Every day, I work on machines that do not exist yet.
NoSuchDevice is an independent pop science archive of devices that physics already allows but nobody has built. Non-standard thinking is the one thing I am genuinely good at, and I aim all of it at these machines. If that hands a future builder a working idea, or warns them off a dead end, even better. And I would quietly love to see even one of them become real one day. I make all of this alone, and this page is where you can help me keep making it.
Most people have had an idea for something that does not exist yet. A better version of a thing they use every day. A fix for a problem nobody else seems to be working on. Then the day takes over, the bills come due, and the idea quietly goes back to sleep.
Mine never did.
I was the kid who took things apart to see what was inside, who read about machines when he was supposed to be asleep. That never wore off. I grew into an ordinary man with an ordinary job and a head that keeps filling up with devices I will probably never get to build, because building them takes a lab and a life I do not have. So I do the next best thing. I take them seriously on paper.
Show me a problem and my mind goes looking for the strange way around it, sometimes for no reason other than to keep that part of me awake. I do it because the world is genuinely interesting once you have the eyes for it, and, I will admit, because it feeds something in me I have stopped apologizing for.
I am not a physicist or a mathematician. I love them the way some people love music they cannot play. Physics is how I try to make sense of the world, and the math is the language it seems to be written in. The further I read, the harder it gets to ignore one thing: most of the machines worth wanting are not waiting on magic. They are waiting on engineering that has not caught up yet.
I built this for three reasons.
The first is selfish. When I am deep in something I am tinkering with, I want a place that already took the idea seriously and showed me where the physics holds and where it gives way. Nothing like it existed, so I am making it, and what helps me will help the next person working in the dark.
The second is the one I care about most. I want this to be clear and useful for students too, not only for people who already know the field. The good information about how the world actually works is buried in lab reports and university PDFs that almost nobody enjoys reading. Complex things cannot be put into simple words, and I will not pretend they can. But the people coming up behind us, the ones who actually want to try, are owed a way in. I would like this to be one more honest place for them to start. If one kid reads about a device here and goes off to build the real version in twenty years, the whole thing was already worth it.
The third I will say plainly, without dressing it up. A person should leave something behind. The world only moves forward because a small number of people decide to push it, on purpose, and not only for the money. I want to be one of the people who pushed.
NoSuchDevice is my way.
If you landed here first, the short version is this. NoSuchDevice takes a device that does not exist yet and pulls it apart the way you would pull apart a real machine. How it would work. Where the energy comes from. What gives out first. The science stays real, the writing stays honest, and nothing gets oversold. The articles are the best argument I can make, so read a few before you decide.
Now the part that is harder to say. This work takes me more than twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Reading the physics, checking the numbers, writing each article so it earns your time, making the images. All of it lands on one person.
For now I can afford to do this. That will not hold forever. The reason this page exists is simple: the hours I pour into NoSuchDevice are hours I am not spending earning a living somewhere else. Donations are what let me keep choosing the archive over a second job. Every bit of support buys me more time on the work.
Nobody owns this but me. No investor steers it and no ad network decides what gets written, which is the entire point. Support from readers is what keeps it that way.
Where this is going
Energy Tech and Eco Tech are already underway. More categories follow, each one tied back to the science that makes its devices plausible.
Some of these devices will sound like science fiction. Two hundred years ago, a phone in your pocket sounded exactly the same.
Fiction today, maybe not tomorrow.
That gap is the whole reason the archive is worth building.
If you think work like this should exist, you can help keep it alive.
Ko-fi
One time or monthly, low fees, no account needed to give. The quickest way to help.
Support on Ko-fiPatreon
Monthly support. This is what lets me plan past next month and keeps the archive independent.
Become a patronOr send crypto directly
Scan the code or copy the address. Please send each coin only on the network shown.
bc1q9qllu69r87z2gtnmkjrzhd6vv8y6zryjqwrtv5
0x411D264f567cbBFA3F13BE8cE7b7d38eD1610258
0x411D264f567cbBFA3F13BE8cE7b7d38eD1610258
One thing I want to be clear about. You are not buying anything here. Nothing on the site is locked behind a payment, there is no members only section, and there never will be. Everything on NoSuchDevice is free, and it stays free, for the kid with a library card and the engineer with a budget alike.
A donation does not buy you more access. It pays for the time the work takes to make. You are paying for the thing to exist. The door was always open.
If that sounds like a poor deal, fair enough. And if it sounds like exactly the kind of thing worth paying for, then you already understand what this site is.
NoSuchDevice exists because I could not let the ideas stay ideas. It keeps existing whenever the people who read it decide it should.
If you are one of them, thank you. It means more than I can fit on a button.