New Energy News (April 2001)
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | New Energy News (April 2001) |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Patrick G Bailey |
| Keywords | New Energy, Zero Point Energy, Casimir Effect, vacuum energy, over-unity, energy policy |
| Published | 2001 |
| Journal | New Energy News |
| Volume | 8 |
| Number | 4 |
| No. of pages | 20 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
Overview
This is Volume 8, Number 4 (April 2001) of New Energy News, the monthly newsletter of the Institute for New Energy, edited by Patrick G Bailey and distributed from Salt Lake City. It is not a research paper but a compiled issue — abstracts, a book review, reprinted news articles, an obituary, a long open letter, and a meetings calendar — and it is of interest chiefly as a snapshot of what the new-energy community was reading and arguing about at the turn of the century. The masthead of this issue announces a format change: from this point NEN would be circulated by email in both plain ASCII and PDF, with an Adobe Acrobat CD-ROM offered by post to subscribers who had no reader.
The issue's unifying theme is the vacuum. Its lead abstract is a mainstream Physical Review B paper on extracting work from the Casimir Effect; its centrepiece is Tom Bearden's open letter to the National Science Foundation arguing that every existing power system is already drawing its energy from the vacuum without knowing it. Between these sit a Reuters report on the first negative-index metamaterial, a polemical book review, and a warning about global electromagnetic pollution. The editorial stance throughout is that a workable Free Energy technology exists or is close, and that its absence from the grid is a matter of institutional inertia and active suppression rather than physics.
Contents
Abstracts: an engine cycle from the Casimir force
The single abstract reproduced is Fabrizio Pinto's "Engine cycle of an optically controlled vacuum energy transducer" (Physical Review B 60, no. 21, 1 December 1999), submitted by Bailey with a reference to Thomas Valone of the Integrity Research Institute. Pinto, then at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, considers an idealised system of two parallel semiconducting boundaries separated by an empty gap of variable width, and argues by gedanken experiment that the total work done by the Casimir force around a suitably chosen closed path need not vanish. In the limit of a cycle bringing the boundaries close together, he suggests "positive net exchange of energy associated with the Cas[i]mir force field could quite possibly be achieved". The abstract proposes doped and undoped crystalline-silicon boundaries as a practical implementation and calls for measurements with both macroscopic and microelectromechanical devices, closing with the much-quoted line that "in the event of no other alternative explanations, one should conclude that major technological advances in the area of endless, by-product free-energy production could be achieved." The optical control is the key: illumination changes the carrier density and hence the reflectivity of the semiconductor plates, so the Casimir force between them can be modulated externally.
Book review: The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight
Remy Chevalier reviews Thom Hartmann's 1999 book, whose title is "an aphorism for fossil fuels stored on earth over millennia". Chevalier is sympathetic to Hartmann's argument for community, doing more with less, and reconnection with the sacred, but attacks him on two specific points. The first is Hartmann's claim that "if cold fusion or hydrogen cells became immediately and widely available, their rapid proliferation may actually accelerate the destruction of the planet"; Chevalier thinks the gamble is worth taking. The second is a factual correction: against Hartmann's "we can't use today's solar cells to make more solar cells", Chevalier quotes the photovoltaics analyst Paul Maycock giving energy-payback times of three to five years for sliced single- and poly-silicon unframed, five to seven framed, and under two years for amorphous silicon films in glass-on-glass packaging — so that panels return roughly four to five times their embodied energy over a 35-year life. The review closes with the observation that the historic movement of populations away from the equator was enabled by cheap fuel, and asks why solar plants are not being built along the equatorial belt.
A death notice
Eiichi Yamamoto reports the death on 17 April of Dr Shuji Inomata, president of the Japan Psychotronics Institute, of liver cancer — "an important figure in the field of new science (to cover new energy and consciousness)".
Articles
Three reprints follow. The first, from MSNBC via Reuters (5 April 2001), reports the composite of copper-ring-and-wire-coated fiberglass sheets built by Sheldon Schultz, David Smith and Richard Shelby at UC San Diego, which bent microwaves the "wrong" way and so became the first material with a negative index of refraction; John Pendry's prediction that such a material would permit focusing beyond conventional limits is noted. The second, William Tucker in the New York Post, argues that New York can avoid California's rolling blackouts only by letting rate rises do their work — California's shortage is traced to twenty years of not building generating capacity while ranking last among the states in per-capita consumption and getting 12 per cent of its energy from renewables. The third, from rense.com, relays an anonymous NOAA-linked claim that dense artificial electromagnetic fields, and HAARP in particular, are damaging the ionosphere, the geomagnetic field and the "bio-electromagnetic fields" of living organisms.
Letters: Bearden to the National Science Foundation
The longest item is Tom Bearden's open letter to the NSF, forwarded from his cheniere.org site. Its argument runs as follows. The shaft power fed into a generator does not, Bearden claims, put a single watt onto the transmission line; it goes entirely into building the magnetic field, which in turn does nothing but separate charge to form a "source dipole". The dipole, being a broken symmetry in its exchange with the active vacuum, then converts absorbed virtual-photon energy into real observable electromagnetic energy — and that is what pours from the terminals. He then invokes the historical split between Poynting and Oliver Heaviside: Poynting accounted only for the small flow component diverted into the conductors, while Heaviside recognised a far larger non-diverged component that misses the circuit entirely, which Bearden's own "back of the envelope calculation" puts at some ten trillion times the intercepted part. Hendrik Lorentz, unable to explain such a flow, integrated the energy-flow vector over a closed surface and thereby discarded it as having "no physical significance" — a step Bearden calls arbitrary and blames for the whole subsequent shape of electrical engineering. The closed current loop compounds the error: half the intercepted energy is spent ramming spent electrons back through the dipole, destroying the very structure that draws energy from the vacuum, which is why every system has COP < 1. He cites John Bedini's dephased lead-acid battery process and his own motionless electromagnetic generator as demonstrations to the contrary, points to the O(3) electrodynamics papers of M. W. Evans and the AIAS group, and proposes that the energy crisis could be "totally solved... in two years for about $40 million".
Meetings
The issue closes with a calendar: the ninth IEEE International Symposium on Electronics and the Environment (Denver, 7–9 May 2001), the VIIIth International Seminar on the Technology of Inherently Conductive Polymers (Niagara-on-the-Lake, 18–20 June), and the 11th Canadian Hydrogen Conference (Victoria, BC, 17–20 June), the last contributed by Toby Grotz.
Assessment
As a document, the issue does the job a newsletter should: it puts a genuinely peer-reviewed Physical Review B abstract, a Science-reported experimental result, a mainstream energy-policy op-ed and a heterodox theoretical letter side by side and lets the reader judge. Pinto's paper is real and was published; the UCSD negative-index composite is real and became the foundation of the metamaterials field. Chevalier's review is unusually good practice for the genre — he does not merely praise the book, he goes and gets a number from a named photovoltaics analyst and corrects the author with it. The editorial willingness to publish the price-signal argument for electricity markets alongside the vacuum-energy material shows a magazine that was not simply an echo chamber.
The difficulties lie almost entirely in the Bearden letter, which is asserted at every load-bearing step. That the shaft input "does not furnish one single watt" is stated, never derived; on the ordinary account the shaft torque works against the back-EMF produced by the load current, and the numbers balance. The claim that the Heaviside non-diverged component represents ten trillion times the useful power is offered explicitly as a back-of-the-envelope figure with no calculation shown, and the letter's own repeated challenge — "send me a calculation of that TOTAL energy output flow" — concedes as much. The deeper problem is that the non-diverged part of the Poynting flow is not unaccounted energy waiting to be harvested: in the standard treatment it is a divergence-free circulation that transports no net energy out of the system, which is exactly why Lorentz's surface integral discards it without loss. Calling that step "arbitrary" does not show it to be wrong. The letter also treats broken symmetry in the sense of T. D. Lee's Nobel work as licensing net energy extraction from the vacuum, which is a different claim from the one that work established, and it leans on the Aharonov–Bohm effect and O(3) electrodynamics without deriving anything from either. No measurement is reported anywhere in the letter — the Bedini and MEG devices are cited as existing rather than characterised. Set against Pinto's carefully hedged "idealised system" and "gedanken experiment", the contrast in epistemic caution within a single issue is instructive. The HAARP item, finally, rests entirely on an unnamed source describing an unpublished report and should be read as such.