Negative Resistance Discovered?

By Tom Bearden
July 12, 1998

It would be quite nice if it becomes as simple as feeding energy into one end of such a carbon fiber "negative resistor" and outputting more energy from the resistor than one inputs. Since in a nominal simple circuit (such as a battery powering a simple resistor) the dipole in the battery is a recognized broken symmetry in the violent flux of the vacuum, it means that the dipole -- merely because of its separated opposite charges -- is outputting "organized" energy flow. Not all its received virtual particle flux from the vacuum is returned as "unorganized" virtual flux. Instead, part is returned as "organized" virtual flux, hence as Poynting energy flow.

Actually this has been known (and is proven experimentally, that any electric or magnetic charge and any dipole is a broken symmetry in the active vacuum flux) in particle physics for over 40 years. It just has not made it into electrodynamics yet.

Now let's address the fundamentalists who immediately resort to the charge of "perpetual motion." They themselves are already the world's greatest advocates of perpetual motion machines. They assume that every single charge and every dipole already is the "source" for its "force fields" and potentials -- and therefore for all the energy in those fields.

In short, they assume (whether they like the words or not) that every "source" charge or dipole simply creates all that energy right out of nothing. Now that is a dramatic violation of the most primary physics law of all: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

One CANNOT be in compliance with that master conservation of energy law, and assume simultaneously that charges and dipoles are the sole sources of their own field energy and potential energy (which, by the way, reach all across the universe before reaching zero magnitude).

The fundamentalists assume that every charge and every dipole in the universe is already a perpetual motion machine. They pound and chastise the unorthodox (i.e., "free energy") researchers for being so "bold" as to suggest that one particular circuit or device might actually be a broken local symmetry in the vacuum energy, and therefore output an energy flow freely from the vacuum energy itself.

Also fundamentalists do not calculate the true Poynting energy flow from a battery or other power source. The textbooks admit that the battery or power source produces the Poynting energy flow down the two conductors (typical simple circuit considered), filling all space around the two conductors with energy flow essentially parallel to the conductors.

Only a very small sheath of that flow, immediately adjacent to the surface of the conductors, strikes the surface charges and diverges some of the intercepted energy flow into the wire to power the electrons and produce current.

So the Poynting flow has two components:

1.      A huge component that does not strike the surface charges and is not diverged.

2.      A very tiny component that does strike the surface charges in the circuit and is diverged into the circuit, forming the Slepian vector j(phi).

Lorentz taught everyone to just integrate the Poynting vector around a closed cylindrical surface very close to the surface of the wire or component.

This has the pronounced effect of discarding the non-divergent vector (enters the Lorentz cylinder on one end and all of it emerges on the other end, giving energy flow out equal to energy flow in, which zeroes in the integration.

This procedure retains only the divergence vector component. In short, Lorentz taught us to just throw away that non-divergent component filling all space around the circuit conductors, since our "single pass" energy flow circuit does not intercept it.

If you do a calculation without that Lorentz procedure, on a nominal circuit, you will come up with (for a nominal circuit I calculated) about 1013 times as much non-divergent Poynting energy flow in surrounding space as there is divergent energy flow being diverted into the wire.

So Lorentz taught us to just discard -- in every circuit -- something (nominally) on the order of 1013 times as much energy flow as we retained.

Put another way, every (nominal) circuit actually extracts from the active vacuum, and outputs out along the conductors (radially out to infinity) a huge energy flow that is 13 or so orders of magnitude greater than that very small component that gets intercepted and diverged (collected) in the circuit to power it.

In short, we build (with single-pass energy flow circuits) the very worst type of circuit that can be imagined, with incredibly small energy interception and collection efficiency.

Obviously, one way to produce more energy out than one inputs by normal calculations, would be to collect some of that normally non-intercepted (non-divergent) huge wasted energy flow that is ignored, but there nevertheless.

There are indeed a few ways of doing that "extra energy collection." One is given by Bohren and others, using the resonance frequency of a particle, in an energy flow at that frequency.

The resonance of the particle can easily cause 18 or so times as much interception and energy divergence upon a single particle. That is well documented and proven experimentally.

Lawandy's lasing without population inversion also uses such particle resonance in an energy flow at or near the resonance frequency.

The technical name for "intercepting and collecting more of the available energy flow" would be "asymmetrical self-regauging".

Another way to get additional energy collected is to retroreflect the energy flow back and forth iteratively, across the intercepting charges. This occurs, e.g., in anti-Stokes emission phenomena in intensely scattering, optically active media.

Patterson's cell, e.g., uses a variation of this method to asymmetrically self-regauge slowly. The palladium-clad microspheres iteratively retroreflect (which I just call "ping-pong") the energy flow back and forth multiple times, thereby increasing the number of intercepts by individual charged particles (protons, i.e. H+ ions) in the loaded palladium.

As the palladium slowly loads with ions, the ping-pong increases, thereby slowly increasing the local energy density (and the local potential) of the system. Patterson's cell has been independently tested by three universities, producing as much as COP = 1200.

He had difficulty keeping the palladium cladding on the microspheres, however, and the configuration was lost gradually as palladium cladding damage occurred. So apparently he has had to go to ordinary cladding such as copper. This apparently results in a dramatic decrease in the ping-pong, and so winds up with a COP of something like 2.0 or so. Of course that is still overunity COP.

A proven example is also Lawandy's lasing without population inversion. Several experiments, some beautiful papers in the literature (such as Nature). Letokhov's work back in 1967 and later presages Lawandy's work. Letokhov even has a paper in Contemporary Physics suggesting (or pointing out, as you wish) that such reactions (which he calls "negative absorption of the medium" and sometimes "negative resonance absorption of the medium") may be considered
legitimate "Maxwell's Demons."

Particularly related to ping-pong and also Chung's negative resistance experiments are the well-known but poorly understood Fiber fuse effect. That one is always overunity; just make the fiber optics cable longer. It's a weird effect; simply take a fiber optics cable that has a core containing germanium (silicon cores do not exhibit the effect), and heat it at one point with a butane cigarette lighter. After awhile, the fiber fuse emerges. A spot on the surface of the core melts into a hole, then another about a centimeter upwards into the incoming laser light, then another, and so on. That thing marches down the cable, no matter how long, at about a meter per second, thereby disrupting and destroying the operation of the cable.

Now here's the funny part. Reinitiate the fiber fuse again at the other end of the cable, with the laser light (spoiled) reversed, and sometimes an even more remarkable thing happens. The beast marches back down the cable, filling in all those holes again and restoring the cable to operation!

Once the fiber fuse starts, you can take away the butane lighter. It is self-perpetuating. You can stop it, however, by disrupting the geometry of the waveguide or "pipe" a little bit. Draw down the pipe into a "throat" section just a bit smaller, and the fiber fuse will march to the throat and stop there.

Russell et al have numerous papers in the literature detailing the fiber fuse. Russell has one paper dealing with the overunity aspects.

I personally think that, assuming the Chung carbon fiber stack actually works, a variation of the fiber fuse effect with ping-pong and phase conjugate pumping and retroreflections" between fibers -- almost as if in a waveguide -- may be occurring. If so, in that case the carbon fiber section could asymmetrically regauge itself, increase the collection of energy from the normally non-intercepted non-divergent portion of the Poynting energy flow in every ping and pong, and thereby legitimately collect and output more energy flow than one input (by one's conventional measurements ignoring the non-divergent input component) into it. What actually would be happening is that the carbon fiber section just had a nonlinear and increased energy flow interception and divergence to drive more electrons. It would not violate the overall conservation of energy at all. Since it would be an open
thermodynamic system far from equilibrium with its active environment (the normally non-divergent portion of the Poynting flow), classical thermodynamics with its infamous second law would not even apply -- that thermodynamics only applies to systems in equilibrium with their environments. Instead, the nonlinear thermodynamics of dissipative open systems would apply.

It is well-known in dissipative open system thermodynamics that such systems can permissibly (1) self-oscillate, (2) exhibit COP>1.0, (3) exhibit local negative entropy, and (4) "self-power" themselves and their loads.

Physics and thermodynamics and Maxwell's equations (before arbitrary symmetrical regauging) do permit such systems. Arbitrary regauging merely to provide altered equations with variables separated -- and thereby much easier to solve -- also arbitrarily discarded such Maxwellian systems that are open systems not in local thermodynamic equilibrium with their EM
environment.

Of course such a proposed candidate system must still be (1) independently replicated, and (2) independently tested and verified. That is the scientific method. So that process and that process alone will determine whether the Chung negative resistor effects are real or flawed in some manner.

And for those fundamentalists who just wish to be instant naysayers, we simply present them with the electrodynamic problem of the source charge assumption used in their own classical EM. When they can show how those charges really create energy filling the entire universe right out of nothing, and have been doing it since the big bang, and simultaneously doing that without
violating the master energy conservation law, then one can believe that classical EM alone can be accepted as refuting the possibility of a true negative resistor. Until then, classical EM has far too many serious errors and flaws to be an arbiter. In its present form it has nothing to say about open dissipative thermodynamic systems -- which a true negative resistor is a priori.

In closing, an interesting side bit of information.

One of the greatest (if not the greatest) electrical scientists the U.S. ever produced was Gabriel Kron. Before and during WW II, communications work was calculated by very large analog simulation of Maxwell's equations, and analogue simulation of other equations, particularly in the U.S. Navy's Network Analyzer at Stanford University, with contractor General Electric. Some papers are openly published on that Network Analyzer work. In addition, GE internally published additional information. We have a bit of that internal information (no further comment will be given) which shows a most interesting thing. Kron reported that the team had developed a negative resistor (and mentions this lightly also in an open paper or two), which when placed in the Network analyzer, allowed the generator to be disconnected since the negative resistor would power the network simulator. No further
details of Kron's negative resistor were ever given, and so far as I know, neither GE nor the U.S. Navy ever released any further details on it.

But certainly Kron was authoritative and a great scientist. He applied not only electrodynamics (and different topologies at that), but also full general relativity to circuits, motors, generators, etc. So I am much inclined to believe his statement about the true negative resistor the team built and tested.

Perhaps now with the Chung work we will get a second chance at a true "negative resistor" which, given an input level of energy flow rate, outputs a greater energy flow rate. I really do not see any great problem in such a notion, if actions occur in transition through the resistor which cause iterative retroreflections and self-targeting from fiber to fiber, thereby in turn resulting in asymmetrical self-regauging.

Electrodynamics already permits the potential energy of a component or system to be freely changed without cost (without having to do work upon the system). The only way the electrodynamicists discarded EM systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium with their local active vacuum environment, was by assuming inert space (vacuum) as just emptiness, and then by symmetrically regauging Heaviside/Maxwell equations (i.e., applying the Lorentz condition) so that the variables were separable. Jackson in his Classical Electrodynamics, 2nd edition, shows this very clearly. But then they had to assume that the source charges themselves just created all that energy in their fields and potentials reaching across the universe in all directions.

Either electrodynamicists have to incorporate the active vacuum and the particle physicists' finding and proof that any charge is a broken symmetry in that energy action, or else they are self-convicted of gross violation of the master conservation of energy law, and massively incorporating perpetual motion machines. Until those issues are resolved in changes, I do not believe classical EM has anything definitive to say about the Chung experiments.

Let's hope that the work of Chung et al will hold up and be replicated. If so, then it represents a really great breakthrough in energy systems, of first magnitude. If not, then the job still remains to be done. Whatever happens, let's at least give Chung and her colleagues a rousing good cheer for having the guts to try the experiments and state the results. If something turns out to be wrong with the experiments, then undoubtedly we will hear of that shortly.

Meanwhile, no serious researcher or serious scientist should ever make degrading remarks and snide comments about honestly reported scientific work, even if that work later turns out to be in error. Poynting, e.g., got the direction of the energy flow wrong, and only discovered the divergent part. Heaviside corrected the direction, and also pointed out that the flow is really huge, with only a tiny fraction being diverged into the circuit. He also added an additional term not discovered by Poynting. Today we use Heaviside's energy flow theory, and call it "Poynting flow."

Lots of great scientists (such as Nobelist Feynman and John Wheeler) have tried to correct known errors in electrodynamics, and failed for one reason or another. Feynman himself pointed out that the field concept in space was wrong. He also pointed out that scientists cannot rigorously define force, and do not rigorously know what energy is (check out his three volumes of physics). Wheeler and Feynman viewed the field in mass-free space not as a force field per se (which requires the presence of mass), but only as the potentiality for a force field there, given that one placed a charged particle there. In other words, the field only appears upon and of the charged mass. Presently, electrodynamics (since Maxwell and Faraday) still assumes that all space is filled with a thin material fluid. In other words, at every point in space there is assumed to be a point coulomb, a point unit north pole, and a point unit mass. The Heaviside-Maxwell equations actually describe what happens to those assumed mass entities. The equations actually have nothing at all to say about what form etc. electrodynamic entities actually exist in, in mass-free space.

The Michelson-Morley experiments in the 1880s falsified the notion that all those charges and masses exist at every point in space. Yet not a single Maxwell equation has ever been changed, to root out that assumption of the material ether that is in the equations themselves.

So one must be extremely wary of just slapping on a critique based on classical electrodynamics. It is seriously flawed, known to be so, and still has never pulled the motes out of its own eye.

And a number of the very best theorists are presently engaged in altering electrodynamics, to produce a new electrodynamics revolution. Names readily coming to mind are Evans, Barrett, Rodrigues, Lu, Hestenes, and many others. We are definitely going to have a new and dramatically extended electrodynamics in the future.


Kron’s Negative Resistor

By Jerry W. Decker

One of the greatest (if not the greatest) electrical scientists the U.S. ever produced was Gabriel Kron. Before and during WW II, communications work was calculated by very large simulation of Maxwell's equations, and other equations, particularly in the U.S. Navy's Network Analyzer at Stanford University, with contractor General Electric. Kron reported that he had developed a negative resistor, which when placed in the Network analyzer, allowed the generator to be disconnected since the negative resistor would power the network simulator. No further details were ever given, and so far as I know, neither GE nor the U.S. Navy ever released any further details.

But certainly Kron was authoritative and a great scientist. So I am much inclined to believe his statement.

Perhaps now we will get a second chance at a true "negative resistor" which, given an input level of energy flow rate, outputs a greater energy flow rate. I really do not see any great problem in such a notion, if actions occur in transition through the resistor which cause iterative retroreflections and self-targeting from fiber to fiber, thereby in turn resulting in asymmetrical self-regauging. Electrodynamics already permits the energy of a component or system to be freely changed without cost. The only way the electrodynamicists discarded EM systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium with their local active vacuum environment, was by assuming inert space (vacuum) as just emptiness, and then by symmetrically regauging Heaviside/Maxwell equations (i.e., applying the Lorentz condition) so that the variables were separable. Jackson in his Classical Electrodynamics, 2nd edition, shows this very clearly.

Let's hope that the work of Chung et al will hold up and be replicated. If so, then it represents a really great breakthrough in energy systems, of first magnitude.