The Field (7 page)

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 describe 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 had 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 10 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
=
mc
²
, 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.