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Authors: Lynne McTaggart

The Field (6 page)

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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 any one 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 10
40
, 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.
20

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 I 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.

BOOK: The Field
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