Dr Hal Puthoff talks about Zero Point Energy

Transcript

is that so-called empty space isn't really empty at all it's actually full of energy so instead of being like kind of a quiet empty lake it's more like the froth at the base of a waterfall or something and this energy is basically electromagnetic in nature and the energy density is uh quite high in fact it's so high that when it was first discovered mathematically it was thought to be some kind of artifact of the mathematics but then as time went on there were even nobel prize-winning experiments it showed that this energy and so-called empty space was really there we don't usually notice it because it's so homogeneously distributed it sort of be like sitting in a bathtub with at exactly your body temperature you might not notice notice the water but under certain circumstances it can be disturbed or perturbed and then it has has effects as i mentioned some some effects on atomic emission for example is what eventually ended up in a nobel prize for willis lamb of yale university is called the lamb shift this is a recognition that in fact this energy disturbs atoms so atoms aren't sitting in a void they're sitting in the sea of energy so once uh quantum theorists realized that energy was there the next question was well is there any way to tap it and it was thought originally that probably not it might be like trying to tap the heat energy around us and you can quickly prove for thermodynamic reasons that it'll take more energy to tap it then you'd get out of it so you don't come out ahead but back in about 1984 researcher at hughes laboratory by the name of robert forward showed that there was a particular effect called the casmir effect which demonstrated that in fact this energy could be tapped when you go to look at the numbers you find out that there's enough energy in the volume of a coffee cup to evaporate all the world's oceans if you could get it all of it so this raised the issue among theorists well can we manipulate this energy could be a tap it for space flight application for example and there are a couple ways to go could we get propulsion out of it could we use it as an energy source and so these are the areas that modern theorists are looking at but one of the more interesting aspects is that if in fact it does look like there's a route from here to there then you know we consider the possibility that well maybe there are other civilizations who've been down this track ahead of us and so it opens up the possibility that you can't reject the possibility of for example et visitation out of hand usually here where einstein said you can't go fast in the speed of light well that's something out of special theory of relativity and it really is you can't take an object and speed it up and then through the light barrier because it'd take an infinite amount of energy and mass to do it but it turns out it's a faulty conclusion to say therefore you can't go fast in the speed of light because once you get into general relativity you have some options the options are to change the properties of space itself so that locally the velocity of light is engineered to be faster than the usual value the best way to explain how it is how it comes about is that it's actually the idea of stretching space expanding space on one side of the craft and shrinking space on the other so that you're not only moving forward through space the space itself is like moving forward on a rubber sheet about the same time you're pulling the rubber sheet and expanding it so then relative to the outside environment you can be going at say the speed of light along the rubber sheet but the rubber sheet itself is moving relative to the rest of the universe then your net motion is faster than the speed of light so the implication then is well if you can manipulate this zero point energy c get it out of the way then if something tried to accelerate you it would be easy you would have no quote inertia it'd be you know rather than using humongous amounts of energy to try to propel you through this tremendous force drag that you get from the vacuum fluctuations you could throw bbs out the back i suppose and take off like a shot and so in fact the air force was sufficiently interested in that that they set up a program called mass modification in which i and my colleagues were interviewed to find out all the details of our modeling inertia as a vacuum fluctuation phenomena that might in principle be manipulated to see if there was a possibility in some far distant future of reducing the inertia of a spaceship so that ordinary propulsive means could be used with relatively low energy requirements and so they did a year-long study and went around to various universities and laboratories and asked people to tell them about experiments they might be able to do to determine whether our model was correct so again there's there's another indication that these are not just uh fringe scientists with science fiction ideas uh but basically these are kind of mainstream ideas being published in mainstream physics journals and being taken seriously by mainstream military and nasa type funders a whole volume of space would be in a special state so the pilots for example would not feel inertial forces either and so under those conditions of promoting a situation which you get rapid inertia of a spaceship the people inside would under those same space manipulated conditions not feel tremendous inertial forces uh here at the institute for advanced studies uh one of our main interests is exploring the possibility of tapping or mining this vacuum fluctuation energy zero point energy but we call it zero point because even if you froze the universe down all the way down to absolute zero where most motion would be frozen out this energy would still be there it's a very fundamental kind of energy but we're looking to see if we can't extract it for many uses not just space flight application i mean the the grand outcome would be that if you could use it to power everything from electric toothbrushes to aircraft carriers to automobiles to homes to to space flight one of the main areas of interest actually in terms of potential use that we've been approached by many people is a possibility of having a very cheap energy source for desalinization which is very hard to make antimatter in large quantities and keep it bottled up but it has been it has been done protons anti-protons have been generated in accelerator experiments and then captured and kept contained for some periods of time so that's that's an area that i know the air forces has been interested in and pursues research on uh you know sometime before this millennium is out i'm certain that probably that will come to use if there aren't other alternatives that that are simpler i routinely make presentations and briefings to various branches of the government i've been taken out on aircraft carriers by the navy and shown what it is that we have to replace if we have new energy sources to provide new fuel methods of course nasa is funding some of these breakthrough propulsion physics ideas the air force various labs in the air force are pursuing fundamental studies on these kind of exotic ideas so so there's a lot of government interest it's getting to the point where modern theoretical physicists are loath to rule out any possibility i mean now we're talking about parallel universes and membranes of many dimensions and uh i mean the physics is is just getting as wild as it can possibly be and sandwiched in among all those alternative possibilities is the possibility that some of these concepts might actually play a role in in space flight application where civilizations ourselves in the future or maybe more advanced et civilizations are present could perhaps travel long distances in relatively short times of course we see claims and not just among the public but among military pilots and good observers uh typically in the military that there appear to be something like craft flying around with anomalous behavior on the other hand in terms of some of the characteristics that seem to be attributed to them and giving the kind of physics and direction physics is going can't rule out that maybe maybe some are are some kind of craft or probes maybe even more likely probes and craft from some far away civilization of course one of the intriguing things as we start looking into the possibility of reducing inertia and so on and then you see these supposed sightings in the sky which turn on the dime right angle turn and so on and the reason we used to reject those out of hand was that it appeared to be there was no inertia there and until recently that was sort of an inconceivable idea to a physicist so i think this is probably pretty justified and saying you know that that doesn't sound like anything i can imagine to be a crap could imagine it to be some form of plasma phenomena or whatever but but not a crack so now as we get this new evidence that well okay maybe inertia can be modified then it does make you sort of sit back and take a second thought about it but when you consider that our electromagnetic technologies you know century old basically and then realize that you could have advanced civilizations out there that are millennia beyond us there really is no way of saying whether they might have some other way of making contact or find other ways like wormholes and just sending probes here or whatever could be well beyond our imagination