The point was, no one mathematically proved a commandment. You use it to build an entire religion upon. Every physicist since Newton took that to be a fundamental assumption and built theory and experiment based upon this bedrock. Newton’s postulate essentially had defined inertial mass and laid the foundation of physical mechanics for the last 300 years. We all know it to be true, even though nobody could actually prove it.32
And now Alfonso Rueda was claiming, in his phone message, that this very equation, the most famous in all of physics besides E = mc2, was the end result of a fevered mathematical calculation that he had been grinding away at late into the night for many months. He would mail details to Bernie in Germany.
Although he was embroiled in his aerospace work, Bernie had read some of Hal Puthoff’s papers and himself got interested in the Zero Point Field, largely as a source of energy for distant space travel. Bernie had been inspired by the work of British physicist Paul Davies and William Unruh of the University of British Columbia. The pair had found that if you move at a constant speed through the vacuum, it all looks the same. But as soon as you start to accelerate, the vacuum begins to appear like a lukewarm sea of heat radiation from your perspective as you move. Bernie began wondering if inertia – like this heat radiation – is caused by acceleration through the vacuum.33
Then, at a conference, he’d met Rueda, a well-known physicist with an extensive background in high-level mathematics, and after much encouragement and prodding from Bernie, the ordinarily dour Rueda began to work through the analysis involving the Zero Point Field and an idealized oscillator, a fundamental device used to work through many classic problems in physics. Although Bernie had his own technical expertise, he needed a high-level mathematician to do the calculations. He’d been intrigued by Hal’s work on gravity and considered that there might be a connection between inertia and the Zero Point Field.
After many months, Rueda had finished the calculations. What he found was that an oscillator forced to accelerate through the Zero Point Field will experience resistance, and that this resistance will be proportional to acceleration. It looked, for all the world, as though they’d just been able to show why F = ma. No longer was it simply because Newton had deigned to define it as such. If Alfonso was right, one of the fundamental axioms of the world had been reduced to something you could derive from electrodynamics. You didn’t have to assume anything. You could prove that Newton was right simply by taking account of the Zero Point Field.
Once Bernie had received Rueda’s calculations, he contacted Hal Puthoff, and the three of them decided to work together. Bernie wrote it up as a very long paper. After some foot-dragging, Physical Review, a very prestigious mainstream physics journal, published the paper unchanged in February 1994.34 The paper demonstrated that the property of inertia possessed by all objects in the physical universe was simply resistance to being accelerated through the Zero Point Field. In their paper they showed that inertia is what is termed a Lorentz force – a force that slows particles moving through a magnetic field. In this instance, the magnetic field is a component of the Zero Point Field, reacting with the charged subatomic particles. The larger the object, the more particles it contains and the more it is held stationary by the field.
What this was basically saying is that the corporeal stuff we call matter and to which all physicists since Newton have attributed an innate mass was an illusion. All that was happening was that this background sea of energy was opposing acceleration by gripping on to the subatomic particles whenever you pushed on an object. Mass, in their eyes, was a ‘bookkeeping’ device, a ‘temporary place holder’ for a more general quantum vacuum reaction effect.35
Hal and Bernie also realized that their discovery had a bearing on Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2. The equation has always implied that energy (one distinct physical entity in the universe) turns into mass (another distinct physical entity). They now saw that the relationship of mass to energy was more a statement about the energy of quarks and electrons in what we call matter caused by interaction with the Zero Point Field fluctuations. What they were all getting at, in the mild-mannered, neutral language of physics, was that matter is not a fundamental property of physics. The Einstein equation was simply a recipe for the amount of energy necessary to create the appearance of mass. It means that there aren’t two fundamental physical entities – something material and another immaterial – but only one: energy. Everything in your world, anything you hold in your hand, no matter how dense, how heavy, how large, on its most fundamental level boils down to a collection of electric charges interacting with a background sea of electromagnetic and other energetic fields – a kind of electromagnetic drag force. As they would write later, mass was not equivalent to energy; mass was energy.36 Or, even more fundamentally, there is no mass. There is only charge.
Noted science writer Arthur C. Clarke later predicted that the Haisch – Rueda – Puthoff paper would one day be regarded as a ‘landmark’37, and in 3001: The Final Odyssey, gave a nod to their contribution by creating a spacecraft powered by an inertia-cancelling drive known as the SHARP drive (an acronym for ‘Sakharov, Haisch, Alfonso Rueda and Puthoff’).38 As Clarke wrote, in justifying his immortalization of their theory:
It addresses a problem so fundamental that it is normally taken for granted, with a that’s-just-the-way-the-universe-is-made shrug of the shoulders.
The question HR & P asked is: ‘What gives an object mass (or inertia) so that it requires an effort to start it moving, and exactly the same effort to restore it to its original state?
Their provisional answer depends on the astonishing and – outside the physicists’ ivory towers – little-known fact that so-called empty space is actually a cauldron of seething energies – the Zero Point Field … HR & P suggest that both inertia and gravitation are electromagnetic phenomena resulting from interaction with this field.
There have been countless attempts, going all the way back to Faraday, to link gravity and magnetism, and although many experimenters have claimed success, none of their results has ever been verified. However, if HR & P’s theory can be proved, it opens up the prospect – however remote – of anti-gravity ‘space drives’ and the even more fantastic possibility of controlling inertia. This could lead to some interesting situations: if you gave someone the gentlest touch, they would promptly disappear at thousands of kilometres an hour, until they bounced off the other side of the room a fraction of a millisecond later. The good news is that traffic accidents would be virtually impossible: automobiles – and passengers – could collide harmlessly at any speed.39
Elsewhere, in an article about future space travel, Clarke wrote: ‘If I was a NASA administrator … I’d get my best, brightest and youngest (no one over 25 need apply) to take a long, hard look at Puthoff et al.’s equations.’40 Later, Haisch, Rueda and Daniel Cole of IBM would publish a paper showing that the universe owes its very structure to the Zero Point Field. In their view, the vacuum causes particles to accelerate, which in turn causes them to agglutinate into concentrated energy, or what we call matter.41
In a sense, the SHARP team had done what Einstein himself had not done.42 They had proved one of the most fundamental laws of the universe, and found an explanation for one of its greatest mysteries. The Zero Point Field had been established as the basis of a number of fundamental physical phenomena. Bernie Haisch, with his NASA background, had his sights firmly on the possibilities open to space travel of having inertia, mass and gravity all tied to this background sea of energy. Both he and Hal received funding to develop an energy source extracted from the vacuum, in Bernie’s case from a NASA eager to advance space travel.
If you could extract energy from the Zero Point Field wherever you are in the universe, you wouldn’t have to carry fuel with you, but could just set sail in space and tap into the Zero Point Field – a kind of universal wind – whenever you needed to. Hal Puthoff had showed in another paper, also with Daniel Cole from IBM, that in p
rinciple there was nothing in the laws of thermodynamics to exclude the possibility of extracting energy from it.43 The other idea was to manipulate the waves of the Zero Point Field, so that they would act like a unilateral force, pushing your vehicle along. Bernie imagined that at some point in the future, you might be able to just set your zero-point transducer (wave transformer) and go. But perhaps even more exotic, if you could modify or turn off inertia you might be able to set off a rocket with very low energy, but just modify the forces that stop it from moving. Or use a very fast rocket, but modify the inertia of the astronauts so that they wouldn’t be flattened by G forces. And if you could somehow turn off gravity, you could change the weight of the rocket or the force required to accelerate it.44 The possibilities were endless.
But that wasn’t the only aspect of zero-point energy with potential. In some of his other work, Hal had come across studies of levitation. The modern cynical view was that these feats were performed by sleight of hand, or were the hallucinations of religious fanatics. Nevertheless, many of the people who’d attempted to debunk these feats had failed. Hal found exquisite notes about the events. To the physicist in him, who always needed to take a given situation apart and examine the pieces, as he had in his youth with ham radios, what was being described appeared to be a relativistic phenomenon. Levitation is categorized as psychokinesis, the ability of humans to make objects (or themselves) move in the absence of any known force. The recorded instances of levitation that Hal had stumbled across only seemed possible in a physics sense if gravity had somehow been manipulated. If these vacuum fluctuations, considered so meaningless by most quantum physicists, did amount to something that could be harnessed at will, whether for automobile fuel or to move objects just by focusing one’s attention on them, then the implications not only for fuel but for every aspect of our lives were enormous. It might be the closest we have to what in Star Wars was called ‘The Force’.
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 as a non-biochemical ‘memory’ in the universe. It might even be possible to organize these fluctuations somehow through an act of will.45 As 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.’46
Hal, like Bernie, 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 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 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.
CHAPTER THREE
Beings of Light
FRITZ-ALBERT POPP THOUGHT he had discovered a cure for cancer. It was 1970, a year before Edgar Mitchell had flown to the moon, and Popp, a theoretical biophysicist at the University of Marburg in Germany, had been teaching radiology, the interaction of electromagnetic radiation on biological systems. He’d been examining benzo[a]pyrene, a polycyclic hydrocarbon known to be one of the most lethal carcinogens to humans and had illuminated it with ultraviolet light.
Popp played around with light a lot. He’d been fascinated by the effect of electromagnetic radiation on living systems ever since he’d been a student at the University of Würzburg. During his time as an undergraduate he’d studied in the house, sometimes even in the very room, where Wilhelm Röntgen had accidentally stumbled on the fact that rays of a certain frequency could produce pictures of the hard structures of the body.
Popp had been trying to determine what effect you’d get if you excited this deadly compound with ultraviolet (UV) light. What he discovered was that benzo[a]pyrene had a crazy optical property. It absorbed the light but then re-emitted it at a completely different frequency, like some CIA operative intercepting a communication signal from the enemy and jumbling it up. This was a chemical which doubled as a biological frequency scrambler. Popp then performed the same test on benzo[e]pyrene, another polycyclic hydrocarbon, which is virtually identical in every way to benzo[a]pyrene save for a tiny alteration in its molecular makeup. This tiny difference in one of the compound rings was critical as it rendered benzo[e]pyrene harmless to humans. With this particular chemical, the light passed right through the substance unaltered.
Popp kept puzzling over this difference and kept playing around with light and compounds. He performed his test on thirty-seven other chemicals, some cancer-causing, some not. After a while, it got so that he could predict which substances could cause cancer. In every instance, the compounds that were carcinogenic took the UV light, absorbed it, and changed the frequency.
There was another odd property of these compounds. Each of the carcinogens reacted only to the light at a specific wavelength – 380 nanometres. Popp kept wondering why a cancer-causing substance would be a light scrambler. He began reading the scientific literature, specifically about human biological reactions, and came across information about a phenomenon called ‘photo-repair’. It is very well known from biological laboratory experiments that if you can blast a cell with UV light so that 99 per cent of the cell, including its DNA, is destroyed, you can almost entirely repair the damage in a single day just by illuminating the cell with the same wavelength of a very weak intensity. To this day, conventional scientists don’t understand this phenomenon, but nobody has disputed it. Popp also knew that patients with a skin condition called xeroderma pigmentosum eventually die of skin cancer because their photo-repair system doesn’t work and so doesn’t repair solar damage. Popp was shocked to learn that photo-repair works most efficiently at 380 nanometres – the very same wavelength the cancer-causing compounds would react to and scramble.
This was where Popp made his logical leap. Nature was too perfect for this to be simple coincidence. If the carcinogens only react to this wavelength, it must somehow be linked to photo-repair. If so, this would mean that there must be some light in the body responsible for photo-repair. A cancerous compound must cause cancer because it permanently blocks this light and scrambles it, so photo-repair can’t work anymore.
Popp was profoundly taken aback by the thought of it all. He decided there and then that this was where his future work would lie. He wrote the paper up, but told few people about it, and was pleased, but not really surprised, when a prestigious journal on cancer agreed to publish it.1 In the months before his paper was published, Popp was highly impatient, worried that his idea would be stolen. Any careless disclosure of his to the casual observer might send the listener off to patent Popp’s discovery. As soon as the scientific community realized he had discovered a cure for cancer, he would be one of the most celebrated scientists
of his day. It was his first foray into a new area of science, and it was going to land him the Nobel prize.
Popp, after all, was used to accolades. Up until that point he’d won nearly every prize you could be awarded in academic life. He’d even picked up the Röntgen prize for his undergraduate diploma work, which consisted of building a small particle accelerator. This prize, named after Popp’s hero, Wilhelm Röntgen, is given each year to the top undergraduate in physics at the University of Würzburg. Popp had studied like a young man possessed. He’d finished his examinations far earlier than the other students. He was awarded his PhD in theoretical physics in record time. The postgraduate work required for German professorships, a five-year proposition for most academics, took Popp just a little more than two years. At the time of his discovery, Popp was already celebrated among his peers for being a whiz kid, not only because of his ability but also because of his dashing, youthful looks.
When his paper was published, Popp was 33 and good-looking, with the set jaw and direct steel-blue gaze of a Hollywood swashbuckler and a boyish face always assumed to be years younger. Even his wife, who was seven years younger than him, was often mistaken as the senior partner. And indeed, there was something of the swashbuckler about him; he had a reputation among his fellow students as the best fencer on campus – a reputation which had been tested in various duels, one of which had left him with a gash all along the left side of his head.
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