Vacuum Energy - Dr. Hal Puthoff (1994)

Transcript

they would be to just show a few view graphs to introduce the topic and my name is how put off I'm director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin Austin Texas and since 1985 we've had a very intensive program both theoretically and experimentally on new energy concepts and so we have an ongoing budget the engineers working in the laboratory everyday many patents for various devices and so we feel like we're making reasonable progress and one of the requirements we have is that the work be of high enough quality that it can get published in mainstream literature so we've published many papers in Physical Review in the United States which is the toughest of the journals to publish in so it is possible to present these ideas in the mainstream even one of the papers that we published last year had the in Physical Review had the title extracting energy and heat from the vacuum and so that that was accepted I and a colleague from IBM worked on the energetics and the thermodynamics to show that there was no violation of either to pursue this concept [Music] as we all know there are problems with fossil fuel sources which we presently use pollution byproducts there's certainly problems with the nuclear power plants especially in the United States there's a very distant now essentially impossible to build a new nuclear power plant so people in the end it's energy industry are out searching for alternatives and of course some of these are familiar solar energy thermonuclear fusion in the beginning thermonuclear fusion looked like it would be a great boon but you're probably familiar with the joke it goes around thermonuclear fusion looks great about 15 years in the future but then it's always looked great about 15 years ago capillary fusion is a different form of fusion that may work there's a lot of controversy about so called cold fusion fusion under non thermonuclear conditions but the one I'm going to talk about which I think has great promise is so-called zero-point energy extraction I'll explain what I mean by zero-point energy it really is the energy of so-called empty space the concept of empty space has gone through several shifts over the past couple thousand years for example Democritus that empty space was a void otherwise how could there be room for the atoms to move around in but then Aristotle came along and said no empty space must not really be empty because we have heat and light and it must propagate through something finding this was codified last century by Maxwell and electromagnetic theory saying well if electromagnetic waves are waves in like water waves they must have something to propagate in so there must be an ether but then in special relativity when attempts were made to try to measure velocity through this either it couldn't be done and so with special relativity and the michelson-morley experiment people said okay there is no ether empty space is really empty but there was only ten years later my Stein himself in developing general relativity ended up having space time that could be distorted and warped and by the time he got finished describing what general relativity had to say about space with all these properties of being warped and distorted Einstein himself said well in space isn't empty introduced the term metric but basically that sort of brought the idea of a full space back so Einstein didn't really get rid of it except for a few years and finally with quantum theory that's when it became absolutely clear that empty space was not empty there are vacuum fluctuations particles come out of the vacuum and then annihilate and go back into the vacuum so it's now recognized by quantum theorists that empty space is very full very active what do I mean by that let's say we have a case of say a mass and a spring you pull down and and you let it go like that or say have a kid on a swing and you give them a push and let go classically we say that the thing will eventually come to rest the oscillator will come to rest it comes to rest because there are losses in the system energy leaves the system and eventually would come to rest but quantum mechanically we say that's not the case if you excite an oscillator you push a swing or a pendulum you do anything like that and let it go losses will reduce its energy if it only comes down to a certain minimal amount of energy and that energy remains and so everything at the microscopic scale is always fluctuating in fact it turns out that team and it's been calculated in this room there's enough energy in that volume to evaporate all the world's oceans and that's not a controversial idea or fringe idea and standard quantum mechanics it's recognized that the energy in even a coffee cup there's enough to evaporate all the world's oceans john wheelers calculated richard climene's calculated it the question is can we get at that energy and for a long time it's been thought probably not but as I'll go through in my presentation tomorrow there's been a history of development where we see that you can get at that energy they might ask there's all that energy right there where does it come from and we know where it comes from [Music] every piece of matter in the universe is fluctuating around doing its quantum dance and so doing it radiates energy out and then every other atom is sitting in that radiation field and absorbing it and that causes it to jump around and therefore radiate so it's basically the electromagnetic equivalent of putting a microphone by a speaker and getting squeal the particle fluctuations generate the fields the fields cause the particles to fluctuate and you can do the calculation and show that that accounts for where the vacuum fluctuations come from it's a giant cosmological feedback system and we've published that in Physical Review the details on it they might say if there's all that energy even right here in the room why don't we notice it well in fact we do experiment any of you can do to prove that that energy is really there suppose you're on a bus or a train it takes off with a jerk and you fall back on the floor what is the force that knocked you down I mean it's a big force to knock you down well it's that has the train or the bus tried to accelerate you you ran in to the wall of vacuum fluctuations and there was a resisting wind from the vacuum that held you back and knocked you down it turns out that that resistance to accelerating through the vacuum energy is proportional to acceleration so unlike ordinary wind if you're just moving in a constant velocity you don't feel it but if something tries to accelerate you you do feel it and hold you back and so the reason Newton's law says force equals mass times acceleration the reason that when you apply a force you get an acceleration is that you have to apply a force proportional to acceleration and overt in order to overcome the vacuum energy holding you back which is also proportional to acceleration so actually there's no more ubiquitous constant phenomena every time you move your hand you feel the vacuum so the energy is very palpable we just published this in Physical Review in February of this year and so it was very well received there was a two-page write-up in science magazine and also in Scientific American and those are very conservative publications in the United States and yet still they were interested in published about it does this close the loop of the terms of the universal theory well from our standpoint the vacuum fluctuations do provide a unifying field field theory I've already shown in earlier work that gravitation can be accounted for and gravitational mass can be accounted for on the basis of interaction of particles with the vacuum fluctuations and then in this paper we found that the inertial mass came out to be the same as the gravitational mass and that's known empirically but from a philosophical standpoint it's never known why the inertial mass and gravitational mass can be the same and the answer is they both arise from interacting with the vacuum fluctuations and it fixes them to be the same no that's an addition who asked the question right right that's an addition when you when you write down what is the background in the universe you get two terms the one term is a zero-point energy the other term is a thermal background distribution the reason the zero-point energy is called zero point is because if you let temperature go all the way to zero the thermal term will disappear or after zero point this first term which we now call zero-point energy remains it doesn't depend on the temperature so the term zero point and zero point energy means zero temperature point so you would have zero point energy at Absolute Zero at Absolute Zero and in the absence of anything else that's right so if you go on the furthest vacuum of outer space and you're hoping to power your spaceship on zero point energy you would not have a problem don't know if you leave no for - and I don't ecology orientation thanks elevation you say you doubted the doctors installations observations can you because the density dizzy or this custody of the ease of changes as a result causal TV change okay when our modeling I would agree with the first part and that is if the density of the vacuum fluctuations changes these will change but our model they changed together but I had fun luck with all these what yet thirty-six percent for the Jovian woods that close already nicely now we're interested here is extracting this energy for use now it's a well-known false idea in physics that well we have all this heat energy around us why don't we somehow extract that energy for use but you can prove that just doesn't work it would take more energy to get the energy out of the surrounding heat than you again and someone's recognized a zero point energy was there it was thought that similarly it couldn't be extracted but a researcher huge laboratory pointed out that there was already in effect in the laboratory which demonstrated that the zero-point energy could be extracted it's a so-called Casimir effect Casimir effect is named after Heinrich Kazmir who was research director for many years at Philips Laboratory in the Netherlands and this is what he noticed as you know if you have a say a radio transistor radio and you take it in your car or go inside of a metal building or inside of a shielded cage you can't hear the radio stations the metal shields out the electromagnetic signals well this vacuum fluctuations are electromagnetic signals and so Kazmir realized that if you had a metal enclosure or say even just a couple of metal plates together close to each other that the region in between would be somewhat shielded from the vacuum energy coming from all different directions it would be somewhat shielded well this energy has radiation pressure momentum energy just like any electromagnetic wave so between the plates where some of that energy is shielded out the energy traveling back and forth puts only a certain amount of radiation pressure outward but outside where there is no shielding you have all the energy pushing in by radiation pressure and so what happens is that the plates are pushed together and this is a large force and it's been measured in the laboratory the force goes up to a million Newton's per square meter at close distances well a Newton is the weight of a book the square meter is about a square yard so it's a big big effect certain cases when you bring metal tips down closest close to pieces of metal for example an electron beam machining this force is strong enough to pull the metal tip into the material and in industrial processes you have to use strong servo mechanisms to keep it away so this is a big effect well what a researcher at Hughes realized was okay if I put up two metal plates in outer space and I walk away those plates will get pushed together faster and faster and faster and faster until they finally hit and when they do that generates heat so you've actually converted some vacuum energy into heat and you can trace that it doesn't violate conservation of energy you can trace bit by bit where the energy comes from the energy comes out of the vacuum starts to push the place together as they get closer and closer more and more modes are shielded the energy vacuum energy that was in those modes has now gone into the kinetic energy the plates moving together closer and closer more modes excluded more kinetic energy and then they hit the kinetic energy is turned into heat so there was a proof of principle absolutely acceptable in mainstream physics that the vacuum energy could be tapped now the question is is there some way to tap it efficiently yes right like that's part that's right it's part of it that's part of it the other is there are some charged effects on the surfaces too of service that's when they go together you can't pull them apart yourself do that you have to do it this way right and our since lasers have been invented people always have these very polished optical flats and lasers and again when you put them together you can't pull on the part you've got it tearing apart that's partly this effect so the question is is there a way of getting it out efficiently so far there are three ways that are known to extract the energy in an engineering sense the first is electromechanical and this was published by this researcher at Hughes and even applied for a patent called a vacuum fluctuation battery I don't know if he got the patent but he applied for it his idea was well instead of letting the plates come together and make heat I will charge the plates electrically and then as they come together they will build up strong electric field and then you can use that field to drive currents through a battery but it's not practical because the amount of energy you get and the difficulty in dealing with them so close it's just not practical but in our laboratory we're working on two additional methods instead of having plates come together you can also have a cylinder which is squeezed or you can have wedges which are pushed together in other words anytime you have surfaces near each other that can control the vacuum modes you will get this kind of pressure force and so in addition to like squeezing a metal boundary it's also possible to make a plasma a little lightning discharge in the laboratory just a high-tech version of scraping your foot on the rug and touching the doorknob and getting a little spark and it turns out that if you meet certain conditions on the density and the voltage and so on then you can get this effect to squeeze a plasma as well as pull metal together and so that's one of the approaches that we're looking at generating little lightning bolts in the laboratory they condense the charge by the way it leads to a whole new technology condensed charge technology which we have 18 different devices patented medical x-rays fast computer chips flat panel displays microwave generators the whole series of things that come out of just having this condensed charged but the energy thing is the one that we're pursuing most dramatically in the laboratory there's also another one another phenomenon called sonoluminescence and for those of you have been interested in research with water this is pretty interesting if you have a turbulent fluid that bubbles in the fluid this vacuum pressure force will collapse the bubbles and it's now been studied in the laboratory that when those bubbles collapse they put out intense bursts of light in 50 picoseconds you can get a hundred thousand photons out of one little bubble and julian schwinger who's Nobel Prize winner in physics has shown that this energy comes from the Casimir effect in other words this is a conversion of vacuum energy into another form in this case light heat radio waves so we know of a laboratory that has some experiments going in which they were creating turbulent bubbles and fluids and then measuring the energy in the water by the heat and they were getting over unity efficiency and so we are have now arranged to have those devices shipped to our laboratory and we're going to do a very detailed study but in this case we're talking about kilowatts of excess energy what right kilowatt now people often think that well if you come up with a new energy idea the oil companies will squash you like a bug it's not true that myth I don't believe it's true once we had our laboratory results we applied for our patents one of the first things I did I went to Pennzoil and I briefed the president Scottie Holland pres pennzoil I went to Texaco and briefed the research director I went to these oil companies and told them about the potential of this new energy source what would be the response of their corporation I didn't tell them we had it just in case then they'd get a picture right but I said it's possible in principle what would be your response their response was we would absolutely welcome it because their resource is running out when they draw small amounts of it out of the ground and make drugs and plastics and nylon pharmaceuticals they don't use that much of the resource and they have a large profit margin but when they draw it out of the ground and dump it in automobiles and dump it into heating your house it uses up an enormous amount of resource and they have very little profit so they said they would be glad to have some other energy source come along and take this burden from them they said the way they see it it's as if you were heating your house by burning van Gogh's and Picasso's really ridiculous no they also said that if these new energy sources come along they would be the first to invest in them to make the refineries more efficient so I think the myth that they'll stop you just simply isn't true we've worked out our own development strategy to avoid difficulties with competing with other industries for example we might think that the Mideast would not like this development even if it's okay with the refineries but the way to overcome that is to go to the Mideast people and ask them to underwrite the new development so that that can pull the plug on their potential competition the nuclear industry also does not have to be threatened by the development of these sources because you can go to the nuclear industry and say you've got your magnificent billion dollar plant here we're not going to bother that what we want you to do is pull out those nasty radioactive rods and throw them away and drop in our new devices and then you can go to the public and say we have gotten rid of radioactive pollution and we're reducing the price to the consumer so it could be a big win for the nuclear industry and they can continue to use their power plants I'm going to talk about that in a minute right here skip the generator in the garage stage we think although you could we think it would be better not to do that and I'll try to explain why with the electric power utilities the way you keep from threatening them is that you don't want to have everyone have one in the garage and unplug immediately because the economic chaos would be too big but the electric power utilities are having it meet increased capacity requirements all the time and in the United States and must satisfy a Clean Air Act which is very difficult and so you go to the electric power industries and say ok as you add new units to meet increasing demand and need to meet clean air requirements don't build more of the old kind just add our form because let's face it even if we had generators up and running it would still be a couple of decades before you could get them all distributed around anyway so we think you'd skip the generator in the garage stage instead you go to a TV manufacturer you would go to a washing machine manufacturer a dishwasher manufacturer and say ok on your next new model instead of having a plug that plugs in the wall have these never-say-die batteries in the back and so that way as units become obsolete new units get introduced without plugs and so you slowly unplug from utility companies instead of doing it all at once there's economic didn't most people are not going to go out and buy all-new equipment that's right that's right so I think that's that's the way to avert it and of course there are always these special-purpose things which special units can be built for and those will just develop as they develop [Music] of course at the conference I will give you know some more of the technical detail without making it too technical but so what's the present status realistically from our standpoint first of all it's scientifically sound this is not pseudoscience the Casimir effect is a real effect it's known to extract energy from the vacuum absolutely accepted by physicists it's certainly embryonic in development because I'm sure none of us arrived here today in an automobile powered by zero-point energy so it is definitely early stages of R&D when investors come to us and we do have investors in our laboratory we tell them it's high-risk infinite payoff so but it is high risk so if you want to invest money in something that you know will make money in the next five years maybe you wouldn't invest in this but if you want to live your old age out as a trillionaire or maybe imagine you would so for workers in the field our feeling is that just the 20th century may go down in energy terms is the nuclear age we think the 21st century will be the zero-point energy age that's art there I'll be glad to answer any questions and we just open up for discussion because there are other people here who know considerable amount