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Originally posted on sciy.org by Ron Anastasia on Wed 07 Feb 2007 02:38 PM PST  

This is Part 1 of a series of quoted passages from the book The Field: the Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe, by science journalist Lynn McTaggart. It’s an excellent non-technical explanation about the metaphysical implications of modern quantum theory, especially what’s called the ‘Zero Point Field.’ I hope this can provide a useful vocabulary for our ongoing dialogues re possible relationships between science and spirituality. I’ll say more in future comments to these articles. ~ ron

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Quoted text from "The Field," by Lynn McTaggart

pp. 19-36

... 'There is one giant reservoir of energy we haven't talked about,' Hal [Hal Puthoff, electrical engineer and quantum physicist] said. Every quantum physicist, he explained, is well aware of the Zero Point Field. Quantum mechanics had demonstrated that there is no such thing as a vacuum, or nothingness. What we tend to think of as a sheer void if all of space were emptied of matter and energy and you examined even the space between the stars is, in subatomic terms, a hive of activity.

The uncertainty principle developed by Werner Heisenberg, one of the chief architects of quantum theory, implies that no particle ever stays completely at rest but is constantly in motion due to a ground state field of energy constantly interacting with all subatomic matter. It means that the basic substructure of the universe is a sea of quantum fields that cannot be eliminated by any known laws of physics.

What we believe to be our stable, static universe is in fact a seething maelstrom of subatomic particles fleetingly popping in and out of existence. Although Heisenberg's principle most famously refers to the uncertainty attached to measuring the physical properties of the subatomic world, it also has another meaning: that we cannot know both the energy and the lifetime of a particle, so a subatomic event occurring within a tiny time frame involves an uncertain amount of energy. Largely because of Einstein's theories and his famous equation E = mc2, relating energy to mass, [relativistic physics maintains that] all elementary particles interact with each other by exchanging energy through other quantum particles, which are believed to appear out of nowhere, combining and annihilating each other in less than an instant — 10^-23 seconds, to be exact — causing random fluctuations of energy without any apparent cause. The fleeting particles generated during this brief moment are known as 'virtual particles'. They differ from real particles because they only exist during that exchange — the time of 'uncertainty' allowed by the uncertainty principle. Hal liked to think of this process as akin to the spray given off from a thundering waterfall.

This subatomic tango, however brief, when added across the universe, gives rise to enormous energy, more than is contained in all the matter in all the world. Also referred to by physicists as 'the [false] vacuum', the Zero Point Field was called 'zero' because fluctuations in the field are still detectable in temperatures of absolute zero, the lowest possible energy state, where all matter has been removed and nothing is supposedly left to make any motion. Zero-point energy was the energy present in the emptiest state of space at the lowest possible energy, out of which no more energy could be removed — the closest that motion of subatomic matter ever gets to zero. But because of the uncertainty principle there will always be some residual jiggling due to virtual particle exchange. It had always been largely discounted because it is ever-present. In physics equations, most physicists would subtract troublesome zero-point energy away — a process called 'renormalization'. Because zero-point energy was ever-present, it didn't count.

...

Hal's discovery, in a sense, was not a discovery at all, but a situation that physicists have taken for granted since 1926 and discarded as immaterial. To the quantum physicist, it is an annoyance, to be subtracted away and discounted. To the religious or the mystic, it is science proving the miraculous. What quantum calculations show is that we and our universe live and breathe in what amounts to a sea of motion — a quantum sea of light. According to Heisenberg, who developed the uncertainty principle in 1927, it is impossible to know all the properties of a particle, such as its position and its momentum, at the same time because of what seem to be fluctuations inherent in nature. The energy level of any known particle can't be pinpointed because it is always changing. Part of this principle also stipulates that no subatomic particle can be brought completely to rest, but will always possess a tiny residual movement. Scientists have long known that these fluctuations account for the random noise of microwave receivers or electronic circuits, limiting the level to which signals can be amplified. Even fluorescent strip lighting relies on vacuum fluctuations to operate.

...

Against the objections of his contemporaries, who believed in empty space, Aristotle was one of the first to argue that space was in fact a plenum (a background substructure filled with "things"). Then, in the middle of the nineteenth century, scientist Michael Faraday introduced the concept of a field in relation to electricity and magnetism, believing that the most important aspect of energy was not the source but the space around it, and the influence of one on the other through some force. In his view, atoms weren't hard little billiard balls, but the most concentrated center of a force that would extend out in space.

A field is a matrix or medium which connects two or more points in space, usually via a force, like gravity or electromagnetism. The force is usually represented by ripples in the field, or waves. An electromagnetic field, to use but one example, is simply an electrical field and a magnetic field which intersect, sending out waves of energy at the speed of light. An electric and magnetic field forms around any electric charge (which is, most simply, a surplus or deficit of electrons). Both electrical and magnetic fields have two polarities (negative and positive) and both will cause any other charged object to be attracted or repelled, depending on whether the charges are opposite (one positive, the other negative) or the same (both positive or both negative). The field is considered that area of space where this charge and its effects can be detected.

The notion of an electromagnetic field is simply a convenient abstraction invented by scientists (and represented by lines of 'force', indicated by direction and shape) to try to make sense of the seemingly remarkable actions of electricity and magnetism and their ability to influence objects at a distance — and, technically, into infinity — with no detectable substance or matter in between. Simply put, a field is a region of influence. As one pair of researchers aptly described it: 'Every time you use your toaster, the fields around it perturb charged particles in the farthest galaxies ever so slightly.'

James Clerk Maxwell first proposed that space was an ether of electromagnetic light, and this idea held sway until decisively disproved by a Polish-born physicist named Albert Michelson in 1881 (and six years later in collaboration with an American chemistry professor called Edward Morley) with a light experiment that showed that matter did not exist in a mass of ether. Einstein himself believed space constituted a true void until his own ideas, eventually developed into his general theory of relativity, showed that space indeed held a plenum of activity. But it wasn't until 1911, with an experiment by Max Planck, one of the founding fathers of quantum theory, that physicists understood that empty space was bursting with activity.

In the quantum world, quantum fields are not mediated by forces but by exchange of energy, which is constantly redistributed in a dynamic pattern. This constant exchange is an intrinsic property of particles, so that even 'real' particles are nothing more than a little knot of energy which briefly emerges and disappears back into the underlying field. According to quantum field theory, the individual entity is transient and insubstantial. Particles cannot be separated from the empty space around them. Einstein himself recognized that matter itself was 'extremely intense' — a disturbance, in a sense, of perfect randomness — and that the only fundamental reality was the underlying entity — the field itself.

Fluctuations in the atomic world amount to a ceaseless passing back and forth of energy like a ball in a game of pingpong. This energy exchange is analogous to loaning someone a penny: you are a penny poorer, he is a penny richer, until he returns the penny and the roles reverse. This sort of emission and reabsorption of virtual particles occurs not only among photons and electrons, but with all the quantum particles in the universe. The Zero Point Field is a repository of all fields and all ground energy states and all virtual particles — a field of fields. Every exchange of every virtual particle radiates energy. The zero-point energy in any one particular transaction in an electromagnetic field is unimaginably tiny — half a photon's worth.

But if you add up all the particles of all varieties in the universe constantly popping in and out of being, you come up with a vast, inexhaustible energy source — equal to or greater than the energy density in an atomic nucleus — all sitting there unobtrusively in the background of the empty space around us, like one all-pervasive, supercharged backdrop. It has been calculated that the total energy of the Zero Point Field exceeds all energy in matter by a factor of 10^40, or 1 followed by 40 zeros. As the great physicist Richard Feynman once described, in attempting to give some idea of this magnitude, the energy in a single cubic meter of space is enough to boil all the oceans of the world.

...

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 Zero Point 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.

Hal was eventually to demonstrate in a paper published by Physical Review, one of the 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. 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. 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 assumption 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.

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 refueling by taping 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.

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 lop across the cosmos. In Hal's mind, it was not unlike a cat chasing its own tail. As he wrote in one paper,


What this implies, says Hal, is a 'kind of self-regenerating grand ground state of the universe', 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."

...

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 Zero Point 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.

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.

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 Zero Point Field. This 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?

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.

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, or perhaps it was even a long-range van der Waals force, like the attraction of two atoms at certain distances. 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'. 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? If that were true, it meant every part of the universe could be in touch with every other part instantaneously.

...

In his professional work, Hal was careful to stay firmly within the confines of conservative physics theory. Nevertheless, privately he was beginning to understand the metaphysical implications of a background sea of energy. If matter wasn't stable, but an essential element in an underlying ambient, random sea of energy, he thought, then it should be possible to use this as a blank matrix on which coherent patterns could be written, particularly as the Zero Point Field had imprinted everything that ever happened in the world through wave interference encoding. This kind of information might account for coherent particle and field structures. But there might also be an ascending ladder of other possible information structures, perhaps coherent fields around living organisms, or maybe this acts a a non-biochemical 'memory' in the universe. It might even be possible to organize these fluctuations somehow through an act of will. As [Arthur C.] Clarke had written, 'We may already be tapping this in a very small way: it may account for some of the anomalous 'over-unity' results now being reported from many experimental devices, by apparently reputable engineers.'

Hal ... was first and last a physicist who didn't let his mind run away with itself, but when he did allow himself a few moments of speculation, he realized that this represented nothing less than a unifying concept of the universe, which showed that everything was in some sort of connection and balance with the rest of the cosmos. The universe's very currency might be learned information, as imprinted upon this fluid, mutable field of information. The Zero Point Field demonstrated that the real currency of the universe — the very reason for its stability — is an exchange of energy. If we were all connected through the Zero Point Field, then it just might be possible to tap into this vast reservoir of energy information and extract information from it. With such a vast energy bank to be harnessed, virtually anything was possible — that is, if human beings had some sort of quantum structure allowing them access to it. But there was the stumbling block. That would require that our bodies operated according to the laws of the quantum world.

[end of Part 1]

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