'Energy-sucking' Radio Antennas,

N. Tesla's Power Receiver

Here's something that has always bugged me: light waves are about 5000 Angstroms in wavelength, while atoms are more like 1 Angstrom across. How can such tiny "antennas" absorb and emit such long waves? Usually it takes a half-wave antenna to do this. I never encountered a good explanation for this during my physics education. It turns out that the explanation is both little-known and fascinating.

Classical EM theory implies that atoms cannot emit or absorb much light. They are thousands of times smaller than light waves, yet atoms obviously interact very strongly with light. How can they do this? Perhaps they imploy Quantum Mechanics in order to get around this problem? There must be some explanation. After all, when a metal dipole antenna is only one foot across, it certainly cannot absorb much 5000ft-wave radiation. Do atoms employ "photon-impact" rather than the EM wave mechanics of dipole antennas? The answer turns out to be NO. The truth is quite strange.

MORE: Jump down to full article
MORE: Clearer diagrams & description
MORE: Further thoughts on this...
MORE: some email discussions

PERPETUAL MOTION?!! Strangely, several people have made the mistaken assumption that this article is about a perpetual motion machine. Why? Who knows! Perhaps I need to point out that in Fig. 2 and Fig. 3, the "10 megavolt supply" is a distant radio transmitter (an EM energy source, powered by the utility grid.)

This article is about the ability of an LC resonator to "funnel" incoming electromagnetic waves towards tiny antennas. These antennas behave as if they were much larger than their physical diameter, as if there was an "invisible lens" focusing more of the incoming EM energy upon the antenna. In conventional terms, it's about enhancing the EA (effective aperture) of small antennas.

HOW DO ATOMS DO IT?

I stumbled across the answer to my questions in a paper about VLF/ELF loop antennas. Apparently Quantum Mechanics does not supply the answer. Instead the question of small antenna behavior is resolved by a little-known section of classical electromagnetism. It involves resonance, but more importantly, it involves the magnetic and electric fields which surround any antenna.

An "electrically small" antenna is one where the physical antenna size is far smaller than the EM wavelength being received. At first glance, electrically small antennas aren't all that strange. If we use them them for radio transmissions, they can work just fine. To force a tiny antenna to emit significant energy, we can simply give it a huge driving signal (high voltage on a tiny dipole, or high current on a tiny loop.) If the EM fields 1-wavelength away from the small antenna are significant, then the EM radiation will be significant. It's almosts as if the EM FIELDS are acting as the antenna. Weak fields act "small," while intense fields behave as a "large" antenna. This explains how a tiny antenna can transmit lots of EM. But what about reception?

It turns out that we can do something similar for reception; for "input" as opposed to "output." By manipulating the EM fields, we can force an electrically-small receiving antenna to behave as if it was very, VERY large. The secret is to intentionally impress an artificial AC field upon the receiving antenna. We'll transmit in order to receive, as it were. Normal half-wave antennas already do exactly this. For example, the wire of a half-wave antenna is far too thin to block incoming radio waves and absorb them. However, the current in such an antenna, as well as the voltage between the two wires, these create space-filling EM fields which have a constant phase relative to the incoming waves. Because of the constant phase, these fields interact with those incoming waves. They create the lobes of an interference pattern.

TRANSMIT IN ORDER TO RECEIVE?!!!

Rather than relying upon the antenna itself to generate fields via the current or voltage of the antenna wires, we could use a power supply. If an antenna is 1/10,000 wavelength across, we can make it behave as if it's 1/3 wavelength across by driving it hard with an RF source. We must drive it at the same frequency as the incoming waves, then adjust the phase of the power supply to a special value. Take a loop antenna as an example. If you want your little loop-antenna to receive far more radio energy, then put a big AC current through the antenna so that the phase of this current is locked in synch with the waves you wish to receive, and is lagging by 90 degrees. The voltage across the antenna terminals stays about the same as when an undriven antenna receives those waves. However, since the current is much higher in the driven antenna, the energy received per second is much higher as well. This seems like engineering blasphemy! How can adding a larger current increase the RECEIVED power? Yet this actually does work. Power equals volts times amps. To increase the RF power coming in from distant sources, increase the amps intentionally.

This sounds really silly. How can we improve the reception of an electrically small antenna by using it to *transmit*? The secret involves the cancellation of magnetic or electric fields in the near-field region of the antenna. The physics of the nearfield region of antennas has a kind of nonlinearity because conductors are present. In the electromagnetic nearfield region, it's possible to change the "E" of a wave without changing the "M" (change the antenna's voltage without changing the current), and vice versa. Superposition of EM traveling waves does not quite apply here because the ruling equations for energy propagation near conductors depends upon V^2 or I^2 separately. In addition, V is almost independent of I in the near-field region. If a very small loop antenna (a coil) should happen to receive a radio wave as a very small signal, we can increase the received *energy* by artificially increasing the current. Or if we're using a tiny dipole antenna (a capacitor,) we can increase the short dipole's received energy by applying a large AC voltage across the antenna terminals.

NOT CRACKPOTTY AFTER ALL

Note that this does not violate any rules of conventional physics. If we add stronger EM fields, they sum with the incoming EM plane waves and cause these radio waves to bend towards the tiny antenna. This increases the antenna's EA (effective area or effective aperture.) We can alter the coupling between the antenna and the surrounding space, but the total energy still follows the conservation law. The altered fields only change the "virtual size" (EA) of the antenna.

More importantly, the phenomena only arises in electrically "small" antennas. If you already have a large 1/2-wave dipole, then adding an AC voltage to it cannot make it seem any bigger. However, if you have a 10KHz loop antenna the size of a pie plate, you can make that antenna seem very, very large indeed. Think like this: how large is the diameter of the antenna's nearfield region at 10KHz? Around 10 kilometers? What if we could extract half of the incoming energy from that entire volume?!! In theory we can. In theory a tiny loop antenna can work as well as a longwire 1/2-wave antenna which is 10KM long.

Here's a way to look at the process. If I can create a field which CANCELS OUT some of the energy in an extended region around a tiny antenna, doesn't this violate the law of Conservation of Energy? Field energy cannot just vanish! That's correct: if we cancel out the energy in the nearfield of an antenna, this is actually an absorption process, and the energy winds up inside the antenna. If we ACTIVELY DRIVE an antenna with an "anti-wave", we will force the antenna to absorb more energy from the EM fields in the surrounding region of space than it ordinarily would.

BUT HOW DO ATOMS DO IT?

OK, if this supposedly explains how tiny atoms can receive long light waves, how can we increase the voltage signal to a SINGLE ATOM?! Actually it's not that difficult. The key is to use EM energy stored as oscillating fields; i.e. resonance. If an atom resonates electromagnetically at the same frequency as the incident light waves, then that atom will store accumulated energy. It will behave as an oscillator, and it will become surrounded by an increasingly strong AC electromagnetic field as time goes by. If this alternating field is locked into the correct phase with the light wave, then the atom's fields can interact with the light waves and cancel out quite a bit of the light energy present in the nearfield region around the atom. The energy doesn't vanish, instead it ends up INSIDE the atom. By resonantly creating an "anti-wave", the tiny atom has "sucked energy" out of the enormous light waves as they go by.

Impossible? Please track down the C. Bohren paper in the references below. He analyzes the behavior of small metal particles and dielectric particles exposed to long-wave EM radiation, and rigorously shows that a resonance can cause the tiny particles to "act large."

How can this stuff be true?! After all, electric and magnetic fields cannot affect each other directly. They work by superpostion. For the same reason, a light wave cannot deflect another light wave. Ah, but as I said before, the mathematics of the fields around a coil or a capacitor are not the same as the mathematics of freely-propagating EM waves. If we add the field of a bar magnet to the field of a radio wave, and if the bar magnet is in the right place (at a spot where the b-field of the radio wave is reversing polarity,) then the radio wave becomes distorted in such a way that it bends towards the bar magnet. As the EM wave progresses, we must flip the magnet over in order to keep the field pattern from bending away again. Now replace the bar magnet with an AC coil, and vary its current so the fields stay locked to the traveling radio wave, and the wave energy will ALWAYS bend towards the coil and be absorbed. The coil will also emit its own EM ripple. This emission is well known: atoms scatter half the light they absorb, and dipole antennas behave as scatterers for incoming EM waves. When all is said and done, our oscillating coil has absorbed half of the incoming EM energy and re-emitted (or SCATTERED) the rest.

A "HOLE" IN PHYSICS

When viewed as a halfwave receiving antenna, a resonant atom acts as if it has grown in size to fill its entire nearfield region. In terms of Quantum Mechanics, it does so by locally creating a large virtual-photon AC field which normally would not be there. In a sense, this new field BECOMES THE ANTENNA. This new field extends to 2/(Pi*wavelength) distance around the atom, and this distance can be thousands of times larger than the atom's radius. A 1-angstrom atom with a large AC field can behave as a 1/3-wave antenna at optical frequencies. Though tiny, the atom can absorb "longwave" radiation such as light. Our 1-angstrom atom becomes a 2000 angstrom atom, and efficiently absorbs 6000A light waves. Very strange, no? I've certainly never encountered such a thing during my physics training. Apparently the missing details of the absorption of light wave by atoms is a "hole" in physics education, and it has only been treated in a couple of contemporary physics papers in the 1980s.

Fig 1. Energy flux lines for the nearfield region of
a resonant absorber. The tiny absorber acts like
a large disk.
[from ref#4]

This "energy suction" effect is not limited to atoms. We can easily build a device to demonstrate the phenomenon. Below is a simple physics analogy to show how tiny atoms can "suck energy" from long light waves. Suppose we transmit a VLF radio signal at 1KHZ frequency. Let's arbitrarily set the signal strength so it's about the same strength as the Earth's weak vertical e-field: 100 Volt/meter. If the transmitter's e-field is contained entirely below the ionosphere, and if the bottom of the ionosphere is about 100Km high, then the entire vertical field is about 10 megavolts top to bottom. These values aren't totally ridiculous. Large, well-designed Tesla coils commonly produce 10 megavolts. If such a coil was erected outdoors and connected to an insulated metal tower, it would fill the Earth's entire atmosphere with 10KHz radiation. Such an AC voltage field would produce a feeble 100V/M field everywhere on the Earth's surface. This field would be detectable by instruments, but otherwise it would be too small for humans to notice, and we certainly would not expect to be able to get significant power out of it.

CAPACITIVE-PLATE ANTENNA

OK, we've got a feeble AC e-field in the outdoor environment. How will a simple antenna-plate perform as an energy receiver? See fig.2 below. If it's a large horizontal metal plate about one meter off the ground, it will give out a 100 volt signal at 1KHz, but this one hundred volt "power source" has an extremely large series impedance. Let's say that the plate/ground capacitance is 10pF. To draw energy with the maximum possible voltage, the load resistor should be approximately equal to the series impedance. This impedance is dominated by the 10pF capacitor value, so this gives 1/(2*PI*F*C) = 16 megohm load resistor, and it drags the antenna's voltage down from 100V to 70.7V. The received energy in the resistor is 300 microwatts, and the current in the resistor is in the microamp range. Just as we might expect, everything here is similar to a conventional radio antenna. The weak e-field from the incoming EM waves behaves only as a "signal", and it is not a source of significant power. It can't drive a motor or light an LED.

  __________  -->
 | 10 MVolt |_______
 | @ 1KHz   |       |
 |__________|       |
    |            ___|___     Capacitance from ionosphere to plate
   _|_                       ( very small, say 1/10,000 pF )
  ////           _______
                    |
                    |
                    |______________    <--- 70.7V @ 1KHz
     antenna        |              |
   (metal plate) ___|___           \
                          10pF     /  16.7 Megohm
                 _______           \
                    |              /
                    |______________|
                   _|_
                  ////

      FIGURE 2

The fundamental problem with the above system is that the empty space around our metal plate is acting like a voltage divider. If the sky has 10 Megavolts compared to ground, and if the metal plate is a few feet above the surface of the ground, then the plate only has a relatively tiny voltage. Current is tiny, so wattage is also tiny. Maybe we could power an LED flasher with this antenna... but only if we set it to flash every few minutes. Maybe if we erected an enormous antenna tower we could do better by lifting the plate higher from the ground (but with such a huge antenna we could easily steal more than 300 microwatts from conventional AM radio stations, Voice of America, etc.)

RESONANT ANTENNA

Now lets add a tuned circuit to the above schematic and see what happens:

  __________  -->
 | 10 MVolt |_______
 | @ 1KHz   |       |
 |__________|       |
    |            ___|___     Capacitance from ionosphere to plate
   _|_                       ( very small, say 1/10,000 pF )
  ////           _______
                    |
                    |
                    |_____________      <---  10 Megavolts!
                    |            |
    antenna         |             \_
   (metal plate) ___|___          (_)
                          10pF    (_) Coil
                 _______          (_)
                    |             (_)
                    |             /
                    |____________|
                    |
                   _|_      1KHz resonant, infinite Q
                  ////

      FIGURE 3

At resonance, the 10pF capacitance of our metal plate effectively vanishes. At resonance, an ideal parallel-resonant circuit behaves like an infinite resistor. If the LC circuit is exactly at resonance, how high will the voltage on the metal plate rise? It rises to ten megavolts!!!! The resonant circuit will continuously accumulate EM energy until the voltage at the antenna-plate rises to the same value of voltage as the transmitter. Weird!

Keep in mind that this device is a relatively small affair sitting in your backyard. If we weren't aware of the mechanism behind this, all we'd see is a passive LC resonator which bursts into oscillation of its own accord, and the voltage grows until the darned thing suffers a corona outbreak or something. The EM fields near the metal plate grow FAR STRONGER than the weak fields in the environment. It resembles an impossible "perpetual motion" machine, which might make a physicist recoil in horror. However, the real explanation is completely conventional, and the source of the energy is those feeble electrostatic fields produced by the distant transmitter. Note: the above phenomenon can only occur for an ideal LC circuit, where the resistance of the coil is zero and where the Q of the circuit is infinite. If our antenna plate is connected to the resonant "secondary" of a superconductive Tesla coil, we might in fact see the output voltage grow to the megavolt range. However, in most real-world tuned circuits it wouldn't reach such heights.

But remember, voltage is not energy. Maybe the incoming power is still small (like 300 microwatts we saw earlier), and maybe it takes months to build up so much voltage across a resonator, even if it's superconductive. Just what is the actual received energy flow? Let's put a resistor across the tuned circuit so we create a flow of real energy and drag the voltage down to, say, .707 of the unloaded voltage. The resistance should equal the impedance of the series capacitor: 10 ^ -16 Farads, giving 1600 giga-ohms. (A huge resistor. Clearly it makes sense to try instead to extract energy using a low-value resistor in series with the inductor coil, rather than using a huge parallel resistor across the tuned circuit. A 1.6 tera-ohm power-resistor might be hard to find in the surplus parts catalogs! That is, if you don't have the parts catalog featured in THIS ISLAND EARTH, that old SF movie where the two engineers build an "Interociter." Obviously the Interociter is Alien Tesla coil technology!)

Ahem. :)

HUGE RECEIVED POWER

With our 1.6 giga-megohm resistor in place, the RF power intercepted by the small metal plate is now 30 watts. That's ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND TIMES HIGHER than the power from the simple non-resonant antenna plate. Our tiny antenna has essentially reached out and made a kind of "direct contact" with the distant transmitter. By changing its own impedance, it has converted the "sky capacitor" into an efficient coupling device. It has sent out a cancelling wave and pulled in energy from an enormous volume encompassing the surrounding fields. It has become a "matching transformer" which steps down the 10MV sky voltage and steps up the "sky current." If we either increase the receiver plate's size, or lift it high up on an antenna tower, then the received power rises proportionally.

So, put a resonator on a small antenna, and drag in far more wave energy. Simple?

[The engineers on SCI.ELECTRONICS.DESIGN forum have pointed out that the 10MV voltage limit on the above resonator is wrong. In reality, it can grow much higher than the voltage on the transmitter. The system is series resonant, so the output voltage is limited only by the Q of the system (by the resistance of the wires in the resonator coil) and is not limited by the 10MV drive voltage.]

In our earlier (resistor-only) antenna circuit, a small amount of "real power" did flow through the capacitance of the sky while on its way to the metal plate and the load resistor. If the voltage across that resistor could be made to oscillate hugely, and if it had the right phase compared to the tiny displacement current coming from the transmitter, then we'd obtain a major increase in energy flow. The tiny current would remain about the same, but with the much larger voltage, the value for V*I is increased and wattage is increased. Remember the unwanted capacitive-voltage-divider effect in the nonresonant resistive receiver? With a resonant system, that would no longer apply, and the output voltage would no longer be low. Things would behave differently. The series displacement-current going through the "sky capacitor" might still be microamps, but if the tuned circuit can play around with the high voltage at our end of the transmission system, then it can drastically change the energy throughput. As with any power-transmission system, we can put more power through it by raising the line voltage while keeping the current the same.

CONCLUSION

To sum up: we see that by putting a big AC voltage on the tuned circuit and by adjusting its phase in relation to the tiny incoming current, we can "suck" the E x M wattage from the distant transmitter. It also works this way inside a simple circuit using conventional voltage dividers: add a resonant circuit, and the series impedance of the power source behaves smaller. See this example circuit. It should still work this way even when a part of the circuit contains a series capacitor whose dielectric is made up of many feet (or even tens of km) of empty space. It's very much like building a high-voltage power line: to transmit high wattage, we use high voltage at low current, and we put a step-down transformer at the far end of the power line. However, in the "power line" in the above diagram, we then put a tiny capacitor in series with the high-voltage line. Then we increase the thickness of the capacitor's air-dielectric until the current in the system is mostly composed of displacement current in the empty space between the pair of widely-separated capacitor plates. To transmit significant power, step the voltage up to astronomical levels at one end, then step it back down at the other end. Rather than using only a step-down transformer in the receiver, instead we use a hi-Q resonator, and we allow the resonant voltage rise to a huge value. As a result, EM energy will be "sucked" into the receiver.

THE TESLA CONNECTION

Note that all of this stuff comes directly from Nikola Tesla's "Wireless power" transmission scheme. If we can flood the atmosphere with VLF standing waves, and if the ionosphere keeps most of this EM energy from escaping, then a small, high-Q resonator can grab significant wattage right out of the air. A small resonator can produce an extensive and intense AC field of its own, and can act as an "EM funnel" which grabs significant wattage right out of the ambient radiation field. It can do so even when the ambient field is quite feeble, and even when the transmitter is thousands of KM away. This is not "radio" where wavelength is the same size as the components. This is "circuitry", where wavelength is huge, and circuits are small, and it more resembles "AC wiring" rather than "EM radiation." This is probably the concept that put that "Mona Lisa grin" on photographs of old Nikola. And that twinkle in his eye...

If we use a metal loop-antenna instead of a metal capacitor plate, then the current in the loop can perform a similar task as the voltage on the plate: the oscillating current should grow huge and cause an intense, volume-filling AC magnetic field to appear. If the phase is correct, this b-field should "suck energy" from the transmitter (or from the local b-fields of the incoming electromagnetic waves.) Keep in mind that all this applies to SMALL ANTENNAS. If your wavelength is 150MHz and your antenna is 1 meter across, then "energy sucking antennas" cannot be used to improve reception. The idea applies to longwave bands, longwire antennas, and VLF power transmission using the Earth-ionosphere resonant cavity.

These sorts of antennas obey circuit-physics, not the physics of EM waves in space. The volume of space adjacent to ANY antenna obeys a combination of circuit-physics and wave-physics, (the near-field and far-field EM equations,) and I've never quite visualized exactly how this works. Now it looks like there are several interesting things hidden between the near-field and the far-field mathematics. Crystal radios which have "suckers" instead of "tuners." Invisible antennas a thousand meters across... stuffed inside an AM radio! Cool.

The "energy grabbing" effect is very limited. It's a nearfield effect. It could only operate within about a 1/6- or 1/4-wavelength radius around a coil or capacitor antenna, or in the region between the peaks of a propagating EM wave. In other words, when we add a tuned circuit, we can increase the "effective size" of a tiny antenna until it resembles a half-wave dipole antenna. It usually would be easier to simply build a half-wave dipole in the first place. Normally we would. At VHF or UHF frequencies, a hi-Q "energy sucking" resonator antenna would not gather any more energy than a normal antenna, since the hi-Q antenna would be electrically large. But whenever the conventional dipole antenna might end up being too large to contemplate (like at 1KHz frequency or even 550KHz), then a high-voltage capacitor plate antenna, or perhaps a tuned-coil antenna, both with very high Q-factor (with inductors wound from thick copper pipe?) ...would behave like a far larger antenna than anyone could possibly imagine.

NOT IN YOUR PHYSICS BOOKS?

In hindsight the above stuff seems somewhat obvious, but why have I never heard of it before? RESONATING ANTENNAS BECOME ABNORMALLY EFFICIENT RECEIVERS?! The reverse must also be true: high-field resonant antennas will leak radio waves, even if their size is very small compared to the wavelength. If resistive losses don't halt them, their AC fields will grow in intensity until the signal finally does get out. Do radio designers realize that all small resonant antennas with huge EM fields act like long-wire antennas having fields of the usual strength? Do Ham radio operators currently use 80-meter transmission antennas having high-Q resonators and enormous magnetic or electrostatic fields? Do AM radio companies know that their antenna towers are really not necessary? Do science teachers realize that even the simplest "crystal radio" can only operate a pair of headphones if a tuned circuit present? Do physicists really grasp, at a gut level, just how those tiny atoms can absorb and radiate the huge wavelengths associated with light waves?

Portable AM radios use resonant-loop antennas, and they've always been this way. We've been carrying around Nikola Tesla's power-receiver in our back pockets since the 1960s. Also, in bygone decades those old "regenerative" receivers were harnessing this "energy sucking" process. Do the designers of 90 years ago know something that modern scientists do not?

UPDATE 9/6/99

In thinking more on this (and while talking to people on the email lists) a couple of new thoughts have occurred to me. One: try to give your receiver's tank circuit as high a Q as possible, and then connect it to a load through a zener diode or other nonlinear device. This will allow the voltage/current of the tuned circuit to rise to a huge level and produce an intense AC field, but without the load interfering. Only after the AC field has reached the appropriate level will we extract any energy and deliver it to the load. [NO, NOT A ZENER! A zener would just act as a series RESISTANCE, dissipate heat, and throw away energy uselessly. Instead, just use a detector diode, and charge up a DC capacitor. 11/1/99]

Two: try using an FM detector circuit to force the receiver to "lock on" to the transmit frequency. If we do this, we could still use immensely high q-factors, but without making our frequency-match adjustments be so sensitive.

Three: once the receiver is oscillating and energy is being transferred, try suddenly changing the voltage of the transmitter. Since the entire system acts like a well-coupled transformer, I suspect that fast changes in transmitter voltage will appear as fast changes at the receiver. Maybe it only takes a single AC cycle for the change to appear. Weird thought: if the transmitter is modulated *faster* than the transmission frequency, would the fast signal appear at the receiver?!!! That would be impossible, since it would violate the rules of AM transmission theory. However, the coupled-resonator system more resembles a pair of atoms transferring photons, rather than resembling an RF transmit/receive system. If the device behaves like a quantum-mechanical coherent system, then perhaps we can modulate the transmitter at a faster rate than the carrier frequency! If it worked, that would REALLY be weird, no? Imagine transmitting at the 76Hz earth resonant overtone frequency, then amplitude-modulating the 76Hz carrier at 1 KHz, and having the signal appear at the receiver's resonator! We wouldn't really be transmitting radio energy. The signal would more resemble QM "wavefunction collapses" which propagate throughout the Earth's ionospheric resonant cavity.

Four: 11/1/99 This circuit mimics atomic absorption, and it also should mimic stimulated emission. Once the circuit is oscillating, it's absorbing the incoming waves because of its phase. The phase relationship causes it to couple to the transmitter. If the transmitter was suddenly turned off, then maybe the circuit would not be able to radiate, since without the waves from the transmitter it could not perform the "poynting-flux emission" process. The phenomenon is definitely not linear! So... what happens when the waves from a transmitter should suddenly encounter the fields of a short antenna? If the phase is right, the short antenna should change from an oscillator to an emitter, and begin emitting energy! This is the reverse of the "energy sucking effect," because while "energy suction" can only occur when the short antenna is surrounded by a powerful field, "energy emission" can only occur when the powerful fields around a short antenna are given a traveling-wave field to provide the "stimulation" for stimulated emission to occur. Absorption/emission requires both the trapped fields at the antenna, as well as the traveling fields from a distant transmitter. If my reasoning isn't faulty, this means that it should be possible to build a sort of radio-freq laser, where a distant transmitter causes a small loop-antenna resonator to add its energy to the transmitted wave.

Also, my crackpot side is starting to yammer at me. It's saying that this particular "hole in physics" might seriously damage contemporary Quantum Electrodynamics, and might even show that Einstein's original photoelectric experiment might be interpreted incorrectly. Hey, if Einstein was wrong, does that mean that the Nobel is withdrawn retroactively and awarded to whoever can show rigorously that "energy sucking antennas" are a better explanation for QM phenomena of all kinds? Or does it just mean that my "crackpot half" is just trying to make certain that no conventional scientist will dare to experiment with this stuff! :)

BEWARE: ODDBALL IMPLICATIONS

If EM resonance is extremely important, and if mainstream science doesn't recognize the effects, then god only knows how many unusual phenomena are awaiting exploration by amateurs. The professional explorers with their well-funded troops haven't yet arrived on this particular "new continent." There are still mysteries to be experienced, and it could be many years before the whole thing is paved over with well-traveled highways built through NSF funding.

Ears as antisound-emitters

Whenever any type of "small" receiver seems to be generating an AC field around itself spontaneously, perhaps we should suspect that the receiver is employing the above concepts; that it is actively generating an "anti-signal," and as a result is receiving more wave energy than it's physical size would suggest. THIS MIGHT APPLY TO ACOUSTIC SYSTEMS! If we illuminate a tiny resonant chamber with long-wave sound of the right frequency, standing waves will build up within the chamber, and it will become an emitter. If there is an acoustic analogy for the above antenna physics, the resonant chamber should "bend" the incoming sound towards itself. When the emitted sound superposes with the 3D incoming waves, the wavefronts of incoming sound will be distorted so they they impact on the resonator and thereby increase the area of its "virtual intake orifice". In EM physics this is well known, it's just the Effective Aperture concept.

Might biological evolution have "discovered" this energy-sucking resonator effect in regards to ears? A collection of programmable resonators might work far better than a broadband receiver, even an amplified one.

It turns out that human ears are known to generate their own signals. Much about this is still a mystery, and proposed theories do not match experimental findings. I note that at frequencies below a few KHz, the wavelength of sound is physically larger than the external ear. Perhaps our human hearing system increases its gain by emitting signals which are phase-locked with the incoming sound? This could be easily missed, since the emitted sound would greatly resemble the incoming sound, and could be mistaken as a reflection.

I've heard that human ears have an unexplained property: they can detect signals which are far below any logical noise level. Their detection capability supposedly even exceeds the QUANTUM MECHANICAL noise level. Perhaps ears increase their net received acoustic energy via an "anti-sound" feedback process resembling resonance? Might there be other situations where small acoustic resonators can receive abnormally large amounts of energy? Shades of Ernst Worrel Keely! Hey, maybe I finally have a clear explanation for that "Acoustic Black Hole" phenomenon with the soda straws. And... and... once again the infamous Dr. Thomas Gold is vindicated, and his detractors are shown to be a bit, shall we say, "deaf" to his words.

Side note: How might the inner ear generate sound? Maybe it does not. Maybe it rapidly modulates the stiffness of its parts and therefore uses nonlinear physics to take energy from other frequency bands and use it to power an oscillation at the frequency it wishes to emit. Sort of like using one crystal radio as a "battery" to power the audio amplifier of another crystal radio tuned to a different station. Or like striking a bell with slow blows, while the bell emits a fast oscillation.

Oooo, Very Weird Idea! If ears generate sound only when sound is being received, then perhaps we can detect this. Perhaps it's even under conscious control. When we listen intently to a particular frequency, obviously we're tuning the brain's internal signal processing algorithms. But what if our conscious action actually changes our inner ear, so that it "sucks energy" at that frequency? If so, then just flood the room with white noise, stick a tiny microphone near your ear, display a realtime spectrogram of the detected noise from the microphone, then try to concentrate on listening to the "high" tones in the noise, and then the "low" tones. Will the spectrogram of the microphone's signal change? When you try to pick up a constant tone in the noise, will a small absorption band appear in the spectrum of energy near your ear? Easier test: subtract (null out) the noise-generator's signal from the microphone's signal and observe this difference signal. (an electronic delay line would probably be needed.) Now concentrate on listening to the highs or the lows. Will the observed difference-signal change? If so, build a circuit which detects this change and turns on a light bulb. Stick a microphone in your ear, decode the alterations in the sound spectrum, and run your appliances by "thinking" about a tone-sequence!!

If THAT works, then try this next one.

Set up the above system. Listen to the white noise and imagine that you hear the word "yes". Do it many times. Now play back the recording of the difference signal (or even the raw signal from the microphone.) Can you hear the word "yes" being transmitted by your *EARS*? If so, then you now know how to speak through your ears. This only works when you are listening to white-noise. Imagine that you hear music in the noise, then see if it appears in the recording from the tiny microphone. Perhaps composers can "think music" right onto the tape recorder. "Think aloud" to yourself, and see if your "verbal thoughts" can be heard issuing from your ears as they... leak out of your head? Perhaps one form of telepathy is... acoustic? Can a blind person navigate via a sort of whitenoise-correlation "acoustic radar?"

OK, now hire a schitzophrenic who hears voices, and see if you can record the voices via whitenoise environment and ear-canal microphones. Ask them questions, see if they answer. Now go interview the "Voices" on the Tonight Show, with or without the cooperation of the victim.

Who'll be the first to explore this silly idea and find out if I'm full of balony?

BALL LIGHTNING

Ball lightning is not yet explained. One of the orthodox explanations is the Storm Maser theory: if thunderstorms emit microwave energy, and if something can somehow focus this energy, then a nitrogen electrical-plasma could feed off the intense microwave flux. The "Energy sucking" theory gives us a second option. Suppose thunderstorms emit weak ELF/VLF e-fields instead of supposedly emitting microwaves? If a plasma happened to be resonant with the coherent AC e-field being created by the storm, and if the Q of the resonant plasma system was high, then that plasma would develop an enormous high-frequency e-field around itself. It would suck energy from the fields of the storm and remain "alight." Do nitrogen/oxygen (or carbon?) plasmas have any high-Q resonances in the ELF/VLF spectrum? What about carbon-fiber networks composed of condensing soot? [CORUM & CORUM] Or rather than pure resonances, do they have self-organization which can communicate with the self-organized lightning plasmas within the thunderstorm and "agree" between themselves to create a "Tesla Power System"? The storm becomes the transmitter and the ball-lightning plasma-glob acts as the hi-Q receiver.

Do storms create any coherent VLF e-fields? VLF radios certainly don't detect such things, so we normally would assume that such signals don't exist. But hold on! There could be a nearfield effect, where there is no RF radiation, and where e-fields and b-fields aren't directly connected together via the impedance of free space. A loop-antenna in a radio receiver is used with the assumption that incoming EM waves have an E and an M component, and we should just as easily receive the M component as receiving the E. (And so a loop antenna would work just as well as a dipole antenna.) Maybe this is not true of environmental VLF e-fields. Suppose that a storm (or even the entire Earth) has a very strong vertical AC electrostatic field. The loop antennas on VLF radios would not detect it. Horizontal dipoles would not detect it. However, a resonant circuit connected to a suspended wire (and to ground) certainly would. With a high-Q resonant circuit, the antenna might even receive significant power. Call it the "artificial ball-lightning" analogy.

RF TRANSFORMERS: TIGHT COUPLING BETWEEN TWO DISTANT COILS

Iron-core transformers are examples of tight magnetic coupling, and significant power can be transferred between the coils of a 60Hz transformer. Capacitors are similar: they are examples of tight electrostatic coupling. Resonant circuits give us two new options for tightly-coupled power systems: pairs of high-amperage resonant loop-antennas, and pairs of high-voltage resonant dipole antennas. The spacing of each of these must be below 1/4 wavelength for the phenomenon to appear, and the e- or b-field strength must be very high. Now that I'm speaking of this, I know I've seen such things in common use. Air-core transformers in high-power VHF radio transmitters employ this effect. If both sides of an air-core transformer are tuned to the same frequency, then the b-field surrounding the transformer will build up to a very high level, and the throughput of energy will be very high, even though there's no closed iron-ring magnetic circuit, and coupling between the coils is *apparently* very loose.

MECHANICAL "ENERGY SUCTION"

Rick M. points out that mechanical forces might become significant in resonant EM systems. Normal transformers and capacitors certainly do display significant mechanical forces. If a transformer can be made into an induction motor, and if a capacitor can be made into an electrostatic motor, what kind of motor can be built from a loose/tight coupled high-frequency resonant EM device? I have no idea. Perhaps something strange and interesting is lurking in these particular "undergrowths." Imagine a radio-frequency induction motor built without iron, whose (resonant) stator is at a great distance from the (resonant) rotor, yet the torque between them is still immense. Imagine a high-Q capacitor-based high voltage motor with huge torque, and with all of its parts embedded within plastic (to eliminate the corona problems associated with DC electrostatic motors.)

ELECTROMAGNETIC PRANKSTERS

An evil though: if we built a resonant antenna within a 1/4-wave distance of an AM radio tower, we might be able to "suck energy" at such a high rate that we could run motors and light lightbulbs! The resonant antenna might be very small, but it would have an intense e-field (or magnetic field if it was a loop antenna), and would reach out and touch the AM tower electrically. I've heard of people using "inductive coupling" to steal 60Hz AC electrical energy. The addition of a resonant circuit would vastly increase the ability of a pickup coil to suck in energy from any distant conductors as long as the frequency was fairly low. In physicist-speak, "If the world is already full of Sodium light, build some artificial Sodium atoms as absorbers."

Now I guess I need to go make a high-Q tuned circuit and set it to the same frequency as an AM radio station. Maybe I can light up an LED! I know that longwire antennas can do this. I also know that an AM radio, if tuned to a weak station, can be affected when an adjacent unpowered AM radio is tuned to the same station. Untuned inductive pickup coils can receive "inductively coupled" energy if the b-field in the area is strong. Instead, with a small coil which resonates at 60Hz, maybe I can magnetically grab some AC power out of the wiring in my walls? It would be cool to have a wireless lightbulb connected to nothing but a high-value 60Hz inductor and capacitor. Maybe it would work a bit better if I wrap a couple of turns of "transmit loop" around my house and drive it with 10KHZ. With thick wire and hi-Q resonance, it wouldn't take much to put many amperes into such a coil. Rats, now I wish I still lived next to a big AM transmitting tower like I did when I was a kid.

L.O.S., THE CREATIVITY DRUG

In conclusion, I must answer the obvious question: is Bill Beaty on drugs or WHAT?!!! No, instead I'm on deadline. I'm staying up all night for many nights in a row while beating my head on this interwoven interrupt-driven cludgy embedded set of C-code background tasks. Lack of sleep is itself a drug. Not LSD, use LOS! College students at exam time are well aware of this phenomenon. Stay up all night for a few too many nights, and you find that philosophy gains entirely new meaning, your wife starts looking at you funny, you are in danger of following Heinlein/Hubbard/Wilson and attempting to start your own religion... and the shades of Tesla and Feynman start subspace-idly coupling some 'Special Ideas' into your throbbing demented neuronal subprocessor networks.

So what do *YOU* do for fun?

;)

Bill b article: Light without photons (NEW 9/99)

MORE: some email discussions REFERENCES: 1. W. Beaty web-article, "Acoustic Black Hole" phenomenon. 2. J. F. Sutton and C. C. Spaniol, "The Black Hole Antenna", PROCEEDINGS OF THE INTERNATIONAL TESLA SYMPOSIUM, 1992, International Tesla Society 3. J. F. Sutton and C. C. Spaniol, "An Active Antenna for ELF Magnetic Fields", PROCEEDINGS OF THE INTERNATIONAL TESLA SYMPOSIUM, 1990, International Tesla Society, 1990 4. C. F. Bohren, "How can a particle absorb more than the light incident on it?", Am J Phys, 51 #4, pp323 Apr 1983 5. H. Paul and R. Fischer "Light Absorption by a dipole", SOV. PHYS. USP., 26(10) Oct. 1983 pp 923-926 6. K. Corum and J. Corum, "Fire Balls, Fractals, and Colorado Springs: A Rediscovery of Tesla's RF Techniques," PROCEEDINGS OF THE INTERNATIONAL TESLA SYMPOSIUM, 1990 Suggested by A. Boswell, regarding small-antenna physics: Chu, J.Appl.Phys. Dec. 1948 Hansen, Proc.IEEE Feb. 1981.