Galt's motor was, of course fictional. When I read the book, I "suspended disbelief" for the sake of the story. In a larger sense, however, "Galt's motor" might be one of those nifty backyard thorium reactors I've heard about. Of course in today's regulatory environment, you would need a staff of several hundred engineers and lawyers to get a license to operate it!

No one has ever explained to me how lightning works. I know air has a breakdown voltage, and once it's exceeded the electricity appears to me to behave completely differently from how it behaves in a wire or semiconductor. I knew a guy in college who had a PT job at a lightning research site, but everything I've learned is just folklore from guys who work with antennas a lot.

When I was in high school I had a pretty good antenna on my parents' house. When I wasn't using it, sometimes I kept it hooked up to an analog field strength meter. The needle would always deflect some. Occasionally I'd see huge spikes, nearly pinning the needle. I had no spectrum analyzer, so I never found out the source.

With a good antenna, you can easily deliver a solid fraction of a mW into a 50-ohm load. A phone charger needs about a watt to do any significant charging, more like 5W in a typical charger. I agree with his thing in principle, but it's thousands of times the power required.

A typical radio station transmits thousands of watts in all directions. Typically you need to catch about a billionth of a watt to get good clear reception.

and yet we hear nothing about antennas in AS.....
what I wish is that we could capture the energy in
clouds before lightning strikes, and store it for use
as needed. . almost became an electrical engineer
over this. -- j
.

This guy knows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vko8pfnX...