Archive for February, 2012

Many physicists today theorize the existence of alternate universes and “zero-point energy” derived from an invisible, sub-atomic “Field” of limitless power. Until very recently, this energy has not been seen with the eyes of man.

Lynee McTaggart, author of the fascinating book “The Field: The Quest for The Secret Force of The Universe” (much more empirical than it sounds) details an amazing experience recently conducted in Sweden that sends this concept spinning.

“Light pulled from thin air” via LynneMcTaggart.com

Late last year, with little fanfare, Chris Wilson and his team at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden pulled off the seemingly impossible. They managed to create light out of thin air.

In the process, they also proved what many physicists like Hal Puthoff, director of The Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin in Texas, have maintained for many years – that empty space is not empty at all, but a plenum of energy and possibility, something that we can tap into at will.

The study was designed to offer first proof of a phenomenon known as the Casimir Effect.

Teeming with energy

In order to understand the magnitude of their discovery, it’s important to understand some things about so-called empty space. For the uninitiated, since the discovery of quantum physics, many quantum physicists have understood that empty space is not empty at all, but a place teeming with subatomic particles, constantly passing energy back and forth as if in an endless game of basketball.

All elementary particles interact through what are considered temporary or ‘virtual’ quantum particles, combining and annihilating each other in less than an instant.

The back-and-forth passes of these virtual particles, akin to two people taking turns constantly depositing and withdrawing the same amount of money from a bank, are known collectively as the Zero Point Field. The field is called “zero point” because even at temperatures of absolute zero, when all matter theoretically should stop moving, these tiny fluctuations are still detectable.

Disturbances in The Field

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 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, and this attractive force is called the ‘Casimir Effect.’

In the Swedish study, Wilson and his colleagues wanted to create a real demonstration of the ‘dynamical’ Casimir Effect, as predicted in the 1970s by an American physicist named Gerald Moore.

Moore had turned the Casimir Effect on its head. Instead of examining the effect of squeezing the vacuum and creating an attractive force between two plates, he believed that if you moved the plates together fast enough, you’d squash the wavelengths between them so much that the Zero Point Field would have to yield up some of its energy in the form of photons. In this way, he figured, you would transform virtual particles of light into true photons – or light beams.

To do this was no mean feat, though; you’d have to take these virtual photons and bounce them off a mirror traveling close to the speed of light.

(more…)