The Field (5 page)

Everyone working on these experiments had the sense that they were on the verge of something that was going to transform everything we understood about reality and human beings, but at the time they were simply frontier scientists operating without a compass. A number of scientists working independently had come up with a single bit of the puzzle and were frightened to compare notes. There was no common language because what they were discovering appeared to
defy
language.

Nevertheless, as Mitchell made contact with them, their separate work began to coalesce into an alternative theory of evolution, human consciousness and the dynamics of all living things. It offered the best prospect for a unified view of the world based on actual experimentation and mathematical equations, and not simply theory. Ed’s major role was making introductions, funding some of the research and, through his willingness to use his celebrity status as a national hero to make this work public, convincing them that they were not alone.

All the work converged on a single point – that the self had a field of influence on the world and vice versa. There was one other point of common agreement: all the experiments being carried out drove a stake into the very heart of existing scientific theory.

CHAPTER TWO

The Sea of Light

B
ILL 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
=
mc
²
, 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.