The whirling dervishes are/were a sub-set of Sufis who believed that they could become closer to a creator through the use of an internal ecstatic electricity created by donning heavy wool garments and spinning in place. When I think of electron dances, planetary dances, galactic rotation and all the other "sit-n-spin" games practiced by the universe, I have to wonder if they might have chanced upon something.
I am not a practitioner of dervish spinning, but over the years I have grown wary about claiming that any religion is incorrect, incomplete, or incomprehensible. Even a quick glance at a pie chart of religions will show that at least 66% of those professing belief in a religion must be incorrect in their beliefs. If you break the dominant religion of Christianity into subsets, then the percentage gets even larger. When claiming that adherents to a religion are deluded, the person judging claims, at a minimum, that the believer has incomplete education, and delusional thinking that borders on mental illness. The concept of a world full of mentally ill delusional and uneducated people is enough to make anyone's head spin, so obviously those dervishes were on to something...
Actually, I didn't bring spinning up to play dreidel, dreidel, but because I just came across a basic concept of electricity and magnetism that has been outside of my experience, and I'm puzzled why it hasn't been utilized more than it has.
Many folks who play with electricity know about Wimhurst generators, those counter-rotating spinning disks that can generate serious static electricity, as shown in early science fiction films. Yet there is another even simpler generator that is far more powerful. I'll describe it in a paragraph:
Take a spinning disk of steel or copper, the larger the better, the faster spinning the better. Place an electric pick-off at the axle, and another at the outside edge. Put the south pole of a magnet on one side, put the north pole on the other side. It will generate direct current electricity. The fact that it can generate electricity at all is startling, since there are no wires cutting magnetic lines of force, but a solid disk of metal, which you would think would evenly dissipate any electric potential. Instead, the electrons are "thrown" to the outside or inside of the spinning disk depending on the direction of rotation of the disk.
What is even more startling is the amount of current that such a device can generate. An early flywheel generator of this type stored 500 MEGAjoules of energy and was capable of creating a current flow of two MEGAamperes. One megajoule is the energy of a one ton block moving at one hundred miles per hour. The energy of five hundred of those was stored in a disk about ten feet in diameter.
What cutting edge publication was the source of my initial knowledge about this device? None other than a Popular Science magazine from April of 1916. That is not a misprint. 1916. Whenever the collective ego of the present electronic wonder age begins to overwhelm, an exploration of the past can bring balance.
In case you want to learn more, do your web search on "Faraday disk." And respect your elders.
