Text: A New Physics for a New Energy Source by Jeanne Manning, September, 1998 "Today the vacuum [of space] is not regarded as empty.... It is a sea of dynamic energy . . . like the spray of foam near a turbulent waterfall." - Harold Puthoff, Physicist Moray B. King, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, risked upsetting a committee of engineering professors in 1978 with his proposal for a doctoral thesis topic - that energy could be tapped from space. The personable, good humored King had not set out to shock. In fact, as a dutiful systems engineering student, he had at first accepted the standard view that the vacuum of space is useless as an energy source. However, King had become intrigued with a new idea a couple of summers before, after reading a book about UFOs. In his search through the physics literature for principles that would allow for antigravity, he ran across a concept that interested him even more - something called "zero-point energy." It not only allowed for anti- gravity, it also allowed for an abundant source of energy. WHAT DO THE TEXTBOOKS SAY? Most scientists and engineers have been taught that the vacuum of space is completely empty and still in the absence of heat, light, and matter. Unless a student is studying quantum mechanics, his or her textbook never mentions zero-point energy. The quantum mechanics student does learn that the fabric of space consists of random fluctuations of electricity. He or she also learns that these fluctuations are collectively called zero-point energy because they represent the energy that is present even at a temperature of absolute zero, the temperature at which everything is completely cold. It is the energy that exists when all other sources of energy are taken away. This energy is difficult to detect because it is everywhere. Expecting someone to sense it is like asking a fish to detect the ocean; the fish has no concept of a world that isn't an ocean. Similarly, the fluctuations of electricity that make up space energy are too microscopic and too quick for us to sense them, either with our bodies or with standard detection equipment. Why did Moray King's engineering professors fail to teach him about zero-point energy - what we refer to in this book as space energy? The reason is that scientists assume that these vacuum fluctuations simply even out. They call this the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of entropy. Under this law, everything is doomed to increasing disorder, until all comes to a dead rest. This means that, according to traditional science, space energy cannot be put to any practical purpose because its randomness cannot be made into an organized system. It would be as if a pile of threads suddenly organized themselves into a shirt. A NEW ENERGY PHYSICS: MAKING THE IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE? King had found the most impressive reference to zero-point or space energy in a book called Geometrodynamics. The author, noted physicist John Archibald Wheeler, said that this energy foaming within the fabric of space is enormously powerful‹if formed into an object, it would put out more energy than a bright star. That's a lot of power. Does this source of incredible power really interact with our world? King found that there, too, the physics literature held good news. Quantum mechanics‹the branch of science that deals with protons, electrons, and other basic particles of matter‹teaches that superhigh-frequency energy does interact with physical matter all the time. It says that these basic particles are mixed with space energy. The difference between standard quantum mechanics and the ideas of Wheeler and other scientists is that they believed basic particles such as protons and electrons were not only mixed with space energy, they were actually made out of space energy. As King continued to read through books on the subject, he began to see energy as a flow, a river from another dimension of space, and basic particles as tiny whirlpools in that river. If the river ceased to flow, the basic particles‹the building blocks of all matt er‹would disappear. So would everyone and everything. Filled with a sense of awe, King began to see beyond the standard view of space energy as a random jittering of basic particles. He found his newfound ideas confirmed by the work of Timothy Boyer, Ph.D., a physicist and teacher. Boyer said‹contrary to traditional scientific belief‹that space energy did influence matter, the physical world around us, and that it wasn't random and meaningless. Eventually, King realized that if engineers could get only a small part of those random energetic movements in space to line up with each other, they could tap into a tremendous source of power for our everyday world. COMING UP WITH A NEW COMBINATION OF THEORIES King wondered: Why was no one asking if all that power could be harnessed and put to work? The answer seemed to lie in specialization. The people who make machinery and generators to move and heat and power things‹the engineers‹don't necessarily study quantum mechanics. The people who do study quantum mechanics, the ones who come up with the equations and the formulas‹the physicists‹don't build machinery. Even if the majority of neither the engineers nor the physicists were interested in this topic, King was. He still wanted to find out if there was a way to allow for the use of space energy. So the young student set a task for himself. He would stick to the standard physics literature and look for concepts that could be put together to form a body of knowledge a combined theory‹about the feasibility of tapping into that abundant energy. He searched through the respected journals and found articles that, taken together, made a case for doing what his professors had said was impossible. Academia was not particularly interested in space energy at the time, but a growing audience, mostly outside of the ivy walls, snapped up the book that King eventually wrote. Tapping the Zero-Point Energy, first published in 1989, brought together published theories about space energy and theories about the way that natural systems organize themselves. This book laid the groundwork for the development of a coherent theory behind a new source of energy. From Chaos To Order Russian-born scientist Ilya Prigogine won a Nobel Prize in 1977 for showing how certain systems can evolve from random behavior to orderly behavior. This means that entropy, which assumes that all systems become more and more disordered, is no longer the only game in the universe. It means that energy can indeed be seen as a creative force in space, instead of disorganized chaos. This behavior, the opposite of entropy, has since been called negentropy. In the 1970s, before and after graduation, Moray King started keeping a foot in two worlds, one in the world of theoretical physics and one in the world of the practical tinkerers who were trying to capture space energy in their home workshops. He was introduced to that second world by new-energy author Christopher Bird, who told King about T. Henry Moray and Moray's struggles to capture space energy (see Chapter 3). New-energy ideas hit King from all sides after that. At first, he wondered if he was being introduced to a bunch of kooks, but he soon came to appreciate these concepts. He kept asking questions, networking and presenting papers at conferences on new-energy technologies, and encouraging inventors to come up with a reproducible experiment to prove that space energy could be tapped. By 1994, King had further refined his space-energy ideas. At conferences, he explained to eager audiences how vortices-whirlpool- or tornado-like spirals found everywhere in nature - held a key to the energy lock. Give a sudden twist to the nucleus of an atom, and all its neighbors, and keep spinning them, King said, and you may pull some space energy into your electric-generating system. Rotate the spinning materials‹a spin upon a spin‹and you have a better chance of picking up some extra energy. Then build pairs of counter-rotating vortices into your system, and you would really have something. To partially visualize this concept, you can take two yo-yos, twist their strings, and let go so that both yo-yos start spinning. You can then swing the yo-yos in full circles, one forward and one backward. This is the type of motion that might give an inventor a chance to hit the space-energy jackpot. An Ancient Idea is Reexamined To more fully understand King's ideas, it is helpful to go back to a very old concept. Another way of speaking about the background sea of energy is the ancient term prana, later known as the aether. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the aether was considered to be a substance filling all space, and through which light travelled. In 1887, two Americans‹Albert Michelson and Edward Williams Morley‹tried to detect the aether experimentally. They could not, and concluded that the aether did not exist. About thirty years later, the concept was totally discarded when Albert Einstein put forth his theory of relativity. It says that there is no background structure to the universe, such as an aether. Instead, all objects in the universe, such as stars and planets, affect each other. This means that nothing in space is absolute. But, as with all theories, there were things that Einstein's theory could not account for. So in 1954, distinguished English physicist P.A.M. Dirac asked science to take another look for the aether: "The aetherless basis of physical theory may have reached the end of its capabilities, and we see in the aether a new hope for the future." An American scientist, E. W. Silvertooth of Washington state, responded to Dirac's call. In 1986, Silvertooth performed an experiment using laser equipment and his knowledge of advanced optics. By measuring earth's motion in space, he calculated that our solar system is moving toward the constellation of Leo at nearly 400 kilometers a second‹or about 892,800 miles an hour. Silvertooth had succeeded where Michelson and Morley had failed. The fact that earth's motion in space could be detected meant that there had to be a stable point of reference such as the aether‹for this motion to be measured against. In order for a scientific experiment to be considered valid, it must be successfully repeated. However, Silvertooth used some very expensive equipment, and his research was sponsored in part by the United States Air Force and another defense agency that handles advanced research. To my knowledge, Silvertooth's experiment has not been repeated, although an Austrian physicist has claimed to have also detected the aether. A Fast-Spinning Vortex? Today's aether theorists do not see the aether as an invisible fluid filling all of space. Rather, they say it is a spiralling foundation for the universe that cannot be detected by current measuring instruments because its movements are too quick. Moray King is not the only space-energy scientist who thinks that the aether moves in a spiral motion. Paramahamsa Tewari, Ph.D., of India is another. He says that the idea of there being enormous levels of power for every square inch of space would be wrong unless that space rotates at a fantastic speed, "like a vortex." He sees the universe as being in motion according to its basic design, with just a concentration of matter here and there a galaxy, a solar system, a planet, an electron. What makes this movement difficult to detect is the fact that we are moving along with it, and thus have nothing to compare it with. It is like trying to sense the spinning of the earth on its axis‹ because everything is spinning, including us, we do not feel the motion. One scientist describes space energy as two giant, invisible elephants pushing on both sides of a door. As long as they push with equal force, the door does not move one way or the other. The aether not only exists, the space energy it produces energizes the earth. To understand how it works, think of a microwave oven. If you put a potato in a microwave, you do not see it cooking, nor do you feel any heat coming from the oven. That's because the microwave cooks the food from the inside out. The oven remains cool, but the inside of the potato becomes very hot. In the same manner, space energy "cooks" the earth's core, which is very hot, while the earth's surface remains relatively cool. The big difference is that the energy in a microwave comes from outward-moving forces of decay, explosion, or combustion, while space energy takes the form of an inward-moving spiral‹as explained in "Spirals of Energy" on page 13. Despite a theory that supports a universal abundance of space energy, many engineers cannot let go of their belief in a world ruled by a finite amount of energy. To be fair to the engineers, they don't want to give up that belief because it has worked well as a basis for practical engineering. It is the idea at the heart of the Industrial Age. However, the new-energy theorists say that space energy does not violate the laws of conservation of energy, which state that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. According to these theorists, this energy has always existed, and thus is not being created out of nothing. It can simply be put to human use. "People are having trouble deciding whether they want to believe it or not," King says. MAGNETS AND ENERGY The key to many of the devices that you will be reading about is the magnet. The earth's own magnetic field‹the one that makes a compass point north‹may interact somehow with space energy. And new-energy researchers find that the smaller magnetic fields which surround manufactured magnets play a key role in getting their energy-generating hardware to work. Some inventors use super-powerful magnets made of rare materials, while others use the sorts of ordinary magnets that are found in stereo sound systems. How exactly do magnets tap into space energy? It is not possible to answer that question with any authority, since scientists are unable to explain exactly what a magnet's force field is‹the force that attracts metal objects to the magnet. Nor can they explain exactly what that field interacts with. One electronics engineer says that we are like early humans discovering fire; they knew what it did, but they didn't know why. Many new-energy researchers have come up with differing theories of what makes magnets work. But these theories have not yet jelled into one body of knowledge that is accepted by the scientific establishment. One thing we do know about magnetism is that it is related to electricity. In the 1830s, English scientist Michael Faraday showed that magnets could be used to produce electricity, and that an electric current produces a magnetic field. While it is not fully understood why this happens, this knowledge has been put to practical use in electric motors and generators. So it is not surprising‹if in fact space energy is electric in nature that magnets can be used to capture space energy, even though we don't fully understand how. MAVERICKS IN HIGH PLACES In the past decade, Moray King has been joined by scientists around the world in space-energy research, and their results have caused great excitement in the new-energy world. Former astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell, Ph.D., predicted this excitement in 1980 when he said: "There are types of energy which lie outside the electromagnetic spectrum. Unfortunately, these research efforts have not been given recognition. For the most part, they have been performed by individuals . . . without any support, whose work lies at the threshold of present-day science, and who are years ahead of science which is already established." The fact that many of space energy's newer proponents are people who have been part of the science establishment means that space energy, long thought of as an oddball idea, will have to be taken seriously. Harold Puthoff, Ph.D., of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin, Texas, is giving space energy the publicity that Mitchell thought it lacked. Puthoff is a scientist whose low-key personality fits into a variety of settings, from security-clearance laboratories to meetings of environmentalists. His background includes corporate work, several years with the United States Department of Defense, and a stint with Stanford Research Institute International. He gives briefings to top govermnent officials and oil industry executives, and to other audiences worldwide. Puthoff was named Theorist of the Year in 1994 by New Energy News, for a paper that News editor Hal Fox, Ph.D., called the century's most important theoretical paper. Puthoff and two coauthors say that inertia‹the tendency of a body in motion to remain in motion, or a body at rest to remain at rest‹can be explained by the presence of space energy. Puthoff explains by saying it is space energy that knocks you down if you are standing on a train and the train accelerates quickly from a full stop. Fox says, "The way the various institutions of science are structured, it is important to work within the system to successfully introduce new scientific theories and facts. This is what Dr. Harold Puthoff has gently accomplished over the past few years." Thomas Bearden, a retired United States Army lieutenant colonel, is a more controversial theorist who is considered to be almost a guru by some in the space-energy field. Bearden believes that present-day mechanical and electrical engineering concepts and mathematics are based on the manipulation of effects, and not of underlying causes, in the same way that a driver can accelerate and deaccelerate a car without understanding how an engine works. The devices made by mainstream engineers do the work they are intended for, he notes, but are crude compared to the hardware that could be made if the deeper causes were understood. Bearden's quest parallels King's‹to learn how to create order in a small part of the seething vacuum of space and put that tremendous energy to work: "We can dip our paddlewheel into that river." Puthoff and Bearden are only two of the many conventionally trained scientists who have found in space-energy theory a new way of seeing the world. And their ideas of theoretical physics are not only important to the world of science. Their ideas form the basis for a technology that will ultimately affect everyone. In the next chapter we meet inventors who have tried to turn space-energy theory into space-energy devices.

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