ENERGY FROM SPACE An Engineer's Invention Excites Interest
In a tiny room in a Bombay suburb, an electrical engineer works on a machine that seems to have been conceived in a Sci-Fi book - a generator which can ostensibly produce electricity from nothing.
But the machine's creator, Paramahamsa Tewari, 51, is not an eccentric inventor from one of Sukumar Ray's fantastic tales. He is a senior engineer with the Department of Atomic Energy's Nuclear Power Corporation (NPC).
Tewari created a minor sensation 10 years ago when he produced the theory that space is filled with a dynamic medium whose swirling motion is the source of all matter and energy.
He called it the Space Vortex Theory (SVT) which postulated that at the heart of the electron was a void whose high speed rotation within a vacuum could produce energy from space.
Interestingly, it was the Theosophical Society which had first published Tewari's theory by arranging a special lecture in 1977 at Adyar in Madras.
The theosophists were excited by Tewari's ideas since they were remarkably close to observations about the electron put forward by Annie Besant's associate, the clairvoyant Charles W. Leadbeater, in the book "Occult Chemistry."
However, the first indication that Tewari's ideas about the structure of space were more than just a mystic vision came earlier this year at a conference in Hanover organised by the German Association of Gravity Field Energy.
The Space Power Generator (SPG) invented by Tewari won the first prize of Rs 25000 from among 25 similar machines presented at the conference by scientists from all over.
Tewari's generator is actually a simple machine, consisting basically of a magnetised cylinder rotating at high speed with the help of a motor.
Power from this device is extracted by connecting a wire between the surface of the cylinder and its axis. According to the engineer inventor, the SPG produces two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half times more power than it consumes, defying the basic physical law of conservation of energy which says that the output of energy cannot be more than the input.
Tewari says the excess power comes from the inter-atomic space of the rotating cylinder - it is the movement of the "voids" in the spinning cylinder which creates additional energy out of the space between the machine's axis and the magnet.
Tewari admits that his theory sounds incredible taking into account the existing laws and that he would never have developed it had he been trained as a physicist and not an engineer, since it is so divergent from conventional physics.
But, he says, it would have been difficult for him to go on with work on the SVT and the generator were it not for encouragement from two US physicists, John A. Wheeler, director of the Centre for Theoretical Physics at the University of Texas, Austin, and Bruce DePalma, formerly a lecturer in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"But for DePalma, I wouldn't have been able to tie up my theory," says Tewari. "He was working on similar ideas and kept sending his results to me."
Though Tewari, who is slated for transfer to the NPC's Kaiga Project in Karnataka as chief project engineer, has pursued his interest in physics in his spare time, he has received infrastructural support from the NPC for putting together his extraordinary new machine.
The SPG was built under Tewari's supervision at the Tarapur Atomic Plant. "Tewari's prototype SPG can be considered a major breakthrough," says S. L. Kati, managing director of NPC.
Before leaving for Hanover, Tewari addressed a meeting of scientists and engineers at the Bhaba Atomic Research Centre on his theory.
But most physicists remained sceptical about his findings.
Undaunted, he is experimenting with a new model of the SPG since his return, which he feels will be an improvement. He eventually hopes to create a prototype for a generator which could deliver 50 kw to 100 kw of electricity.
"The encouragement I received abroad has been a great help, and hopefully within a year, I will be able to build an experimental model which could ultimately prove commercially viable," he says.
Tewari, of course, is not the only engineer hoping to build the ultimate power generation machine - one which will run perpetually since it will extract energy from space - as the Hanover conference demonstrated.
In fact, DePalma, the first inventor to create such a machine, is presently conducting experiments in California in anticipation of a breakthrough which could lead to commercial production.
Their work promises to create ultimately a machine which appears to come straight out of a futuristic fantasy.
- M. Rahman
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