On Mon, Jul 28, 1997 at 07:31:01PM -0000, Secret Squirrel wrote:
IBM have published a communications scheme that claims to recover energy normally lost - it was on their website a few months ago. I skipped reading it at the time because it sounded dotty.
A few years ago an engineer at one of the weapons labs found a new solution to Maxwells equations. This was briefly reported in the general press, and seemed to imply that the solutions found allowed for soliton-like wave packets. Some time later there were experiments reported using water tanks with specially shaped wave generators that were trying to create a water-wave analog. The article describing these experiments speculated, if I remember correctly, that special antenna geometry and manipulation of the input signal might be used to generate a electromagnetic wave equivalent. There was also brief speculation about uses for such a device -- beamed energy packets, for communications, or, at high power, for energy transfer. Or weapons. Anyone else remember this?