ZPEnergy.com - Energy from the vacuum?

On the Yahoo free_energy list there is an interesting discussion under the thread "PUTHOFF WEIGHS IN - Fw: Query regarding your paper". (See the paper "Extracting Energy and Heat from the Vacuum" in the Downloads section). Here is a letter from Hal Puthoff:

Ted's question: I'm not expert but thought you might try to clarify what your hypothesis is and if you think it could supply energy to the world. As you know "cold fusion" was investigated several years ago also, but no proof seems to be found.

Hal Puthoff's response to Ted,

With regard to the latter, indeed, all our investigations regarding cold fusion have come up with naught (see www.earthtech.org), though we don't rule it out absolutely.

With regard to the former (ZPE extraction), to date no viable technique has been found, though we do not absolutely rule it out either. True, if Casimir plates are allowed to collapse, some energy results, but it can't be recycled effectively as it takes just as much energy to pull the plates apart as was obtained during the collapse.

You can then consider that if someone continuously supplied you with Casimir plates, you let them collapse then trashed them instead of recycling them, you would come out ahead with the trashed Casimir plates being the "ash" from the "Casimir plate fuel."

Next step is to consider Casimir pinch effect in a non-neutral plasma where a non-neutral filament or ball is permitted to collapse, yield energy, then dissipate however it dissipates as you make new plasma, then in principle one could consider that, providing the energy used to ignite the plasma process was less than what was obtained, one would have the ZPE equivalent of a nuclear fission reactor.

The dissipated "plasma ash" components would presumably eventually be reconstituted by environmental thermal input, but there are some dicey thermodynamics here that are not yet certain.

One experiment we tried at the synchrotron at the Univ. of Wisconsin had the following logic. Suppose you had hot ball bearings in the sun that could roll thru a shaded pipe, give up some heat energy to a heat exchanger, then roll out the other side and get reheated by the sun. Then circulate around again. In the ZPE case (with ZPE playing the role of the sun in the above analogy), as a first step we circulated hydrogen molecules between Casimir plates to reduce the ZPE environment (i.e., shade ZPE), looking for evidence that the dissociation energy would be greater from the now (hypothesized ZPE-driven) reduced ground state energy level. (See www.earthtech.org for details.) The experiment gave some tantalizing results, but no real proof that the ground state energy had been reduced, but we had signal to noise problems that were not completely resolved, leaving the result in ambiguity.

So what is the bottom line? We do not rule out the possibility of ZPE conversion, but we do not guarantee it either, and in any case no engineering embodiment/scheme has yet come up a winner. But we continue looking. To quote the Russian science historian Podolni, "It would be just as presumptuous to deny the feasibility of useful application as it would be irresponsible to guarantee such application."

Best regards,
Hal Puthoff, PhD
Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin