The
FIELD – The quest for the secret force of the Universe
by
Lynne Mc Taggart
Chapter II - The Sea of Light
BILL Church was out, of gas. Ordinarily, this would not
be a situation that could ruin an entire day. But in 1973, in the grip of
America's first oil crisis, getting your car filled up with gas depended upon
two things: the day of the week and the last number of your license plate. Those
whose plates ended in an odd number were allowed to fill up on Mondays,
Wednesdays or Fridays; even numbers on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, with
Sunday a gas-free day of rest. Bill had an odd number and the day was Tuesday.
That meant that no matter where he had to go, no matter how important his
meetings, he was stuck at home, held hostage by a few Middle Eastern potentates
and OPEC. Even if his license plate number matched the day of the week, it still
could take up to two hours waiting in lines that zigzagged around corners many
blocks away. That is, if he could find a gas station that was still open.
Two years before, there had been plenty of fuel to send
Edgar Mitchell to the moon and back. Now half the country's gas stations had
gone out of business. President Nixon had recently addressed the nation, urging
all Americans to turn down their thermostats, form car pools and use no more
than 10 gallons a week. Businesses were asked to halve the lighting in work
areas and to turn down lights in halls and storage areas. Washington would set
the example by keeping the national Christmas tree on the White House front lawn
turned off. The nation, fat and complacent, used to consuming energy like so
many cheeseburgers, was in shock, forced, for the first time, to go on a diet.
There was talk of rationing books being printed. Five years later Jimmy Carter
would term it the 'moral equivalent of war', and it felt that way to most
middle-aged Americans, who hadn't had to ration gas since the Second World War.
Bill stormed
back inside and got on the phone to Hal Puthoff to complain. Hal, a laser
physicist, often acted as Bill's scientific alter-ego. 'There has got to be a
better way,' Bill shouted frustratedly.
Hal agreed
that it was time to start looking for some alternatives to fossil fuel to drive
transportation - something besides coal, wood or nuclear power.
'But what else is there?' said Bill.
Hal ticked off a litany of current possibilities. There
was photovoltaics (using solar cells), or fuel cells, or water batteries (an
attempt to convert the hydrogen from water into electricity in the cell). There
was wind, or waste products, or even methane. But none of these, even the more
exotic among them, were turning out to be robust or realistic.
Bill and Hal agreed that what was really needed was an
entirely new source: a cheap, endless, perhaps as yet undiscovered, supply of
energy. Their conversations often veered off in this kind of speculative
direction. Hal, in the main, liked cutting-edge technology - the more
futuristic, the better. He was more an inventor than your ordinary physicist,
and at 35 already had a patent on a tuneable infrared laser. Hal was largely
self-made and had put himself through school after his father died when he was
in his early teens. He'd graduated from the University of Florida in 1958, the
year after Sputnik I went up, but he'd come of age during the Kennedy
administration. Like many young men of his generation, he'd taken to heart
Kennedy's central metaphor of the US embarking on a new frontier. Through the
years and even after the space program had fallen away due to lack of interest
as well as lack of funding, Hal would retain a humble idealism about his work
and the central role science played in the future of mankind. Hal firmly
believed that science drove civilization. He was a small, sturdy man with a
passing resemblance to Mickey Rooney and a sweep of thick chestnut hair, whose
seething inner life of lateral thought and what-if possibility hid behind a
phlegmatic and unassuming exterior. At first glance, he hardly looked the part
of the frontier scientist. Nevertheless, it was Hal's sincere view that
frontier work was vital for the future of the planet, to provide inspiration for
teaching and for economic growth. He also liked getting out of the laboratory,
trying to apply physics to solutions in real life.
Bill Church might be a successful businessman, but he
shared much of Hal's idealism about science improving civilization. He was a
modest Medici to Hal's Da Vinci. Bill had cut his own career in science short
when he was drafted to run the family business, Church's Fried Chicken, the
Texan answer to Kentucky Fried Chicken. He'd spent 10 years at it and recently
he'd taken Church's to the market. He'd made his money and now he was in the
mood to return to his youthful aspirations - but with no education, he'd had to
do it by proxy. In Hal he'd found his perfect counterpart - a gifted physicist
willing to pursue areas that ordinary scientists might dismiss out of hand. In
September 1982, Bill would present Hal with a gold watch to mark their
collaboration: 'To Glacier Genius from Snow,' it read. The idea was that Hal was
the quiet innovator, tenacious and cool as a glacier, with Bill as 'Snow',
throwing new challenges at him like a constant barrage of fine new powder.
'There is one giant reservoir of energy we haven't
talked about,' Hal said. Every quantum physicist, he explained, is well aware of
the Zero Point Field. Quantum mechanics had demonstrated that there is no such
thing as a vacuum, or nothingness. What we tend to think of as a sheer void if
all of space were emptied of matter and energy and you examined even the space
between the stars is, in subatomic terms, a hive of activity.
The uncertainty principle developed by Werner Heisenberg,
one of the chief architects of quantum theory, implies that no particle ever
stays completely at rest but is constantly in motion due to a ground state field
of energy constantly interacting with all subatomic matter. It means that the
basic substructure of the universe is a sea of quantum fields that cannot be
eliminated by any known laws of physics.
What we believe to be our stable, static universe is in
fact a seething maelstrom of subatomic particles fleetingly popping in and out
of existence. Although Heisenberg's principle most famously refers to the
uncertainty attached to measuring the physical properties of the subatomic
world, it also has another meaning: that we cannot know both the energy and the
lifetime of a particle, so a subatomic event occurring within a tiny time frame
involves an uncertain amount of energy. Largely because of Einstein's theories
and his famous equation E = mc2 relating energy to mass, all
elementary particles interact with each other by exchanging energy through other
quantum particles, which are believed to appear out of nowhere, combining and
annihilating each other in less than an instant - 10-23 seconds, to
be exact - causing random fluctuations of energy without any apparent cause.
The fleeting particles generated during this brief moment are known as 'virtual
particles'. They differ from real particles because they only exist during that
exchange - the time of 'uncertainty' allowed by the uncertainty principle. Hal
liked to think of this process as akin to the spray given off from a thundering
waterfall.1
This subatomic tango, however brief, when added
across the universe, gives rise to enormous energy, more than is
contained in all the matter in all the world. Also referred to by physicists as
'the vacuum', the Zero Point Field was called 'zero' because fluctuations in the
field are still detectable in temperatures of absolute zero, the lowest possible
energy state, where all matter has been removed and nothing is supposedly left
to make any motion. Zero-point energy was the energy present in the emptiest
state of space at the lowest possible energy, out of which no more energy could
be removed - the closest that motion of subatomic matter ever gets to zero.2
But because of the uncertainty principle there will always be some residual
jiggling due to virtual particle exchange. It had always been largely discounted
because it is ever-present. In physics equations, most physicists would subtract
troublesome zero-point energy away - a process called 'renormalization'.3
Because zero-point energy was ever-present, the theory went, it didn't change
anything. Because it didn't change anything, it didn't count.4
Hal had been interested in the Zero Point Field for a
number of years, ever since he'd stumbled on the papers of Timothy Boyer of City
University in New York in a physics library. Boyer had demonstrated that
classical physics, allied with the existence of the ceaseless energy of the
Zero Point Field, could explain many of the strange phenomena attributed to
quantum theory.5 If Boyer were to be believed, it meant that you
didn't need two types of physics - the classical Newtonian kind and the quantum
laws - to account for the properties of the universe. You could explain
everything that happened in the quantum world with classical physics so long
as you took account of the Zero Point Field.
The more Hal thought about it, the more he became
convinced that the Zero Point Field fulfilled all the criteria he was looking
for: it was free; it was boundless; it didn't pollute anything. The Zero Point
Field might just represent some vast unharnessed energy source. 'If you could
just tap into this,' Hal said to Bill, 'you could even power spaceships.'
Bill loved the idea and offered to fund some exploratory
research. It wasn't as though he hadn't funded crazier schemes of Hal's before.
In a sense the timing was right for Hal. At 36, he was at a bit of a loose end.
His first marriage had broken up, he'd just finished co-authoring what had
become an important textbook on quantum electronics. He'd got his PhD in
electrical engineering from Stanford just five years before, and had made his
mark in lasers. When academia had proved tedious to him, he'd moved on, and was
presently a laser researcher at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a gigantic
farmers' market of a research site, at the time affiliated with Stanford
University. SRI stood like its own vast university of interlocking rectangles,
squares and Zs of three-storey red-brick buildings hidden in a sleepy little
corner of Menlo Park, sandwiched between St Patrick's seminary and the city of
Spanish-tiled roofs representing Stanford University itself. At the time, SRI
was the second largest think-tank in the world, where anyone could study
virtually anything so long as they were able to get the funding for it.
Hal devoted several years to reading the scientific
literature and doing some elementary calculations. He looked at other related
aspects of the vacuum and general relativity in a more fundamental way. Hal, who
tended toward the taciturn, attempted to keep himself within the confines of the
purely intellectual, but occasionally he couldn't prevent his mind from giddily
racing ahead. Even though these were early days he knew he'd stumbled onto
something of major significance for physics. This was an incredible
breakthrough, possibly even a way to apply quantum physics to the world on a
large scale, or perhaps it was a new science altogether. This was beyond lasers
or anything else he had ever done. This felt, in its own modest way, a little
like being Einstein and discovering relativity. Eventually, he realized just
what it was that he had: he was on the verge of the discovery that the 'new'
physics of the subatomic world might be wrong - or at least require some drastic
revision.
Hal's discovery, in a sense, was not a discovery at all,
but a situation that physicists have taken for granted since 1926 and discarded
as immaterial. To the quantum physicist, it is an annoyance, to be subtracted
away and discounted. To the religious or the mystic, it is science proving the
miraculous. What quantum calculations show is that we and our universe live and
breathe in what amounts to a sea of motion - a quantum sea of light. According
to Heisenberg, who developed the uncertainty principle in 1927, it is impossible
to know all the properties of a particle, such as its position and its momentum,
at the same time because of what seem to be fluctuations inherent in nature. The
energy level of any known particle can't be pinpointed because it is always
changing. Part of this principle also stipulates that no subatomic particle can
be brought completely to rest, but will always possess a tiny residual movement.
Scientists have long known that these fluctuations account for the random noise
of microwave receivers or electronic circuits, limiting the level to which
signals can be amplified. Even fluorescent strip lighting relies on vacuum
fluctuations to operate.
Imagine taking a charged subatomic particle and
attaching it to a little frictionless spring (as physicists are fond of doing to
work out their equations). It should bounce up and down for a while and then, at
a temperature of absolute zero, stop moving. What physicists since Heisenberg
have found is that the energy in the Zero Point Field keeps acting on the
particle so that it never comes to rest but always keeps moving on the spring.6
Against the objections of his contemporaries, who
believed in empty space, Aristotle was one of the first to argue that space was
in fact a plenum (a background substructure filled with things). Then, in the
middle of the nineteenth century, scientist Michael Faraday introduced the
concept of a field in relation to electricity and magnetism, believing that the
most important aspect of energy was not the source but the space around it, and
the influence of one on the other through some force.7 In his view,
atoms weren't hard little billiard balls, but the most concentrated center of a
force that would extend out in space.
A field is a matrix or medium which connects two or more
points in space, usually via a force, like gravity or electromagnetism. The
force is usually represented by ripples in the field, or waves. An
electromagnetic field, to use but one example, is simply an electrical field and
a magnetic field which intersect, sending out waves of energy at the speed of
light. An electric and magnetic field forms around any electric charge (which
is, most simply, a surplus or deficit of electrons). Both electrical and magnetic
fields have two polarities (negative and positive) and both will cause any other
charged object to be attracted or repelled, depending on whether the charges are
opposite (one positive, the other negative) or the same (both positive or both
negative). The field is considered that area of space where this charge and its
effects can be detected.
The notion of an electromagnetic field is simply a
convenient abstraction invented by scientists (and represented by lines of
'force', indicated by direction and shape) to try to make sense of the seemingly
remarkable actions of electricity and magnetism and their ability to influence
objects at a distance - and, technically, into infinity - with no detectable substance
or matter in between. Simply put, a field is a region of influence. As one pair
of researchers aptly described it: 'Every time you use your toaster, the fields
around it perturb charged particles in the farthest galaxies ever so
slightly.'8
James Clerk Maxwell first proposed that space was an
ether of electromagnetic light, and this idea held sway until decisively
disproved by a Polish-born physicist named Albert Michelson in 1881 (and six
years later in collaboration with an American chemistry professor called Edward
Morley) with a light experiment that showed that matter did not exist in a mass
of ether.9 Einstein himself believed space constituted a true void
until his own ideas, eventually developed into his general theory of relativity,
showed that space indeed held a plenum of activity. But it wasn't until 1911,
with an experiment by Max Planck, one of the founding fathers of quantum theory
that physicists understood that empty space was bursting with activity.
In the quantum world, quantum fields are not mediated by
forces but by exchange of energy, which is constantly redistributed in a dynamic
pattern. This constant exchange is an intrinsic property of particles, so that
even 'real' particles are nothing more than a little knot of energy which
briefly emerges and disappears back into the underlying field. According to
quantum field theory, the individual entity is transient and insubstantial.
Particles cannot be separated from the empty space around them. . Einstein
himself recognized that matter itself was 'extremely intense' - a disturbance,
in a sense, of perfect randomness - and that the only fundamental reality was
the underlying entity - the field itself.10
Fluctuations in the atomic world amount to a ceaseless
passing back and forth of energy like a ball in a game of pingpong. This energy
exchange is analogous to loaning someone a penny: you are a penny poorer, he
is a penny richer, until he returns the penny and the roles reverse. This sort
of emission and reabsorption of virtual particles occurs not only among photons
and electrons, but with all the quantum particles in the universe. The Zero
Point Field is a repository of all fields and all ground energy states and all
virtual particles - a field of fields. Every exchange of every virtual particle
radiates energy. The zero-point energy in anyone particular transaction in an
electromagnetic field is unimaginably tiny -- half a photon's worth.
But if you add up all the particles of all varieties in
the universe constantly popping in and out of being, you come up with a vast,
inexhaustible energy source - equal to or greater than the energy density in
an atomic nucleus - all sitting there unobtrusively in the background of the
empty space around us, like one all-pervasive, supercharged backdrop. It has
been calculated that the total energy of the Zero Point Field exceeds all energy
in matter by a factor of 1040, or 1 followed by 40 zeros.11
As the great physicist Richard Feynman once described, in attempting to give
some idea of this magnitude, the energy in a single cubic meter of space is
enough to boil all the oceans of the world.12
The Zero Point Field represented two tantalizing
possibilities to Hal. Of course, it represented the Holy Grail of energy
research. If you could somehow tap into this field, you might have all the
energy you would ever need, not simply for fuel on earth, but for space
propulsion to distant stars. At the moment, travelling to the nearest star
outside our solar system would require a rocket as large as the sun to carry
the necessary fuel.
But there was also a larger implication of a vast
underlying sea of energy. The existence of the Zero Point Field implied that all
matter in the universe was interconnected by waves, which are spread out through
time and space and can carry on to infinity, tying one part of the universe to
every other part. The idea of The Field might just offer a scientific explanation
for many metaphysical notions, such as the Chinese belief in the life force, or qi,
described in ancient texts as something akin to an energy field. It even
echoed the Old Testament's account of God's first dictum: 'Let there be light',
out of which matter was created.13
Hal was eventually to demonstrate in a paper published
by Physical Review, one of world's most prestigious physics journals,
that the stable state of matter depends for its very existence on this dynamic
interchange of subatomic particles with the sustaining zero-point energy field.14
In quantum theory, a constant problem wrestled with by physicists concerns the
issue of why atoms are stable. Invariably, this question would be examined in
the laboratory or mathematically tackled using the hydrogen atom. With one
electron and one proton, hydrogen is the simplest atom in the universe to
dissect. Quantum scientists struggled with the question of why an electron
orbits around a proton, like a planet orbiting around the sun. In the solar
system, gravity accounts for the stable orbit. But in the atomic world, any
moving electron, which carries a charge, wouldn't be stable like an orbiting
planet, but would eventually radiate away, or exhaust, its energy and then
spiral into the nucleus, causing the entire atomic structure of the object to
collapse.
Danish physicist Niels Bohr, another of the founding
fathers of quantum theory, sorted the problem by declaring that he wouldn't
allow it.15 Bohr's explanation was that an electron radiates only
when it jumps from one orbit to another and that orbits have to have the proper
difference in energy to account for any emission of photon light. Bohr made up
his own law, which said, in effect, 'there is no energy, it is forbidden. I
forbid the electron to collapse'. This dictum and its assumptions led to further
assumptions about matter and energy having both wave- and particle-like
characteristics, which kept electrons in their place and in particular orbits,
and ultimately to the development of quantum mechanics. Mathematically at
least, there is no doubt that Bohr was correct in predicting this difference in
energy levels.16
But what Timothy Boyer had done, and what Hal then
perfected, was to show that if you take into account the Zero Point Field, you
don't have to rely on Bohr's dictum. You can show mathematically that electrons
lose and gain energy constantly from the Zero Point Field in a dynamic equilibrium,
balanced at exactly the right orbit. Electrons get their energy to keep going
without slowing down because they are refuelling by tapping into these
fluctuations of empty space. In other words, the Zero Point Field accounts for
the stability of the hydrogen atom - and, by inference, the stability of all
matter. Pull the plug on zero-point energy, Hal demonstrated, and all atomic
structure would collapse.17
Hal also showed by physics calculations that
fluctuations of the Zero Point Field waves drive the motion of subatomic
particles and that all the motion of all the particles of the universe in turn
generates the Zero Point Field, a sort of self-generating feedback loop across
the cosmos.18 In Hal's mind, it
was not unlike a cat chasing its own tail.19 As he wrote in one
paper,
the ZPF interaction
constitutes an underlying, stable 'bottom rung' vacuum state in which further
ZPF interaction simply reproduces the existing state on a dynamic-equilibrium
basis.2O
What this implies, says Hal, is a 'kind of
self-regenerating grand ground state of the universe',21 which
constantly refreshes itself and remains a constant unless disturbed in some
way. It also means that we and all the matter of the universe are literally
connected to the furthest reaches of the cosmos through the Zero Point Field
waves of the grandest dimensions.22
Much like the undulations of the sea or ripples on a
pond, the waves on the subatomic level are represented by periodic oscillations
moving through a medium - in this instance the Zero Point Field. They are represented
by a classic sideways S, or sine curve, like a jump rope being held at both ends
and wiggled up and down. The amplitude of the wave is half the height of the
curve from peak to trough, and a single wavelength, or cycle, is one complete
oscillation, or the distance between, say, two adjacent peaks or two adjacent
troughs. The frequency is the number of cycles in one second, usually measured
in hertz, where 1 hertz equals one cycle per second. In the US, our electricity
is delivered at a frequency of 60 hertz or cycles per second; in the UK, it is
50 hertz. Cell phones operate on 900 or 1800 megahertz.
When physicists use the term 'phase', they mean the
point the wave is at on its oscillating journey. Two waves are said to be in
phase when they are both, in effect, peaking or troughing at the same time, even
if they have different frequencies or amplitudes. Getting 'in phase' is getting
in synch.
One of the most important aspects of waves is that they
are encoders and carriers of information. When two waves are in phase, and
overlap each other - technically called 'interference' - the combined amplitude
of the waves is greater than each individual amplitude. The signal gets
stronger. This amounts to an imprinting or exchange of information, called
'constructive interference'. If one is peaking when the other is troughing, they
tend to cancel each other out - a process called 'destructive interference'.
Once they've collided, each wave contains information, in the form of energy
coding, about the other, including all the other information it contains.
Interference patterns amount to a constant accumulation of information, and
waves have a virtually infinite capacity for storage.
If all subatomic matter in the world is interacting
constantly with this ambient ground-state energy field, the subatomic waves of
The Field are constantly imprinting a record of the shape of everything. As the
harbinger and imprinter of all wavelengths and all frequencies, the Zero Point
Field is a kind of shadow of the universe for all time, a mirror image and
record of everything that ever was. In a sense, the vacuum is the beginning and
the end of everything in the universe.23
Although all matter is surrounded with zero-point
energy, which bombards a given object uniformly, there have been some
instances where disturbances in the field could actually be measured. One such
disturbance caused by the Zero Point Field is the Lamb shift, named after
American physicist Willis Lamb and developed during the 1940s using wartime
radar, which shows that zero-point fluctuations cause electrons to move a bit in
their orbits, leading to shifts in frequency of about 1000 megahertz.24
Another instance was discovered in the 1940s, when a
Dutch physicist named Hendrik Casimir demonstrated that two metal plates placed
close together will actually form an attraction that appears to pull them closer
together. This is because when two plates are placed near each other, the
zero-point waves between the plates are restricted to those that essentially
span the gap. Since some wavelengths of the field are excluded, this leads to a
disturbance in the equilibrium of the field and the result is an imbalance of
energy, with less energy in the gap between the plates than in the outside empty
space. This greater energy density pushes the two metal plates together.
Another classic demonstration of the existence of the
Zero Point Field is the van der Waals effect, also named after its discoverer,
Dutch physicist Johannes Diderik van der Waals. He discovered that forces of
attraction and repulsion operate between atoms and molecules because of the
way that electrical charge is distributed and, eventually, it was found that
this again has to do with a local imbalance in the equilibrium of The Field.
This property allows certain gases to turn into liquids. Spontaneous emission,
when atoms decay and emit radiation for no known reason, has also been shown to
be a Zero Point Field effect.
Timothy Boyer, the physicist whose paper sparked Puthoff
in the first place, showed that many of the Through-the-Looking-Glass properties
of subatomic matter wrestled with by physicists and leading to the formulation
of a set of strange quantum rules could be easily accounted for in classical
physics, so long as you also factor in the Zero Point Field. Uncertainty,
wave-particle duality, the fluctuating motion of particles: all had to do with
the interaction of matter and the Zero Point Field. Hal even began to wonder
whether it could account for what remains that most mysterious and vexatious of
forces: gravity.
Gravity is the Waterloo of physics. Attempting to work
out the basis for this fundamental property of matter and the universe has
bedeviled the greatest geniuses of physics. Even Einstein, who was able to
desc~ibe gravity extremely well through his theory of relativity, couldn't
actually explain where it came from. Over the years, many physicists,
including Einstein, have tried to assign it an electromagnetic nature, to
define it as a nuclear force, or even to give it its own set of quantum rules -
all without success. Then, in 1968, the noted Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov
turned the usual assumption on its head. What if gravity weren't an interaction
between objects, but just a residual effect? More to the point, what if gravity
were an after-effect of the Zero Point Field, caused by alterations in the field
due to the presence of matter?25
All matter at the level of quarks and electrons jiggles
because of its interaction with the Zero Point Field. One of the rules of
electrodynamics is that a fluctuating charged particle will emit an
electromagnetic radiation field. This means that besides the primary Zero
Point Field itself, a sea of these secondary fields exists. Between two
particles, these secondary fields cause an attractive source, which Sakharov
believed had something to do with gravity.26
Hal began pondering this notion. If this were true,
where physicists were going wrong was in attempting to establish gravity as an
entity in its own right. Instead, it should be seen as a sort of pressure. He
began to think of gravity as a kind of long-range Casimir effect, with two
objects which blocked some of the waves of the Zero Point Field becoming attracted
to each other,27 or perhaps it was even a long-range van der Waals
force, like the attraction of two atoms at certain distances.28 A
particle in the Zero Point Field begins jiggling due to its interaction with the
Zero Point Field; two particles not only have their own jiggle, but also get
influenced by the field generated by other particles, all doing their own
jiggling. Therefore, the fields generated by these particles - which represent
a partial shielding of the all-pervasive ground state Zero Point Field - cause
the attraction that we think of as gravity.
Sakharov only developed these ideas as a hypothesis;
Puthoff went further and began working them out mathematically. He demonstrated
that gravitational effects were entirely consistent with zero-point particle
motion, what the Germans had dubbed 'zitterbewegung' or 'trembling motion'.29
Tying gravity in with zero-point energy solved a number of conundrums that had
confounded physicists for many centuries. It answered, for instance, the
question of why gravity is weak and why it can't be shielded (the Zero Point
Field, which is ever-present, can't be completely shielded itself). It also
explained why we can have positive mass and not negative mass. Finally, it
brought gravity together with the other forces of physics, such as nuclear
energy and electromagnetism, into one cogent unified theory - something
physicists had always been eager to do but had always singularly failed at.
Hal published his theory of gravity to polite and
restrained applause. Although no one was rushing to duplicate his data, at least
he wasn't being ridiculed, even though what he'd been saying in these papers in
essence unsettled the entire bedrock of twentieth-century physics. Quantum
physics most famously claims that a particle can also simultaneously be a wave
unless observed and then measured, when all its tentative possibilities
collapse into a set entity. With Hal's theory, a particle is always a particle
but its state just seems indeterminate because it is constantly interacting
with this background energy field. Another quality of subatomic particles such
as electrons taken as a given in quantum theory is 'nonlocality' - Einstein's
'spooky action at a distance'. This quality may also be accounted for by the
Zero Point Field. To Hal, it was analogous to two sticks planted in the
sand at the edge of the ocean about to be hit by a rolling wave. If you didn't
know about the wave, and both sticks fell down because of it one after the
other, you might think one stick had affected the other at a distance and call
that a non-local effect. But what if it were zero-point fluctuation that was the
underlying mechanism acting on quantum entities and causing one entity to
affect the other?30 If that were true, it meant every part of the
universe could be in touch with every other part instantaneously.
While continuing with other work at SRI, Hal set up a
small lab in Pescadero, in the foothills of the northern California coastline,
within the home of Ken Shoulders, a brilliant lab engineer he'd known from years
before whom he'd lately recruited to help him. Hal and Ken began working on
condensed charge technology, a sophisticated version of scuffling your foot
across a carpet and then getting a shock when you touch metal. Ordinarily,
electrons repel each other and don't like to be pushed too closely together.
However, you can tightly cluster electronic charge if you calculate in the
Zero Point Field, which at some point will begin to push electrons together
like a tiny Casimir force. This enables you to develop electronics applications
in very tiny spaces.
Hal and Ken began coming up with gadget applications
that would use this energy and then patenting their discoveries. Eventually they
would invent a special device that could fit an X-ray device at the end of a
hypodermic needle, enabling medics to take pictures of body parts in tiny
crevices, and then a high-frequency signal generator radar device that would
allow radar to be generated from a source no larger than a plastic credit card.
They would also be among the first to design a flat-panel television, the
width of a hanging picture. All their patents were accepted with the explanation
that the ultimate source of energy 'appears to be the zero-point radiation of
the vacuum continuum'.31
Hal and Ken's discoveries were given an unexpected boost
when the Pentagon, which rates new technologies in order of importance to the
nation, listed condensed-charge technology, as zero-point energy research was
then termed, as number 3 on the National Critical Issue List, only after stealth
bombers and optical computing. A year later, condensed-charge technology would
move into the number two slot. The Interagency Technological Assessment Group
was convinced that Hal was onto something important to the national interest
and that aerospace could develop further only if energy could be extracted from
the vacuum.
With the US government endorsing their work, Puthoff and
Shoulders could have pad their pick of private companies willing to fund their
research. Eventually, in 1989, they went with Boeing, which was interested in
their tiny radar device and planned to fund its development on the back of a
large project. The project languished for a couple of years, and then Boeing
lost the funding. Most of the other companies demanded a full-scale prototype
before they would fund the project. Hal decided to set up his own company to
develop the X-ray device. He got halfway along that route before it occurred to
him that he was about to take an unwelcome detour. It might make him a lot of
money, but he was only interested in the project for the money he could use to
fund his energy research. Setting up and running this company would take at
least IO years out of his life, he figured, much as Bill's family business had
consumed a decade of his. Far better, he thought, simply to look for funding for
the energy research itself. Hal made the decision then and there. He would keep
his eye firmly on the altruistic goal he'd started with - and would eventually
bet his entire career on it. First service, then glory and last, if at all,
remuneration.
Hal would wait nearly 20 years for anyone else to
replicate and expand his theories. His confirmation came with a telephone
message, left at 3 a.m., that would seem braggardly, ridiculous even, to most
physicists. Bernie Haisch had been wrapping up a few last details in his
Lockheed office in Palo Alto, getting ready to embark on a research fellowship
he'd got at the Max Planck Institute at Garching, Germany. An astrophysicist at
Lockheed, Bernie was looking forward to spending the rest of his summer doing
research on the X-ray emission of stars and considered himself lucky to have
landed the opportunity. Bernie was an odd hybrid, a formal and cautious manner
belying a private expressiveness which found its outlet in writing folk songs.
But in the laboratory he was as little given to hyperbole as his friend Alfonso
Rueda, a noted physicist and applied mathematician at the California State
University in Long Beach, who'd left the message. Physicists were hardly noted
for a sense of humor about their work, and the Colombian was a quiet detail man,
certainly not given to boastfulness. Maybe it was Rueda's idea of a practical
joke.
The message left on Haisch's answering machine had said,
'Oh my God, I think I've just derived F = ma.'
To a physicist, this announcement was analogous to
claiming to have worked out a mathematical equation to prove God. In this case,
God was Newton and F = ma the First Commandment. F = ma was a
central tenet in physics, postulated by Newton in his Principia, the Holy
Bible of classical physics, in 1687, as the fundamental equation of motion. It
was so central to physical theory that it was a given, a postulate, not
something provable, but simply assumed to be true, and never argued with. Force
equals mass (or inertia) times acceleration. Or, the acceleration you get is
inversely proportional to mass for any given force. Inertia - the tendency of
objects to stay put and be hard to get moving, and then once moving, hard to
stop - fights your ability to increase the speed of an object. The bigger the
object, the more force is needed to get it moving. The amount of effort it takes
to send a flea flying across a tennis court will not begin to shift a
hippopotamus.
The point was, no one mathematically proved a
commandment. You use it to build an entire religion upon. Every physicist since
Newton took that to be a fundamental assumption and built theory and experiment
based upon this bedrock. Newton's postulate essentially had defined inertial
mass and laid the foundation of physical mechanics for the last 300 years. We
all know it to be true, even though nobody could actually prove it.32
And now Alfonso Rueda was claiming, in his phone
message, that this very equation, the most famous in all of physics besides E
= mc2, was the end result of a fevered mathematical
calculation that he had been grinding away at late into the night for many
months. He would mail details to Bernie in Germany.
Although he was embroiled in his aerospace work, Bernie
had read some of Hal Puthoff's papers and himself got interested in the Zero
Point Field, largely as a source of energy for distant space travel. Bernie had
been inspired by the work of British physicist Paul Davies and William Unruh of
the University of British Columbia. The pair had found that if you move at a
constant speed through the vacuum, it all looks the same. But as soon as you
start to accelerate, the vacuum begins to appear like a lukewarm sea of heat
radiation from your perspective as you move. Bernie began wondering if inertia -
like this heat radiation - is caused by acceleration through the vacuum.33
Then, at a conference, he'd met Rueda, a well-known
physicist with an extensive background in high-level mathematics, and after much
encouragement and prodding from Bernie, the ordinarily dour Rueda began to
work through the analysis involving the Zero Point Field and an idealized
oscillator, a fundamental device used to work through many classic problems in
physics. Although Bernie had his own technical expertise, he needed a high-level
mathematician to do the calculations. He'd been intrigued by Hal's work on
gravity and considered that there might be a connection between inertia and the
Zero Point Field.
After many months, Rueda had finished the calculations.
What he found was that an oscillator forced to accelerate through the Zero Point
Field will experience resistance, and that this resistance will be proportional
to acceleration. It looked, for all the world, as though they'd just been able
to show why F = ma. No longer was it simply because Newton had deigned to
define it as such. If Alfonso was right, one of the fundamental axioms of the
world had been reduced to something you could derive from electrodynamics. You
didn't have to assume anything. You could prove that Newton was right simply by
taking account of the Zero Point Field.
Once Bernie had received Rueda's calculations, he
contacted Hal Puthoff, and the three of them decided to work together. Bernie
wrote it up as a very long paper. After some foot-dragging, Physical Review, a
very prestigious mainstream physics journal, published the paper unchanged in
February 1994.34 The paper demonstrated that the property of inertia
possessed by all objects in the physical universe was simply resistance to being
accelerated through the Zero Point Field. In their paper they showed that
inertia is what is termed a Lorentz force - a force that slows particles moving
through a magnetic field. In this instance, the magnetic field is a component of
the Zero Point Field, reacting with the charged subatomic particles. The larger
the object, the more particles it contains and the more it is held stationary by
the field.
What this was basically saying is that the corporeal
stuff we call matter and to which all physicists since Newton have attributed an
innate mass was an illusion. All that was happening was that this background
sea of energy was opposing acceleration by gripping on to the subatomic
particles whenever you pushed on an object. Mass, in their eyes, was a
'bookkeeping' device, a 'temporary place holder' for a more general quantum
vacuum reaction effect.35
Hal and Bernie also realized that their discovery had a
bearing on Einstein's famous equation E = mc2. The equation
has always implied that energy (one distinct physical entity in the universe)
turns into mass (another distinct physical entity). They now saw that the
relationship of mass to energy was more a statement about the energy of quarks
and electrons in what we call matter caused by interaction with the Zero Point
Field fluctuations. What they were all getting at, in the mild-mannered,
neutral language of physics, was that matter is not a fundamental property of
physics. The Einstein equation was simply a recipe for the amount of energy
necessary to create the appearance of mass. It means that there aren't two
fundamental physical entities - something material and another immaterial - but
only one: energy. Everything in your world, anything you hold in your hand, no
matter how dense, how heavy, how large, on its most fundamental level boils down
to a collection of electric charges interacting with a background sea of
electromagnetic and other energetic fields - a kind of electromagnetic drag
force. As they would write later, mass was not equivalent to energy; mass was
energy.36 Or, even more fundamentally, there is no mass. There is
only charge.
Noted science writer Arthur C. Clarke later predicted
that the Haisch-Rueda-Puthoff paper would one day be regarded as a 'landmark'37,
and in 3001: The Final Odyssey, gave a nod to their contribution by
creating a spacecraft powered by an inertia-cancelling drive known as the SHARP
drive (an acronym for 'Sakharov, Haisch, Alfonso Rueda and Puthoff).38
As Clarke wrote, in justifying his immortalization of their theory:
It addresses a problem so
fundamental that it is normally taken for granted, with a
that's-just-the-way-the-universe-is-made shrug of the shoulders.
The question HR & P
asked is: 'What gives an object mass (or inertia) so that it requires an effort
to start it moving, and exactly the same effort to restore it to its original
state?
Their provisional answer
depends on the astonishing and outside
the physicists' ivory towers - little-known fact that so-called empty space is
actually a cauldron of seething energies - the Zero Point Field. . . HR & P
suggest that both inertia and gravitation are electromagnetic phenomena
resulting from interaction with this field.
There have been countless
attempts, going all the way back to Faraday, to link gravity and magnetism, and
although many experimenters have claimed success, none of their results has
ever been verified. However, if HR & P's theory can be proved, it opens up
the prospect - however remote - of anti-gravity 'space drives' and the even more
fantastic possibility of controlling inertia. This could lead to some
interesting situations: if you gave someone the gentlest touch, they would
promptly disappear at thousands of kilometers an hour, until they bounced off
the other side of the room a fraction of a millisecond later. The good news is
that traffic accidents would be virtually impossible: automobiles - and
passengers - could collide harmlessly at any speed.39
Elsewhere, in an article about future space travel,
Clarke wrote: 'If I was a NASA administrator . . . I'd get my best, brightest
and youngest (no one over 25 need apply) to take a long, hard look at Puthoff et
al.'s equations.'4o Later, Haisch, Rueda and Daniel Cole of IBM
would publish a paper showing that the universe owes its very structure to the
Zero Point Field. In their view, the vacuum causes particles to accelerate,
which in turn causes them to agglutinate into concentrated energy, or what we
call matter.41
In a sense, the SHARP team had done what Einstein
himself had not done.42 They had proved one of the most fundamental
laws of the universe, and found an explanation for one of its greatest
mysteries. The Zero Point Field had been established as the basis of a number of
fundamental physical phenomena. Bernie Haisch, with his NASA background, had his
sights firmly on the possibilities open to space travel of having inertia, mass
and gravity all tied to this background sea of energy. Both he and Hal received
funding to develop an energy source extracted from the vacuum, in Bernie's case
from a NASA eager to advance space travel.
If you could extract energy from the Zero Point Field
wherever you are in the universe, you wouldn't have to carry fuel with you, but
could just set sail in space and tap into the Zero Point Field - a kind of
universal wind - whenever you needed to. Hal Puthoff had showed in another
paper, also with Daniel Cole from IBM, that in principle there was nothing in
the laws of thermodynamics to exclude the possibility of extracting energy from
it.43 The other idea was to manipulate the waves of the Zero Point
Field, so that they would act like a unilateral force, pushing your vehicle
along. Bernie imagined that at some point in the future, you might be able to
just set your zero-point transducer (wave transformer) and go. But perhaps even
more exotic, if you could modify or turn off inertia you might be able to set
off a rocket with very low energy, but just modify the forces that stop it from
moving. Or use a very fast rocket, but modify the inertia of the astronauts so
that they wouldn't be flattened by G forces. And if you could somehow turn off
gravity, you could change the weight of the rocket or the force required to
accelerate it.44 The possibilities were endless.
But that wasn't the only aspect of zero-point energy
with potential. In some of his other work, Hal had come across studies of
levitation. The modern cynical view was that these feats were performed by
sleight of hand, or were the hallucinations of religious fanatics. Nevertheless,
many of the people who'd attempted to debunk these feats had failed. Hal found
exquisite notes about the events. To the physicist in him, who always needed to
take a given situation apart and examine the pieces, as he had in his youth with
ham radios, what was being described appeared to be a relativistic phenomenon.
Levitation is categorized as psychokinesis, the ability of humans to make
objects (or themselves) move in the absence of any known force. The recorded
instances of levitation that Hal had stumbled across only seemed possible in a
physics sense if gravity had somehow been manipulated. If these vacuum
fluctuations, considered so meaningless by most quantum physicists, did amount
to something that could be harnessed at will, whether for automobile fuel or to
move objects just by focusing one's attention on them, then the implications not
only for fuel but for every aspect of our lives were enormous. It might be the
closest we have to what in Star Wars was called 'The Force'.
In his professional work, Hal was careful to stay firmly
within the confines of conservative physics theory. Nevertheless, privately he
was beginning to understand the metaphysical implications of a background sea
of energy. If matter wasn't stable, but an essential element in an underlying
ambient, random sea of energy, he thought, then it should be possible to use
this as a blank matrix on which coherent patterns could be written, particularly
as the Zero Point Field had imprinted everything that ever happened in the world
through wave interference encoding. This kind of information might account for
coherent particle and field structures. But there might also be an ascending
ladder of other possible information structures, perhaps coherent fields around
living organisms, or maybe this acts as a non-biochemical 'memory' in the
universe. It might even be possible to organize these fluctuations somehow
through an act of wil1.45 As Clarke had written, 'We may already be
tapping this in a very small way: it may account for some of the anomalous
'over-unity' results now being reported from many experimental devices, by
apparently reputable engineers.' 46
Hal, like Bernie, was first and last a physicist who
didn't let his mind run away with itself, but when he did allow himself a few
moments of speculation, he realized that this represented nothing less than a
unifying concept of the universe, which showed that everything was in some sort
of connection and balance with the rest of the cosmos. The universe's very
currency might be learned information, as imprinted upon this fluid, mutable
field of information. The Field demonstrated that the real currency of the
universe - the very reason for its stability - is an exchange of energy. If we
were all connected through The Field, then it just might be possible to tap into
this vast reservoir of energy information and extract information from it. With
such a vast energy bank to be harnessed, virtually anything was possible - that
is, if human beings had some sort of quantum structure allowing them access to
it. But there was the stumbling block. That would require that our bodies
operated according to the laws of the quantum world.