Aether, Ether Or Zero-Point, What Do You Say When. . .?

Let’s play with the question of vocabulary for the breakthrough-energy scene. Or whatever it ends up being named.

The good news and the bad news is that there are no rules. There is no lexicon of accepted vocabulary, because there’s no overarching professional association for the emerging field that encompasses all the types of revolutionary energy science and technology.

Internationally, there’s a scattering of groups around specialized topics such as LENR, or Nikola Tesla’s inventions or innovative magnetic generators. But the broad field of research has no equivalent to American Physical Society for physicists in the USA, or to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, IEEE, with its half a million or so members worldwide.

So we’re on our own in deciding, for example, when to say ‘zero-point energy’ or whether to use the ancient term ‘aether.’

‘Thinktank’ at Stanley Hotel

In 1994 there was a gathering at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, that could have been the beginnings of a professional association for this field that collectively needs an internationally agreed-on name.

I was privileged to be there, as an observer, because a physicist who was involved in the new organization in Colorado had invited me.

The gathering brought together, from around the globe, some “heavy hitters” of the science and technology subculture. Scientists at that gathering rarely used the phrase free energy.

Toby Grotz had started an organization called the Institute of New Energy and had persuaded a multi-millionaire backer to pay for bringing in the researchers from Europe, India, New Zealand, Japan and other countries.

An amusing aspect of the several days of meetings was that, at the same time these impressively intelligent people were conferring at the Stanley Hotel, the outside of the building was decorated to be the movie set for filming of the Hollywood comedy Dumb and Dumber. In the hotel’s eating places, the film crew hung out with scientists.

The film’s comedic, and smart, star Jim Carrey, ran out of the hotel in his bathrobe to photo-bomb our group photo.

The scientists’ and engineers’ gathering was the only time I met the British physicist Harold Aspden in person. Dr. Aspden is in the back row, third from the right and I’m toward the left, with sunglasses, near Yin Gazda and John Hutchison, back row far left.

Dr. Aspden regularly used the word ‘aether’ in his writings, as did Paramahamsa Tewari, front row right side. Thomas Bearden, left side and looking like the film Men in Black, usually wrote about ‘energy from the vacuum.’ Yet he knew that space is a plenum, full of powerfully seething movements, and is far from being a vacuum. Other influencers at that meeting, including the physicist Hal Puthoff (behind Jim Carrey) used the phrase ‘zero-point energy.’

There is a difference between the words and it’s important, Bearden explained to me. He was generous with his time in explaining physics to newbies such as I was.

Bearden emailed me “the precise difference between zero-point energy” and ‘energy from the vacuum.’

“Zero-point energy is the energy of real particles that remains at the lowest quantum level i.e., absolute zero temperature,” Bearden wrote. “It's observable energy, so we can measure it with instruments if we use sufficiently precise experiments. The important thing is that zero-point energy is detectable with sufficient instruments.”

“The actual vacuum fluctuations, however, are subquantal and hence not detectable a priori by any instrument. Only the overall effects can be detected.”

“So scientists (who are) trying to hang on to their conventional status have to focus on zero-point energy and things like the Lamb shift, the Casimir effect etc., so they can point to actual experiments in the literature showing that the zero-point energy exists.”

“…they will have their careers destroyed if they go after the subquantal, and not measurable, energy fluctuations. There they have no experiments to point to, so their peers will destroy them as being ‘perpetual motion nuts’ or just plain ‘addled.’

“But …we are going after that unlimited ‘subquantal fluctuation’ energy in the actual vacuum itself. There, the conventional establishment reacts with venom and great force.”

“However, there is a little problem for (conventional scientists) that few of them realize. And that is the source charge. The charge just sits there and pours out real photons -- real, observable, measurable EM (electromagnetic) energy continuously in all directions, from the moment that the charge is formed. It will do that forever, if one just leaves it alone and doesn't intervene.”

Experimenters who understand what Bearden was saying may build devices that seem to violate the Law of Conservation of Energy. Aether or…will visit this topic again.