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By Thomas Westerholm
Life & Trends Reporter
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For nearly two centuries, scientists have speculated whether the Earth's rotation could be tapped as a source of electricity.
Now, researchers at Princeton University say they have shown it can—just not in a useful amount at this stage.
Using a hollow cylinder of manganese-zinc ferrite, the team was able to produce a faint electric current by aligning the device precisely with Earth's magnetic field and rotation.
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The breakthrough validates an idea first explored by Michael Faraday in 1832, who theorized that a conductor moving through Earth's magnetic field might generate a current. Though he failed, his theory inspired generations of scientists.
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The Challenge
The core of the challenge lies in a quirk of physics.
Under most conditions, any electric potential induced in a rotating conductor gets canceled by an opposing internal electric field.
But the Princeton team, led by astrophysicist Christopher Chyba, found a way around this: they used a magnetically "soft" material with a low magnetic Reynolds number and crafted it into a hollow shape that distorts the internal magnetic field just enough to break the usual symmetry.
"We predicted that this should be possible [...] back in 2016," Chyba told Newsweek in an email. "However, that paper got very little notice.
"One group in the Netherlands tried to test our predictions with some experiments, but the experiments did not in fact satisfy our paper's criteria for generating voltage.
"So we decided to do the experiment ourselves."
In their experiment, published in Physical Review Research, the team reported measuring a tiny but measurable voltage of about 17 microvolts—less than one-thousandth the power of a hearing-aid battery.
However, the importance of the work is not in the power output—it's in proving that the phenomenon is real.
"What's needed now—as we say at the end of our 2025 paper—is for another, independent group to try to replicate our experiments," Chyba told Newsweek.
"If the effect is successfully reproduced by another group, then the effect needs to be scaled up. Our equations show how to do that.
"But there is, obviously, a difference between an equation that predicts how to get to higher voltages and actually demonstrating that in the lab and showing that it works.
"If the effect is real and scaling behaves the way our equations say, then the possibility becomes real."
What to Know
The device functioned by aligning with both the Earth's magnetic field and rotational axis at the Princeton lab.
Several tests, including rotating the cylinder in different orientations and repeating the experiment at a separate location, confirmed the effect.
What People Are Saying
"A word of caution: at this laboratory scale, the voltages are tens of microvolts, and it is very easy to make mistakes when measuring such low voltages," Chyba said.
"Nearly all of our 2025 paper is devoted to the controls and tests we put in place to try to ensure we weren't making a mistake in our measurements.
"You can't do these low-voltage experiments in a 'quick and dirty' way—or if you do, your results are unlikely to mean much."
Chyba added that this work began when he and a colleague attempted to understand electrical heating of the moons of Jupiter.
"This led us to ask lots of different questions, and we finally realized that some of our ideas could be tested in the laboratory—so we built our own small laboratory to test them," he added.
"But that's how basic research works—your initial idea may not seem to have any practical implications, but one thing leads to another.
"Universities are where most basic research happens; some happens in museums, some in government laboratories, some in nonprofits, and some in industry.
"But most new ideas don't pan out, so universities, rather than industry, are more likely to support scientists doing basic research.
"If we want the United States to stay at the forefront of science and technology, the U.S. government has to keep supporting basic research at universities."
What's Next
The immediate next step is replication. Other labs will need to confirm the findings independently.
As for practical use, the voltages are far too low to be useful now, but future experiments could attempt to increase the voltages.
Chyba said the team hopes to attempt some "scaling experiments".
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