The Field (36 page)

It was the first inkling that group consciousness, working through a medium such as the Zero Point Field, acted as the universal organizing factor in the cosmos. But so far, with the technology to hand, Nelson had only the first glimmers of evidence, a tiny deviation from random activity. All he could do thus far was measure a single pebble or at best a handful of sand – the quantum effect of an individual or a small group on the world. One day, he might have the capacity to measure the effect of the entire beach, for that was the ultimate point. The beach should only be measured in its entirety. The sand of the entire shore is indivisible.

Twenty-five years after Edgar Mitchell had experienced collective consciousness viscerally, scientists were beginning to prove it in a laboratory.
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CHAPTER TWELVE

The Zero Point Age

IN A DRAB LITTLE
corner classroom at the UK’s University of Sussex on a frosty day in January 2001, a group of sixty scientists from ten countries had crowded together to try to work out exactly how they were going to fly 20 trillion miles into deep space. NASA had had a few Breakthrough Propulsion Physics workshops in America and this was to be the international equivalent: one of the first independent workshops ever held on propulsion. Indeed, it had attracted an impressive audience of physicists from the British government, a NASA marshal, various astrophysicists from the French Laboratoire D’Astrophysics Marseilles and the French Laboratory of Gravitation, Relativity and Cosmology, professors from American and European universities, and some fifteen representatives of private industry. This was just a seed meeting, not a true scientific conference, mainly to start the ball rolling – a precursor to the international conference to be held December 2001. Nevertheless, there was an unmistakable air of expectancy around the room, tacit acknowledgment that each person present was perched on the very frontier of scientific knowledge and might even be witness to the dawning of a new age. Graham Ennis, the conference organizer, had lured representatives from most of the major British newspapers and science magazines by dangling before them the prediction that in five years’ time we’d be building our own small rockets with WARP drives to keep satellites in their correct positions.

However distinguished the audience, the greatest deference was reserved for Dr Hal Puthoff, by now in his early sixties, a bit thinner but still with his thatch of greying hair, who’d spent nearly thirty years trying to determine whether you could harness the space between the stars. To a handful of the younger members of the audience, Hal had become something of a cult figure. A young British government physicist called Richard Obousy had stumbled across Hal’s Zero Point Field papers during his university studies, and been thunderstruck by their implications, so much so that they’d influenced the course of his own career.
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And now he was faced with the prospect of both meeting the great man and preceding him on the podium with a small introductory talk on manipulating the vacuum – a warm-up act to the day’s main attraction.

To any outside observation, this was something more than a frivolous exercise, a batch of technocrats playing at constructing the ultimate technotoy. It was clear to every scientist in the room that the planet had, at most, fifty years of fossil fuel left and humans were facing a climate crisis as the greenhouse effect slowly turned our world into a gas chamber. Looking for new sources of energy wasn’t just necessary to power spaceships. It was also vital to power earth and maintain it intact for the next generation.

Experiments making use of the most outlandish of new ideas in physics had been going on covertly for thirty years. Rumors abounded about secret testing sites at places like Los Alamos with billion-dollar ‘black’ budgets that NASA or the American military continued to hotly deny. Even British Aerospace had launched its own secret program – code-named Project Greenglow – to study the possibility of turning off gravity.
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Loads of other possibilities, all resting on solid, proven physics, might provide for new methods of space-flight propulsion, said Ennis, who was presiding over the first day. You could: control inertia, so that you could move large things such as spacecraft with small forces; use one of a number of nuclear fusion techniques, which would require tremendous pressure and temperature; employ a radioactive fission reactor, as the Russians had done; use tethers, which would extract electrostatic energy; employ matter – antimatter effects, where the reaction of matter meeting its opposite number creates energy; change electromagnetic fields; or rotate superconductors. At a NASA congress in Albuquerque, New Mexico, they’d been exploring the possibility of a spaceship creating its own wormhole, much as Carl Sagan had imagined in
Contact
.
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A number of private companies, including Lockheed Martin, were enthusiastic and had lent their support. This could have all sorts of practical everyday applications on earth. Imagine, for instance, if you could turn off gravity and levitate patients. You could make bedsores a thing of the past.

Or you could try something even more outlandish. You could try to extract your energy from the nothingness of space itself. The ‘ZPF’, scientists agreed, represented one of the best possible scenarios – a ‘cosmic free lunch’, as Graham Ennis liked to put it, an endless supply of something from nothing. After physicist Robert Forward of Hughes Research Laboratory in Malibu, California, wrote a paper about it, theorizing how you might conduct experiments,
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physicists were beginning to believe that it may be possible to get to it and, more importantly, get energy out of it.

During his talk the following day, Hal Puthoff explained that, in quantum mechanical terms, if you were going to attempt to extract energy from The Field, you’d have several choices. You’d need to decouple from gravity, reduce inertia or generate enough energy from the vacuum to overcome both. The US Air Force had first recommended that Forward do his study to measure the Casimir force, the quantum force between two metal plates caused by partially shielding the space between them from zero-point fluctuations in the vacuum and so unbalancing the zero-point energy radiations. Forward, an expert in gravitational theory, was given the assignment by the Propulsion Directorate of the Phillips Laboratory at Edwards Air Force Base, which has the task of launching research into twenty-first-century space propulsion.

They had proof that vacuum fluctuations could be altered using technology. However, Casimir forces are unimaginably small – a pressure of just one hundred-millionth of an atmosphere on plates held a thousandth of a millimeter apart.
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Bernie Haisch and Daniel Cole published a paper theorizing that if you built a vacuum engine of an enormous number of such colliding plates, each would generate heat when they finally come into contact and give you power. The problem is that each plate creates, at most, a half of a microwatt’s worth of energy – ‘not much to write home about’, said Puthoff.
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You’d need tiny systems running at a very high rate for it to work on any level.

Forward thought that it was possible to do an experiment on altering inertia by making changes in the vacuum. He recommended four such experiments to be carried out to test this concept.
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Scientists working in quantum electrodynamics had already shown that these vacuum fluctuations could be controlled once you manipulated the spontaneous emission rates of atoms. It was Puthoff’s view that electrons get their energy to whiz around the nucleus of an atom without slowing down because they are tapping quantum fluctuations of empty space. If we could manipulate that field, he said, we could destabilize atoms and extract the power from them.
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It was theoretically possible to extract energy from the Zero Point Field; even in nature scientists had conjectured that this was exactly what was happening when cosmic rays ‘power up’ or energy is released by supernovas and gamma-ray bursters. There were other ideas, such as the spectacular conversion of sound into light waves, or sonoluminescence, where water, bombarded with intense sound waves, creates air bubbles which rapidly contract and collapse in a flash of light. The theory in some quarters was that this phenomenon was caused by zero-point energy inside the bubbles, which, once the bubbles shrank, converted into light. But Puthoff had already tried all these ideas in turn and felt they held little promise.

The US Air Force had also been exploring the idea of cosmic rays driven by zero-point energy, where protons could be accelerated in a cryogenically cooled, collision-free vacuum trap – a chamber that had been cooled as close as possible to absolute zero. This would give you about the emptiest space possible to attempt to extract energy from vacuum fluctuations of protons once they started to go faster. Another idea was downshifting the more energetic high-frequency parts of zero-point energy through the use of specially created antennae.

In his own laboratory, Puthoff had been playing around with a method that would involve perturbing ground states of atoms or molecules. According to his own theories, these were simply equilibrium states involving the dynamic radiation/absorption exchange with the Zero Point Field. So if you employed some sort of Casimir cavity, the atoms or molecules might undergo energy shifts that would alter excitations involving the ground states. He’d already begun experiments at a synchrotron facility, a place with a special subatomic accelerator, to try this, but had so far met with failure.
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Then Hal thought of turning the whole project inside out, following up on a notion first mooted by general relativity theorist Miguel Alcubierre of the University of Wales. Alcubierre had tried to determine whether WARP drives, as described in Star Trek, really were possible.
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Suppose you ignore quantum theory and look upon this as a problem of general relativity. Instead of invoking Niels Bohr, you invoke Albert Einstein. What if you tried modifying the space-time metric? If you use the curved space-time of Einstein, you treat the vacuum as a medium that could be polarized. You do a little ‘vacuum engineering,’ as Nobel prize laureate Tsung-Dao Lee called it.
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Under this interpretation, the bending of a light ray, say, near a massive body, is caused by a variation in the refractive index of the vacuum near that mass. The propagation of light defines the space-time metric. What you might be able to do is decrease the refractive index of the Zero Point Field, which would then increase the speed of light. If you modify space-time to an extreme degree, the speed of light is greatly increased. Mass then decreases and energy-bond strength increases – features that theoretically would make interstellar travel possible.

What you do is to distort and expand space-time behind the spaceship, contract space-time in front of it, and then surf along on it faster than the speed of light. In other words, you restructure general relativity as an engineer would. If you could successfully do this, you could make a spaceship travel at ten times the speed of light, which would be apparent to people on earth but not to the astronauts inside. You’d finally have yourself a
Star Trek
WARP drive.

What you are doing by such ‘metric engineering’, as Hal termed it, is getting space-time to push you away from the earth and toward your destination. This is possible by creating large-scale Casimir-like forces. Another possible type of metric engineering, which also requires using Casimir forces, is traveling through wormholes – ‘cosmic subways’
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, as Hal referred to them, which connect you to distant parts of the universe, as was imagined in
Contact
.

‘But how close were we to doing any of this?’, the audience asked. Hal coughed to clear his throat, his characteristic tic. It might take twenty years to do it, he replied laconically. Or it might take that same amount of time just to decide that it was not possible to get to it. You probably weren’t looking at major space travel in his lifetime, although he still held out hope of extracting energy for earthbound fuel before he died.

The first international propulsion workshop was an undoubted success, a good meeting place for physicists who’d been working away on their own at problems of energy and thrust that might take half a century to see the light of day. It was evident to everyone that they were at the beginning of an exploration that would one day, as Arthur C. Clarke had put it, make today’s current efforts at venturing beyond our atmosphere look like nineteenth-century attempts to conquer flight with a hot-air balloon.
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But in different parts of the world, many of Puthoff’s old colleagues, also now in their sixties, were working away without fanfare on more earthbound activities that were every bit as revolutionary, all predicated on the idea that all communication in the universe exists as a pulsating frequency and The Field provides the basis for everything to communicate with everything else.

In Paris, The DigiBio team, still in its Portakabin, had by now perfected the art of capturing, copying and transferring the electromagnetic signals from cells. Since 1997, Benveniste and his DigiBio colleagues have filed three patents on diverse applications. For Benveniste the biologist, the applications, naturally enough, were medical. He believed his discovery could open the way for an entirely new digital biology and medicine, which would replace the current clumsy hit-and-miss method of taking drugs.