Thursday, April 9, 2020

Cosmic Energy- The energy of the future

Cosmic Energy. - The Energy of the future.;
                 

    Shakti, defined as the  "power, ability, strength, effort, energy, capability") is the primordial cosmic energy and represents the dynamic forces that are thought to move through the entire universe in Hinduism. The Manifest universe is considered as a cosmic dance of Shiva and Shakti. Shiva represents  consciousness, and Shakti , the energy that animates Shiva- this unmanifest totipotent consciousness.
God or "Purusha"  is pure and unmanifest consciousness. From a perceptual perspective, He is nothingness, the Shoonya, devoid of any attributes or qualities- Nirguna Brahman. For totally arbitrary,inexplicable reasons, He infuses and sets in motion Prakriti, the universal energy, that was latent in Him,  This union is the foundation of all creation, that we know as the universe. The Big Bang according to the ancient Vedic ideology. The big bang activates and   sets in motion the latent energy hidden in the cosmic egg (Hiranyagarbha).
        All matter that exists in the universe, can be transformed from one state to another. Matter and energy are two sides of the same coin- Prakriti. Matter is energy in its grossest form. The iconic E=mc2 equation of Einstein ratified this belief.
The conviction of all manifestation being an expression of consciousness and energy is being further affirmed by the discovery of positive vacuum energy. Vacuum,or absolute nothingness too is teeming with energy, the so called quantum fluctuations.
One of the most fundamental principles in quantum mechanics, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, states that there's a limit to how much we can know about quantum particles, and as a result,  vacuum isn't empty,.  It's actually buzzing with its own strange energy, and filled with particle-antiparticle pairs that appear and disappear randomly. Even at Absolute Zero Kelvin, that's-273 degrees, there is what is called as Zero point. energy. It's inconceivable, but even this at this temperature, volume for volume, a cubic unit of this vacuum has roughly 10 raised to 80 times, the energy of the equivalent energy of  nuclear fuel of the same volume. Mind numbing indeed. Could this energy ever be harnessed?
Fossil fuels have been the scourge of mankind and could be the nemesis of life on and of the planet.
The search for the proverbial energy that suffuses the cosmos and harnessing the same without causing any environmental catastrophe  further got a shot in the arm by the irrefutable evidence of generating energy by attenuating the ubiquitous neutrinos.
The Ethereal Neutrino- One would naturally scoff at the idea that neutrinos could be harvested for electricity. The sun and other stars emit lots of other subatomic particles as well, and the neutrino is one form of solar-emitted subatomic particle that has puzzled scientists for generations.Traveling at the speed of light, invisible neutrinos bombard every surface on the Earth every hour of every day. They pass directly through the Earth, and come out the other side almost entirely unchanged.The neutrinos were considered to be massless, and therefore this avenue was largely left unexplored, till 2015, whent two scientists  stumbled on the same secret at the same time on opposite sides of the world: Neutrinos have mass, which means they also have energy.This discovery won Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald Nobel prizes in Physics, and it got physics to wake to up to the idea that neutrinos could be harvested for energy.
According to Einstein's relativity theory, everything in the universe that has mass must also have energy.
E=mc2 established the  equivalency and interconvertibiity of mass and energy. It was discovered that a previously-thought massless subatomic particle did, in fact, have mass (no matter how slight), then such a particle could be harnessed for energy.If such a particle bombarded the Earth 24×7  all through the day and night and was capable of traveling through almost every substance,  this energy could be harnessed constantly without any "curtailment".
          Scientists have  now successfully been intercepting these neutrinos briefly as they pass through the planet. Scientists at the Neutrino Energy Group are harvesting some of the mass that these passing particles possess and transforming it into energy.
 The U.S. Department of Energy has announced massive neutrino research programs, At present, neutrinovoltaic technology has been demonstrated to be operable in laboratory settings. It's possible to extract electrical energy from the kinetic energy of passing neutrinos, and the work has now begun to scale neutrinovoltaic energy production up by developing the next generation of energy-generating, neutrino-capturing devices. TheNeutrino Energy Group expects neutrinovoltaic technology to be fully accessible and dispersed throughout consumer populations. As we Skyped with one of the pioneers of this technology -Holger Thorsten Schubart  from the beautiful hills of Mount Abu, he revealed the basics of this perpetual energy source.
The concept was to attenuate  this  constant stream of neutrinos by making them pass through a tight lattice of silicone doped graphene coated on an Aluminium strip. These neutrinos dissipated their kinetic energy by displacing an electron and we were spell bound to see him power up a pocket calculator by connecting it to this strip. It was indeed very awe inspiring to see this device operate on an unending free limitless source of energy. It might be a while, before this could translate into powering up larger devices, but the scaling up process might just be a matter of time, considering the leaps that scientists have been making to evolve an existing technical breakthrough to the next level.
Shiva had indeed lured Shakti in this cosmic dance to redeem his creation from extinction.

Dr. Deepak Ranade.

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