The problem is that the theory puts white dwarfs' magnetic fields at 100,000 tesla or more, well beyond humanity's reach.Dr Murdin built his own little white dwarf to see if the theory looked good.
With a group of Tesla and SpaceX engineers Musk released an alpha-level design that went at least part of the way to working out how it would operate.
This has rung true for revolutionary inventors, from Nikola Tesla to the South Africa-born Elon Musk.
"BP could score a PR victory by releasing this information, in the same way that Tesla released some of their energy patents to boost innovation in the sector.
The "war of the currents" Edison waged on Westinghouse and Tesla might then have had a different outcome, with DC the victor and AC remembered (if it were remembered at all) as an interesting but stillborn experiment.
IMAGINE what might have happened if, back in the 1880s, Thomas Edison had devoted his prodigious engineering talents to perfecting a direct-current transformer instead of wasting his energy disparaging the upstart alternating-current system from Europe that was being championed in America by George Westinghouse and his Serbian-American adviser, Nikola Tesla.
In that sense, Westinghouse and Tesla remain the victors of the war of the currents.
The co-founder of PayPal, and developer of the Tesla, the first modern electric sports car, has long wanted to get into the space business as well.
Tesla recently reported a $46m profit for the fourth quarter of 2013 and it is forecasting faster growth when it launches production of the Model X electric sport-utility vehicle later this year.The real breakthrough could come by 2017 with the more mainstream Model E expected to carry a price tag of less than half of the Model S, which is priced at up to $110,000.
Like the Tesla (which is based on a small Lotus), the Evora does not need a gearbox.
But Aptera and Tesla have things in common.
