Future Energy eNews

March 2021 Vol.22

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Hello Tom,

 As our readers will remember, I was once again a guest on the History Channel’s “Ancient Aliens” show S15 E8 just last year in 2020. This time it was for a favorite subject of mine, George Van Tassel and his Integratron. As the website states, “In the Mojave Desert, there is a structure built to bestow everlasting life--and according to the architect, the blueprint was provided by an extraterrestrial visitor. Known as the Integratron, it has been called a work of genius, but could it actually provide the key to immortality?” The producers hired me to build a model of a completed Integratron with a high voltage Tesla coil in the middle of it and tell some fascinating stories about Van Tassel too. Now fortunately, the show is FREE to watch online (with commercials of course) if you would like to see the entire story and my take on the fascinating Integratron. 

Story #1 reminds us of the last great editing project that I undertook for the Faster Than Light book, which has two specific means for achieving FTL flight. However, there is also the usual Alcubierre warp drive theory and negative energy conversion  that we see on all of the Science Channel shows. Now, physicist Erik Lentz from Göttingen University in Germany offer a new theory “without requiring any kinds of exotic physics that physicists have never seen.” It uses a new class of hyper-fast solitons that maintain their shape and energy as they travel faster than light, while still satisfying Einstein’s general relativity. Published in Classical and Quantum Gravity , the amount of energy required still is a challenge to be solved.

Story #2 is a recent revival of a demonstration done a while back at Ithaca College in the video, which is like an introduction to the next story. The Lewin Day article explains how a superconductor can keep going on a magnetic track, at a fixed distance, and hints at the day when room-temperature superconductors will do the same on vehicle-sized tracks. Note the small push that the cold superconductor is given to get started and, without friction of any kind, it keeps going and going.

Story #3 offers a more up-to-date physics breakthrough from Princeton for superconductivity. Funded by the US Army Research Office, National Science Foundation, and the US Department of Energy, the researchers were able to see the beginnings of superconducting Cooper pairs forming at the edge of a molybdenum ditelluride sample, without “injecting” superconductivity into the sample. A referenced article from Science 2020 is also cited  . If they see more edge versus bulk superconductivity like this, there may be advances in supercurrents that could have practical applications.

Story #4 is more readily practical with hydrogen production being the focus of forward osmosis with salty seawater. A completely passive process for water splitting, this Harvard University project uses platinum catalyst electrodes and a semi-permeable cellulose acetate membrane to achieve the hydrogen production. University of Glasgow, Mark Symes says, “How come no one thought of that before?” That means it is important! The article is from the Proc. Of the Nat. Acad. Sci. 

Story #5 will stretch your mind as it challenges the models that try to account for the expanding universe. Tackling the cosmological constant that Einstein added to his relativity equation with a capital lambda Λ, the University of Geneva says it is 70% of the universe’s budget, which makes it equivalent to the famed “dark energy”. In fact, the article states, “in modern cosmology Λ represents vacuum energy” but only for the early universe, so the theory is called an “early dark energy” model and potential solution to the cosmological problem, published in New Astronomy, April, 2021.

Onward and Upward!

Tom Valone, PhD

Editor