Putting free energy to good use

It is almost universally believed that one cannot have energy out of nothing. This is the first law of Thermodynamics—one cannot create or destroy energy. One can only change the energy from one form to another. So electric cars for example would need to be powered by batteries.

However, in microscopic physics, surprisingly this need not hold. For instance in the paper "Noncommutative Radiation", for example B.G. Sidharth of the B.M. Birla Science Centre had pointed out that by virtue of a different spacetime geometry we could tap into some feeble radiations—the important point is that there are no inputs in the form of energy. This has also been elaborated in some of his other papers.

It may be recalled that in 1997 when the then standard big bang model was unanimously accepted Sidharth had come forward with his dark energy driven accelerating universe. This was corroborated the very next year by observations of Reiss, Perlmutter and Schmidt. In this context Nobel Laureate Professor Tony Leggett had said that this work clearly showed that Sidharth had anticipated the dark energy.

In fact, the Einstein equation leaves a tiny gap as demonstrated by researchers. This could be partly or fully covered up by the so- called Snyder-Sidharth dispersion relation where the usual Einstein relation gets an extra term, which would be very minute. All this work has appeared in standard European and American research journals. The technological challenge would be to tap this minute free radiation or energy and convert it to our usable level.

- From research newsletter of G P Birla Observatory and Astronomical Research Centre