Nebulous Musings from Aunt Crabbie

New Source of Free Energy Fills Universe

By Robert Roy Britt

Senior Science Writerposted: 05:15 pm ET03 June 2002

ALBUQUERQUE N.M. - Nuclear power, move over. There's a new and far more dramatic source of energy out there, and wow is it attractive, at least theoretically.

Supermassive black holes act like massive electric motors, generating untold amount of energy that is converted into magnetic fields that radiate up to ten million light-years into space. This power is what its discoverers say is the most dominant source of free energy in the universe.

Though the mechanism for the dynamo behind the controversial phenomenon is not fully understood, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory think they have a bead on the process and are trying to duplicate it, on a small scale, in their lab.

The evidence for the energy is in the form of radio emissions, observed for 20 years, that come from an extended region of space and can't be described by any other source, the scientists said here today at the 200th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. While they admit their model is speculative, they say no one has yet come up with anything better.

Here's how they think it works: In the ancient universe, large young galaxies were dominated by highly energetic supermassive black holes at their centers. Each could contain the mass of 100 million stars. A flat disk of material, mostly gas, developed around the black hole, spiraling inward. Researchers believe these disks became magnetically charged.
Los Alamos scientist Stirling Colgate offered an analogy for how the magnetic energy is wrapped around the black hole, and how the more there is, the more potential it creates.

"It's just like when you wrap a rubber band around your thumb," Colgate said. "The first wrap doesn't stop the circulation and hurt your thumb," Colgate explained. "The tenth wrap ... you're in a bad state."


you mean, like . . . Tex Ass?



Now also imagine that your thumb is spinning, winding the system tighter and tighter. Meanwhile, billions of other stars orbit around the center of the galaxy, and those nearest the center, where it is most crowded, get accelerated to high velocities. Think of it as a swarm of bees, explained Colgate's colleague Philipp Kronberg. Frequently, they pierce and stretch the rubber bands.



Zzzzzzzzzzz...

Ben-O NRGeo!


"Along comes a star the size of the Sun and collides with the disk," Colgate continued, "and makes a massive collision." Some of the magnetic lines are pulled up out of the disk. "The magic is, it rotates them."

Having magnetic fields at 90 degrees to the main disk creates a dynamo, Colgate said. The twisted field continues to rotate with the primary accretion disk, but now it casts magnetic energy into space.

The idea has been simmering for years. However, now the researchers have the radio emissions that support the notion. Kronberg said there's no disputing the tremendous energy they've measured; and it had to come from a black hole's accretion disk, he said, for nothing else in that part of space is powerful enough to have created it.

Kronberg also said the implications of the work could change theories about how galaxies form, but more research is needed to figure out how.
"This is an emerging, controversial interpretation of our universe," Colgate said. "There is a slowly growing awareness of this dominant, new, implied free energy in the universe."

Don't assume it's true, he added. "It's just the best we can come up with."
In an interview, Colgate explained that free energy is energy that has been converted into a useable form, such as magnetism, that could, if harnessed, run a machine. Though the free energy from black holes is not likely to ever be tapped by humans, it does represent a significant and largely unexplored aspect to the universe.

Colgate said free energy is not something that would explain exotic dark matter or dark energy, two phenomena that other theorists have described but not yet detected.

The Los Alamos research team includes Hui Li, Quentin Dufton, Vladimir Pariev and John Finn. While the free energy of space would not likely be tappable for any commercial source, the researchers are building a laboratory model in order to better understand the process.





I was tuning in the shine on the light night dial
doing anything my radio advised
with every one of those late night stations
playing songs bringing tears to me eyes
I was seriously thinking about hiding the receiver
when the switch broke 'cause it's old
They're saying things that I can hardly believe.
They really think we're getting out of control.

Radio! is a sound salvation
Radio! is cleaning up the nation
They say you better listen to the voice of reason
But they don't give you any choice
'cause they think that it's treason.
So you had better do as you are told.
You better listen to the radio.

I wanna bite the hand that feeds me.
I wanna bite that hand so badly.
I want to make them wish they'd never seen me.
Some of my friends sit around every evening
and they worry about the times ahead
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference
and the promise of an early bed
You either shut up or get cut up;
they don't wanna hear about it.
It's only inches on the reel-to-reel.
And the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools
tryin' to anaesthetise the way that you feel

Wonderful radio!
Marvelous radio!
Wonderful radio!
Radio, radio...

(E. Costello)