Only the foolhardy tend to propose ideas to generate near-limitless energy. Yet that鈥檚 what one Russian physicist has done, and rather than dismissing his proposal out of hand, some experts have welcomed it as 鈥渢hought-provoking鈥�.
That doesn鈥檛 mean the idea is likely to bear fruit any day soon. 鈥淚鈥檓 afraid we will need to obtain a quantity of a hypothetical material known as mirror matter,鈥� says Zurab Silagadze of Novosibirsk State University, who dreamed up the scheme.
Some theories of fundamental particles imply that every particle must have a mirror partner 鈥� that an electron is twinned with a mirror electron, for instance. If such mirror matter exists, it would hardly interact with ordinary matter. Some even say it may account for the universe鈥檚 鈥渄ark鈥� matter. If such matter could be captured, Silagadze says it could then be used to generate near-endless amounts of energy.
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If mirror matter were placed in a reservoir of ordinary matter, it would weakly absorb heat from its surroundings, which it would re-radiate as mirror heat in the form of mirror photons before it had a chance to interact once more with the ordinary matter. This rapid and irretrievable loss of heat would cool the reservoir, and if another reservoir of ordinary matter, initially at the same temperature, were placed alongside it, heat could flow from one to the other, allowing energy to be extracted from the system as useful work.
鈥淭he process will go on almost indefinitely, perpetuating a temperature difference and enabling work to be done. With a mirror-matter heat engine like this, we could extract near-limitless work,鈥� says Silagadze. His calculations show that the proposal would not violate the second law of thermodynamics.
鈥淭he idea is simply to exploit the cold mirror world as a heat sink, just as our generators use cold water,鈥� says Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Silagadze鈥檚 paper has been accepted for publication in the journal Acta Physica Polonica B. If it stands up to further scrutiny then two further, and not inconsequential, challenges must be faced. The existence of mirror matter must be proved and, once this has been achieved, some must be found.
鈥淭he basic idea is simply to exploit the cold mirror world as a heat sink, just as many of our generators use cold water鈥�
