[FilosofumRex]

Earth's rotation has been slowing down despite principle of conservation of angular momentum, at about 2 mille-sec/century. Dinos had an hour shorter days than we do now.

I'm not an EE, but isn't this related to Tesla's last invention which bankrupted him - I believe he was working on electricity generation from thin air.

[qnleigh]

It's slowing down mostly because of drag induced by tides, which involve the sun and the moon. The total system including the earth, moon, sun and everything else does conserve angular momentum.

But this paper seems to imply that Earth, isolated from evening else in the solar system, could be made to slow down. This does seem like a violation of conservation of angular momentum...

[fpoling]

This is poorly discussed in the article and AFAICS it reaches wrong conclusion.

I think the energy comes from weakening of the magnetic field and the energy stored within it, not from slowing down earth rotation. Earth as the result may rotate faster as the moment stored in the field will be transferred back to Earth as in the example with a sphere from the article.

[qnleigh]

That would make so much more sense. So then the comments about only slowing down Earth's rotation by a few ms/century. It would deplete Earth's magnetic field, and likely on a much faster timescale.

This would not be good...

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I once read a book (Signalz, by F. Paul Wilson), where someone got transmitted power working, and it was part of ushering in eldritch dimension-dwellers. In that book, Tesla was part of some kind of dark wizard cabal.

Don’t remember, exactly. It was a while ago.