the packed highway, however, you are still moving at a snail’s pace.

As expected, subsequent testing of Davey's contraption proved the concept to be fatally flawed.  For Davey Andrew’s case at least, “Christian scientist” is an oxymoron, and he is living proof that religion is incompatible with science.

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