A couple years ago, I went to visit my buddy Sonny White at the Limitless Space Institute in Houston. A small lab where they have made discoveries in advanced physics, using the Casimir effect for warp drive. Faster than light travel is incredibly cool stuff, but remains science fiction that we can’t yet implement.
Laying on the desk by his atomic force microscope was a computer chip with some alligator clips hanging off of it. Sonny off-handedly said “this is kind of cool” and hooked it up to a voltage meter. It wasn’t much, but you could see that some juice was coming out of the chip. There was no battery in the circuit. No power source of any kind. Sonny had invented a way to get energy using the Casimir effect.
Me (losing my cool demeanor): “Sonny, this is fucking incredible — you can make a battery that never needs to be charged!“
Since then, Casimir spun out of the lab and we got to be one of Sonny’s first investors. The battery is produced in a chip fab and will take some time and engineering work to scale up and develop for the market.
All your physicist friends were taught that the Casimir effect can’t produce energy, so have them listen to Sonny talk about it on this obscure podcast: