A team from Princeton University, including Christopher Chyba, Kevin Hand, and Thomas Chyba, has shown through experiments that Earth’s rotation can generate electric power as it moves through its own magnetic field.
For almost 200 years, scientists believed that Earth’s rotation through its magnetic field couldn’t be used to generate continuous electric power. This idea goes back to Michael Faraday’s experiments in 1832. A well-known argument holds that a conductor fixed to Earth won’t feel any net electric force from the planet’s rotation. Many studies have supported this view over time.
Chyba and Hand proposed that under specific conditions, standard assumptions may not apply. Their approach involves using a cylindrical shell composed of a magnetically permeable material. For it to work, two conditions must be met. First, the shape of the system must create a nonzero curl in the magnetic force. Second, the…
