THE CORREA PAGD TECHNOLOGY:
AN INTRODUCTION BY HAROLD ASPDEN

I have been invited to say a few words of introduction for the video presentation by Paulo and Alexandra Correa which follows. What you will see is a quite remarkable achievement because the video shows how their ingenuity and dedication have made possible something which scientists regard as impossible, namely the generation of electric power as if one is drawing energy from nowhere.

Their invention harnesses the energy of a pulsed electrical discharge in what you might regard as a kind of lamp, a lamp which glows but feeds more electrical power back into its supply circuit than it draws with each pulsation. It is a quite incredible discovery, but yet it is a reality.

The technical field involved is that of electrodynamics, a subject which concerns the interaction of electric currents, and you will see that in Dr. Correa's introduction he couples my name with the formulation of a new law of electrodynamics that he had seen in my published work and which had, I am pleased to say, been a source of inspiration in helping to understand the mystery of what he and his wife Alexandra had discovered in their experiments.

So, for the benefit of physicists who might be shown this video, it is appropriate if I describe a little about the relevant historical background concerning electrodynamics and my efforts at a time before I had even heard of the Correas' research project.

Almost all of the technology of the electrical power industry is based on the discoveries of the 19th century. The basic laws of physics governing the subject were all developed in a span of three decades ranging from 1820 to 1850. Oersted, Ampère, Faraday, Neumann, Fechner and Weber are names of the key players involved.

Their formulations were based on interpreting experiments on how electric current flow in wire circuits interacted in communicating force and transferring energy. This was, of course, long before the discovery of the electron and its role as a current carrier in those wire circuits. The essential feature present in those experiments was that the current flow was always around a closed circuit and did not involve electric discharges across circuit gaps.

Once Oersted announced in 1820 that he had discovered how electric current flow in a wire circuit can interact with a magnet to produce a force, Ampère came immediately onto the scene by showing that flow of current in two parallel wires develops a force between them. Within 3 years, by 1823, Ampère had formulated a basic law of electrodynamics which satisfied all the empirical data known at the time but yet which needed to rely on one further assumption. That assumption, in declaring forces had to be in balance, precluded all possibility of there being any energy inflow from a source extraneous to the interacting circuits.

In effect, by that assumption, what the Correas have discovered experimentally was assumed to be impossible ab initio by Ampère in 1823.

Ampère's law was immediately accepted by his contemporaries. As one writer stated, in his book Early Electrodynamics published in 1965: "At the beginning of the year 1820 nothing was known of the magnetic action of an electric current. By 1826 the theory for steady currents had been completely worked out. Since then, though newer methods made have made the handling of the mathematical apparatus simpler and more concise, nothing fundamental has been changed."

Onward efforts immediately following that 1826 period arose from the interest in electromagnetic induction by Faraday and the work of Neumann and Fechner which inspired Weber to formulate a new law of electrodynamics that aimed to clarify the picture by linking that force with electrostatic interaction between electric charge and the Coulomb force law. This was pre-1850 and the subject saw little development in the 100 years which followed.

On the practical side, 'rules of thumb' were adopted once the notion of a magnetic field came into the picture, rules that apply only in a restricted sense, such as to the closed circuit interaction of current flow in wire, but rules which work, and work well. In testimony of this we have seen how our electrical power industry has grown and been successful, and I assure you that electrical design engineers never ever use Ampère's law or Weber's law in their work, even though they have confined their field of activity to the territory restricted by that assumption I have already mentioned.

Now, back in the mid 19th century period, we are told that Faraday had been fascinated by the way in which colourful electric discharges replace sparks as the pressure of gas is reduced in a vacuum tube carrying electric current. He discovered that the glow discharge moves towards the anode and recedes from the cathode to leave what came to be known as the 'Faraday dark space' - a sign that whatever was conveying the current was not part of a steady flow in the vicinity of that cathode. Here was current flow of a kind different from that in wires, the basis of Ampère's empirical formulation.

I read in that book I mentioned, Early Electrodynamics, in its chapter IV entitled 'The Critics', that Ampère's law had been called into question because it required closed circuit conditions, but yet a circuit could have an air gap that might affect the action. (I am thinking here of that vacuum tube of Faraday as a circuit component.) The book reports that Maxwell, in 1873 in his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, discussed this very issue by noting: "It might be suggested that in the case of the current of discharge by a spark we might have a current forming an open finite line, but according to the views of this book even this case is that of a closed circuit."

Do keep in mind that in 1873 the electron had yet to be discovered, and there was no certain knowledge of what it was that carried electric current through those wires and certainly not across those spark gaps - and, more particularly, not in an electrical discharge through gas in a discharge tube such as the Correas were to use in their experiments. So here was a weakness in the way Maxwell had disposed of that closed circuit concern, especially in view of the 'Faraday dark space' phenomenon.

By 1876 there was talk of 'cathode rays' and by 1879 these were shown to be deflected by a magnet and assumed to be streams of negative particles, and were seen as resembling a procession of ions which were then emerging in the field of chemical electrolysis.

One can therefore begin to see that even back in 1879 the theory of electrodynamics needed to take account, not just of the interaction of current, but also of the inertial mass differences of the charge carriers conveying that current.

But what of Weber's modification of Ampère's law and that basic assumption which ruled out energy transfer extraneous to the interacting circuits? Here, the history of the subject is important and I draw attention to these two volumes that I have in front of me. They are by Sir Edmund Whittaker and are entitled History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity. In volume No. 1 on page 203 we are told that, concerning Weber's theory, which dates from 1846, the critics had denied that: " his law of force could be reconciled with the principle of conservation of energy."

So you see here the clear implication that tapping energy as if from nowhere is hidden in formulations of electrodynamic law. Whittaker declares in his book that he can see a way of avoiding that objection but only, as he puts it, to find "that a more serious one now presents itself". He finds that the occurrence of a negative sign before an energy term in the formula "implies that an electric charge behaves as if its mass were negative, so that in certain circumstances its velocity might increase indefinitely under the action of a force opposed to the motion."

Whittaker then moves on in his historical account with the simple statement: "Leaving this objection unanswered ..." and so we are left floating in a void with no version of a law of electrodynamics that links with Coulomb's Law and precludes anomalous energy activity. The field remains open for onward discovery. Can one then be surprised to hear that the Correas have now made that discovery?

This is the background to the subject of electrodynamics, a field in which I took an interest from the time of my own Ph.D. research years. I note that Whittaker's A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity was first published in 1910 and in its revised and enlarged edition in 1951, the latter being the text from which I have quoted. Whittaker was then an Honorary Research Fellow of Trinity College, in Cambridge in England, the venue of Sir Isaac Newton, and I was at Trinity College in that year 1951 pursuing my research project on a problem concerning anomalous magnetic energy phenomena. My research was telling me that the aether could not be ignored and it could react magnetically as if it were an independent source of electrical charge in motion.

That interest of mine was later to lead to a new formulation of the law of electrodynamics, guided by the then-reported experimental cathode reaction force anomalies found using cold cathode discharge devices, the point being that current flow around a closed circuit can comprise that of electrons in one circuit segment and that of heavy ions in another circuit segment. The law which I formulated avoided the assumption made by Ampère in favour of one which said that no two interacting current circuit elements can induce rotation by their sole interaction and incorporated the effect attributable to any difference in mass of the interacting charge carriers. It is the law which was published in a peer-reviewed periodical 33 years ago (1969) in the Journal of the Franklin Institute and the one which Paulo Correa refers to in the video presentation which now follows.

It allows energy to transfer by induction processes to and from the environment of the interacting circuit components and, along with certain other factors pertaining to the aether, helps in the understanding of why the Correa technology is successful in generating electrical power by tapping aether energy.

The message I stress is that our physics community still relies on an old-fashioned notion of electrodynamic theory that was not updated when we came to understand how electricity is really conveyed around circuits and across discharge gaps in those circuits, such as across the Faraday dark space region of a discharge tube. We know a great deal, but until we face up to answering that 'unanswered objection' raised by Sir Edmund Whittaker and deciphering the energy anomalies implicit in electrodynamic theory, helped along by the experimental findings of Paulo and Alexandra Correa, we live in ignorance of what might be possible in the future on the energy front. Our physics community must not ignore what the Correa evidence reveals.

Thank you for your attention.