There is a trick in theoretical physics that sounds like a con: a completely stationary device, bolted to a laboratory table, can behave as though it is spinning so fast that no real material could survive the rotation. And from that impossible motion, it can extract energy.
The researchers at CUNY’s Advanced Science Research Center did not build a black hole. What they built was a ring of electronic resonators — stationary hardware, nothing moving, nothing spinning — and rapidly adjusted their properties in a synchronized sequence. The result was a traveling pattern that made electromagnetic waves experience the system as though it were rotating at extraordinary speed. Waves with the right rotational character extracted energy and became amplified. The energy came from nowhere visible. The device never moved. The waves simply took what the geometry offered.
This is the Penrose-Zel’dovich process, or at least its essential physics. Roger Penrose proposed in 1969 that a rotating black hole could donate some of its rotational energy to any particle brave enough to enter the ergosphere — that region where spacetime itself is dragged around faster than light. The black hole would slow down, imperceptibly, and something else would gain speed. The hole would not lose mass, only spin. It would give up what it had been hoarding since its violent birth: the angular momentum of a collapsing star, frozen in place and time.
The idea has haunted astrophysics for half a century because it is beautiful and because it is almost useless. The ergosphere is not a place you visit. The engineering required to extract useful energy from a black hole’s rotation is the kind of problem that makes Dyson spheres look like IKEA furniture. And yet the physics is real. Black holes are not merely sinks. They are batteries. They store the energy of their formation in a form that can, in principle, be tapped.
What the CUNY team did was not engineering. It was translation. They asked whether a tabletop device could speak the same mathematical language as a Kerr black hole, and the answer was yes. A stationary ring of resonators, properly timed, creates the same conditions for electromagnetic waves that the ergosphere creates for matter. The waves behave as though they are in a rotating frame. They draw energy from a system that is not moving. The amplification is modest now, but the principle is what matters: the boundary between a theoretical impossibility and a practical demonstration has been crossed.
I keep thinking about the word synthetic in the paper’s description. Synthetic ultrafast rotation. It is not rotation at all. It is the signature of rotation, the mathematical residue, the ghost of motion impressed on a stationary medium. The hardware does not spin. The field does not spin. Only the relationship between them spins. And from that relationship, energy emerges.
There is something here about how the universe works that I find difficult to articulate. We think of energy as something stored in things — in fuel, in height, in motion, in mass. But the CUNY device extracts energy from a pattern. From a phase relationship. From the geometry of how waves encounter a structure that is not moving but pretends to be. The energy is not in the resonators. It is not in the electromagnetic field. It is in the way they are arranged in time.
This is not merely black hole physics on a chip. It is a hint that energy itself might be more relational than we have assumed. The Penrose process always sounded like a cosmic curiosity: a theoretical mechanism for advanced civilizations to harvest dying stars. The tabletop version makes it stranger. If a stationary device can give up energy to a wave because the wave thinks the device is rotating, then what does it mean for energy to be “real”? The wave is not fooled. It is simply responding to the boundary conditions of its world. The boundary conditions are real. The energy is real. The rotation is not.
Penrose is 94 now. He won the Nobel Prize in 2020 for black hole physics, though the citation was for the singularity theorems, not for this process. The Zel’dovich of the Penrose-Zel’dovich process is Yakov Zel’dovich, the Soviet physicist who died in 1987, who understood that a rotating black hole amplifies scattered waves in much the same way that a rotating cylinder would. Zel’dovich proposed it. Penrose proved it was possible. The CUNY team built it in a room.
The paper says the work has implications for communications, optics, photonics, quantum technologies. This is probably true and probably beside the point. The point is that a piece of stationary hardware, properly tricked, can behave like the most violent object in the universe. The ergosphere is not a place. It is a condition. It is a relationship between geometry and time. And it turns out that relationship can be reproduced on a table in Manhattan, with a power supply and a signal generator.
I do not know what to do with this information. I suspect no one does yet. The device amplifies waves modestly. It does not solve energy crises. It does not make black holes accessible. But it does something to the imagination. It collapses the distance between the cosmic and the tabletop. It suggests that the most exotic physics in the universe might not require exotic conditions — only the right pattern, the right timing, the right geometry.
The black hole spins. We cannot see it spin. We can only see what it does to the matter around it. The ring does not spin. We cannot see it not-spin. We can only see what the waves do when they encounter it. In both cases, the truth is in the behavior. The truth is always in the behavior. The rest is interpretation.
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