Sava's Place

Scientists in America think they’ve discovered a way of dispensing with cables for the distribution of power from plug socket to laptop. All I can say is that it’s about time! What took you so long?

It’s always been a source of annoyance to me: we can get on the Internet wirelessly, sync our phones wirelessly, listen to music wirelessly, but at some point this world of wireless wizardry falls apart when the ‘You are now running on critical battery’ warning pops up. I hate that warning with a passion.

Well no more! OK, maybe for a while, but the end of cables is in sight. How? Well, thanks to a little thing called ‘resonance’ – obviously!

Dr Marin Soljacic, lead scientist on the project, stated that it could work in a room, be scaled up to work in factories, or scaled down to work at a microscopic level. Now that, my friends, would be something worth paying for!

Essentially, and I’m no physicist so forgive me for simplifying it somewhat, it involves two objects with the same ‘resonant frequency’ being close enough to each other for their energy tails to form a tunnel that transfers energy from one to the other. You can read all about it here, but in the meantime, Dr Soljacic concluded:

Hence, a simple copper antenna designed to have long-lived resonance could transfer energy to a laptop with its own antenna resonating at the same frequency. The computer would be truly wireless.

Any energy not diverted into a gadget or appliance is simply reabsorbed.

Bring it on, Dr Soljacic, an expectant world awaits!