Imagine stealing energy from a black hole… without the black hole.
No spinning parts.
No impossible speeds.
No spaceship anywhere near an event horizon.
Just a ring sitting still on a lab bench in New York.
That's exactly what physicists at CUNY just pulled off.
Back in 1969, Sir Roger Penrose made a wild claim.
If a particle falls into a black hole's ergosphere — the zone where spacetime itself gets dragged around by the spin — it can split in two.
One half vanishes forever.
The other half escapes… carrying more energy than it started with.
Free energy, straight from a black hole's rotation.
Physicist Yakov Zel'dovich later said the same trick should work on light and radio waves too.
Only problem?
Nobody could test it.
Copying a black hole's rotation on Earth means spinning something faster than physics allows.
Real materials would simply tear apart.
Here's the twist.
CUNY's team, led by Andrea Alù, didn't spin anything.
They built a stationary ring out of engineered metamaterials.
👉 Then they timed the electrical properties of components around the ring to shift in sequence — creating the illusion of motion.
A wave pattern that behaves exactly like something rotating faster than light.
Without a single moving part.
Stay with that for a second.
They basically hacked spacetime's rulebook using timing tricks and circuitry.
When waves with the right rotational signature hit the ring, something remarkable happened.
They didn't bounce off weaker.
They came out amplified.
Stronger than they went in.
Exactly what Penrose predicted. Exactly what Zel'dovich calculated.
Confirmed. In a lab. In 2026.
Published in Nature.
This isn't only about black holes anymore.
The same amplification trick could reshape everyday tech:
The team's next move? Shrinking the device and testing it with light instead of radio waves.
Funded partly by the US Department of Defense.
Still years from your smartphone.
But the physics is no longer theoretical.
Fifty-six years after Penrose scribbled the idea down…
a black hole just got recreated on a desk.
That's all for now!
