The Field

by Lynne McTaggart

  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.

  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. Th
is 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 nearl
y 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.