Scientists are only human. Although they have been trained to always try and think objectively about the world around them, there are limits. There are some topics that many scientists will refuse to even discuss. The taboo topics vary somewhat with the scientist. For instance, there are still some scientists that refuse to accept the strong theoretical and observational evidence for black holes. Other scientists, for good reason, have a difficult time believing that Nature will ever allow us antigravity, space warps, time machines, or faster-than-light communication. They admit that certain mathematical solutions to the Einstein equations allow these anomalies under certain drastic assumptions, but they firmly believe that some version of "cosmic censorship" will ultimately prevail and Nature will prevent us from ever exercising those solutions.
There are other scientists that have a hard time believing in the feasibility of the extreme versions of spaceflight such as interstellar travel, or Skyhooks, Space Fountains, and Rotavators. Usually, however, they are at least willing to admit their doubts are based on economic or engineering feasibility, not physical feasibility. I, personally, have been told in loud and no uncertain terms by a Nobel Laureate, that any attempt to even discuss the possible practical use of antimatter was "crazy".
I too have my doubts about the reality or attainability of many concepts, but I try to maintain an open mind. In my opinion, if science is to be any good to us at all in describing the behavior of the universe, then everything must ultimately be describable in scientific terms. To give an extreme example, either God exists or He does not. In my view of science and the way scientists should operate, if God does not exist, then it is the job of science to attempt to prove that he does not exist. If God does exist, then He must come under the purview of science and it is the job of the scientist first to prove He exists, and then to build up a body of experimental, observational, and theoretical knowledge that will ultimately enable the human race (or whatever the human race has evolved to by then) to understand Him.
God is an extreme example of a taboo topic that most scientists will refuse to discuss in an objective, scientific manner. There are many others, such as UFOs, ESP, and astrology. The reasons why most scientists refuse to get involved in a serious discussion of these taboo topics is that the very phrases that describe those topics are ill-defined and laden with decades, if not centuries, of emotion-riddled, crackpot-oriented, yellow-journalistic baggage. They do not want their names or reputations associated in any way with the phrase.
They also have a legitimate scientific reason for avoiding discussion. The taboo topics have been dreamed up by naive human minds, and just because someone can think of a concept and give it a name does not make it real. These skeptical scientists do not see any "handles" by which they could grapple with these ill-formed concepts in order to understand them from a logical scientific point of view. Without that understanding, it is impossible to prove or disprove the reality of the concept.
I believe I have found some ideas that may give us a handhold on some of these slippery concepts if they are true. It is important that you realize that, in my opinion, all of the following topics are wishful thinking and are not scientifically valid concepts. But, if they are real, perhaps these speculations will help us to bring these concepts under the umbrella of scientifically acceptable topics that are open for discussion. Then, if the scientific method can be applied successfully, perhaps these presently taboo topics can graduate from wishful thinking into future reality. The taboo topics I will attempt to shed light on are: Free energy, reactionless drives, extra-sensory perception (ESP), and life after death.
One of the goals of every backyard inventor is to invent a source of free energy, a battery or perpetual motion machine that produces energy and does useful work, but never runs down. It is probably too much to hope that some future technology will allow us to get "something for nothing", but it may be possible, using the theory of quantum electrodynamics to do something almost equivalent to that—extracting energy from the vacuum.
The Theory of Quantum Electrodynamics is the theory for describing the microscopic behavior of electricity and magnetism. It is one of the more successful physical theories, since it has been checked experimentally many times and found to be accurate. In quantum electrodynamics a region of space is divided up into a large (infinite) number of modes of potential oscillation for the electromagnetic field. The state of the electromagnetic field is defined by counting the number of photons in each mode. The "vacuum" state is defined as that state where there are no photons in any of the modes. Yet, according to quantum electrodynamics, each mode of oscillation, even when the space is at absolute zero, has in it a zero-point oscillation with an energy equal to "half" a photon. This residual electromagnetic field produces fluctuating electromagnetic forces that have observable consequences.
One place where the effects of the electromagnetic fluctuations show up is in the calculation of the energy states in a hydrogen atom. The electric fields of the quantum fluctuations cause perturbations to the orbit of the electron around the proton. Even through the perturbations average out over the orbit, the electron moves in a slightly shifted orbit compared to that calculated from the electric field of the proton alone. This produces most of the shift in the energy levels of the hydrogen atom that was experimentally observed in 1947 by Willis Lamb and Robert Retherford.
Since according to quantum electrodynamics, each mode has on the average a zero-point energy of half a photon, and since there are an infinite number of modes, this means that empty space has an infinite amount of energy. Richard Feynman, examining this paradox, tried to put a bound on this infinity by assuming some physically reasonable cutoff for the shortest wavelength mode, such as the Compton wavelength of a proton (2x10-16 meter). Even this cutoff gives an energy density of 1015 times that of water for the vacuum. This density is comparable to the density of the proton itself! The paradox remains. Feynman and others found a way around the infinities by a mathematical technique called renormalization, but no one has a good explanation why the extremely high predicted energy densities don't have a large gravitational effect. In summary, theory says there is a nearly infinite source of energy in the electromagnetic fluctuations of the vacuum, and it is possible to interact with the electromagnetic fluctuations and obtain energy. One technique involves the use of small black holes.
In the Theory of Quantum Electrodynamics, not only is the vacuum full of electromagnetic energy, it is also full of "virtual" particles that are created out of nothing, exist for a while, then merge back into nothing. [See the top half of Figure 11 in the Chapter "Black Holes".] Stephen Hawking showed that if a small black hole were placed in this emptiness full of energy, its powerful gravitational field would swallow the virtual particles if they got too close. With no partner to recombine with, the other member of the virtual particle pair would be promoted to the status of a "real" particle and leave. To an onlooker, it would look as if the black hole had "emitted" the particle. Thus, it would seem that the black hole has extracted energy from the vacuum.
In the details of Hawking's theory, however, it is shown that a virtual particle that is swallowed by the black hole has "negative" energy, so the total energy-mass content of the black hole is decreased by the addition of the virtual particle. So, although it looks like the black hole allows us to get something out of the nothing called the "vacuum", in reality the energy came out of the mass of the black hole rather than the vacuum.
Since there is yet no theory that proves it is impossible to extract energy out of the vacuum, and the example of the "hot" black hole seems to show that it might be possible, there has been a lot of speculation on space drives that somehow use the energy of the vacuum for propulsion. So far, the best description of a possible vacuum fluctuation "drive" is in Charles Sheffield's science fiction novel The McAndrew Chronicles.
I have found a way to extract a small amount of energy from the electromagnetic fluctuations of the vacuum. It is a vacuum fluctuation "battery" and it is based on the Casimir effect. In addition to the well-known Lamb-Retherford shift in the hydrogen atom, there is another, lesser known, effect of the electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations called the Casimir force. The Casimir force is a short range attraction between any two objects caused by the presence of the electromagnetic fluctuations in the vacuum. A calculation by Casimir of the force between two conducting plates showed that the conducting plates restrict the number of normal modes that can exist in the vacuum between them. Although there are an infinite number of modes between the two plates, that infinity is smaller than the infinite number of modes that would be allowed if the plates weren't there. In a straightforward calculation of the number of normal modes and the zero-point energy in those modes, Casimir predicted that the electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations between the plates would have a negative energy density that was proportional to the third power of the spacing between the plates. There thus would be an attractive force between the plates that was proportional to the fourth power of the spacing. The force was independent of the material in the conductors.
Later, the analysis was broadened by Lifshitz to include dielectrics. It was found that any two plates, whether conductor or dielectrics, would experience a fourth power force law, but one that was also proportional to the dielectric constant of the plates. The Casimir result for conducting plates is obtained when the dielectric constant of the plates is allowed to go to infinity. The equations describing the Casimir effect are only valid down to a separation distance proportional to the minimum wavelength at which the plates are still a good conductor or the dielectric constant is not unity. For distances closer than that, a different equation takes over. The attractive force will still increase with decreasing distance, but at a rate proportional to the third power of the separation distance. Both Casimir and Lifshitz were aware that these forces due to the fluctuations of the vacuum were known previously as "surface tension", "surface energy", and "van der Waals" forces that occur between uncharged atoms and objects.
Since the Casimir force produces very high force levels at close spacings, and according to Lifshitz, those force levels vary according to the dielectric or conducting state of the plates, it is conceivable that one day the Casimir force could be a significant factor in the operation of microcircuits with sub-micrometer dimensions.
The experimental measurement of the Casimir force has been carried out a number of times with varying degrees of success. Usually the experiment is carried out between a curved dielectric lens and a flat dielectric plate. The first successful measurements were carried out in the 1950s by some Russian scientists on quartz, with separation distances down to 1000 angstroms (about 300 atoms). Later, other dielectric plate experiments were carried out with slowly improving precision. The closest separation distance obtained was fourteen angstroms (about five atoms) with two crossed cylinders of mica. At fourteen angstroms, the measured force between the two mica cylinders was over ten tons per square meter!
The Casimir force has some of the properties of the gravity force since it is purely attractive, is independent of the material in the plates, and is a function of the inverse power of the separation distance, although the variation with separation distance goes as a higher power than the gravity force. Although there is no rigorous proof known that the vacuum fluctuation field is a conservative field like the gravity field, it is highly probable that it is. Even if the vacuum fluctuation field is a conservative field, that does not mean we cannot use it to obtain energy. The gravity field of the Earth is a conservative force field and yet hydroelectric dams extract energy from the gravity field by using water coming from a region of high gravitational potential. In reality, of course, the energy extracted from a hydroelectric dam came originally from the Sun, which evaporated the water from the oceans at a low gravitational potential and placed it in lakes at a high gravitational potential. The hydroelectric dam is then seen as a mechanism that uses the gravitational force of the Earth as a "catalyst" to convert the gravitational potential energy of the water into kinetic energy that can in turn be converted into electricity by the turbines. Hydroelectric dams are also used for energy storage. During times of low electrical demand, electricity can be used to pump water back up to a lake at high gravitational potential.
In the same manner, I have shown that we can prepare a conductor in a foliated state which is in a "high" vacuum fluctuation potential energy state due to its large surface energy, and then use the Casimir force as a means to convert the potential energy into kinetic energy as the foliated conductors cohere into a solid block of conductor that is in a "low" vacuum fluctuation potential energy state. The part of the hydroelectric turbines can be played by any mechanism that can convert kinetic energy into electricity, but I use the electrostatic repulsion force between two conducting plates with the same polarity of charge.
The general concept for the construction of an aluminum foil "vacuum fluctuation battery" is to take a large number of leaves of ultrathin aluminum foil that are arranged in a stack with the leaves separated by a few micrometers. Each leaf is connected electrically to an active bidirectional power supply and the shape and position of the leaf is monitored by sensors. The power supply gives each leaf a small amount of positive charge. The positive charge will create an electrostatic repulsion between the plates that will keep the plates separated despite the attempt of the Casimir force to pull them together. This electrostatic suspension system is unstable, of course, so the position of each leaf will have to be electronically stabilized by feedback from the position sensors through the active power supply. Stability may also be enhanced by partial mechanical support of the leaves using frames of insulating material such as aluminum oxide or by unique geometries.
The voltages applied to the end leaf and the next-to-the-end leaf are then adjusted so that the electrostatic repulsion between these two leaves is lowered until the electrostatic force is slightly less than the Casimir force at that distance. The Casimir force will draw the two leaves together, doing work against the repulsive electric field between the plates. By adjusting the electric field to always be slightly less than the Casimir force, the active bidirectional power supply can extract electrical energy out of the kinetic energy of the motion of the plates as they move from large separation distances where the vacuum fluctuation potential energy is near zero, to the minimum separation distance where the vacuum fluctuation potential energy is large and negative. The process is repeated by the next leaf from the end until the foliated conductor is condensed into a solid block. Alternatively, all the leaves could be brought together at the same time, like compressing an accordion. Thus, by cohering the multitude of aluminum leaves in a foliated conductor into a single block of aluminum under the careful control of an electronic servo system, it is possible to extract electrical energy from the vacuum.
If the collapse process is halted before the aluminum films cohere, then the vacuum fluctuation battery can be "recharged" by making the applied electrostatic force slightly larger than the Casimir force. The leaves will be pushed apart at the cost of supplying energy from the bidirectional power supply.
Another version of the vacuum fluctuation battery that might be easier to fabricate and have more stability would be a wide flat spiral of foil built along the lines of a Slinky toy. Here there is only one conductor to make contact with and each turn of the spiral acts against the neighboring turns. The spiral configuration allows a substantial compaction of the foil from large spacings to small spacings while maintaining uniform spacing.
Unfortunately for those looking for large amounts of free energy, the numbers indicate that this vacuum fluctuation battery would require significant advances in precision manufacture and control of extremely thin structures before it would even begin to approach the watts per pound capability of even an ordinary chemical battery.
The important aspect of the vacuum fluctuation battery is that it shows that there is at least one way of getting energy out of the quantum fluctuations in the vacuum. And if there is one way, there may be other ways that are more efficient. We are probably not getting something for nothing, however, and the vacuum does not seem to be a source of continuous "free" energy. The vacuum fluctuation field is probably a conservative field, but there is no known proof of that in the literature. Since the vacuum fluctuation field seems to be the source of what "holds matter together", it is probably limited in energy density to chemical energy levels. Still, it is important that I have identified a non-thermodynamic method of extracting that chemical energy, as well as a method for getting chemical energy out of what are normally considered non-reactive chemicals (aluminum foil).
Another dream of the backyard inventor is to invent a reactionless space drive—some collection of gizmos in a box, that when energized, will make the box rise into the air and speed off to the stars. Usually the gizmos are gyroscopes, for nearly everyone at one time or another has held a gyroscope in their hand and watched it perform its magic feat of levitation. With one end sitting on your finger, the rest of the gyroscope balances out horizontally, its center of gravity far out away from its single support point—yet it does not fall!
In their early years, before book learning finally convinced them it was impossible, practically every space enthusiast, Robert Goddard and Wehrner Von Braun among them, has felt that there must be some way to remove that last support, yet still have the gyro continue to levitate, or perhaps drift slowly upwards to the stars. Yet, as each struggled with the concept of a reactionless drive based on gyroscopes, all were forced sooner or later to realize that it would not work. They were beaten by nature's conservation laws.
The law of conservation of energy is not the problem, for a rapidly spinning gyroscope certainly has enough energy to lift itself a considerable distance in the Earth's gravity field. No, it is one of the other conservation laws. The law of conservation of linear momentum.
If you start with a gyroscope sitting on the surface of the Earth, and you end up with a gyroscope moving upwards in the sky with a finite velocity, then by the law of conservation of linear momentum, some other mass must be moving in the opposite direction. The upward moving gyroscope must have had something to push against, like your finger.
The wheel of a gyroscope is spinning furiously. Certainly there must be a way to use that circular motion of the wheel to produce an upward motion of the whole gyroscope. Yet, as many a frustrated inventor has found, when model after model refuses to budge from the floor, there is yet another conservation law standing in the way of progress—the law of conservation of angular momentum—spin. But suppose that the conservation laws of linear and angular momentum were not true laws, just approximations.
Many years ago B.E. (Before Einstein), the world was dominated by four conservation laws: Conservation of mass, conservation of energy, conservation of linear momentum, and conservation of spin. The physics textbooks of that time insisted that each was always separately conserved despite some unresolved anomalies. For instance, there was that perpetually glowing pitchblende in Madam Curie's laboratory that seemed to indicate that energy was coming from nowhere. Also, calculations of the only known heat source for the Sun, gravitational contraction, seemed to give a lifetime for the Sun that was less than the age of the Earth, indicating that there might be some other energy source keeping the Sun hot.
Suppose you had shown a scientist of that time three one-kilogram bricks on a table, one of frozen hydrogen, one of red-hot iron, and one of room-temperature uranium. If you then asked the scientist which brick had the most energy, the scientist would have first noticed that since all the bricks were at the same height in the Earth's gravitational field, and they all weighed a kilogram, that their gravitational potential energies were the same. If the scientist then measured the temperature of the bricks, he would have said that the hot brick of iron would have more heat energy than the others, and he could even calculate how far that heat energy could lift the iron brick against the Earth's gravity given an efficient way to convert the heat energy into kinetic energy. Obviously the red-hot kilogram of iron had more energy than the room temperature kilogram of uranium, and the frozen kilogram of hydrogen ice had the least energy of all.
Then Einstein developed the Special Theory of Relativity to explain what happens to objects traveling near the speed of light. One of the magical but logical consequences of this theory was that the conservation laws for mass and energy were not strictly true! The theory predicted that mass could be changed into energy and vice versa.
The concept must have been mind-boggling at first. Mass is measured in kilograms and energy is measured in joules. They don't even have the same units. How can you convert one into the other? It would be like turning a sow's ear into a silk purse! The magical conversion of mass into energy does take place, however, and the conversion factor is a phenomenally large one, the speed of light—squared! From Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity there comes that famous equation: E=mc2. This equation predicts that if some way could be found to carry out the conversion, a tiny amount of mass will produce an amazing amount of energy—ninety megajoules per microgram!
The scientists could now understand what was going on in Madame Curie's laboratory. The nuclei in the atoms of pitchblende were changing from one element to another, and giving off energy in the process. The new element weighed slightly less than the old element and the difference in mass showed up as gamma ray or particle energy. The scientists then knew that nature was able to violate the conservation laws for mass and energy, but search as they might, there didn't seem to be any device by which humans could control the conversion.
Albert Einstein told us in 1905 that mass could be converted into energy and he even gave us the conversion equation. But it took 37 years before Enrico Fermi found the method by which the energy stored in the excess mass of the uranium nucleus could be released. The process ultimately proved to be amazingly simple. You just put two or more large blocks of uranium or plutonium near each other and a chain reaction starts, automatically producing heat (or an explosion).
When Fermi and the other scientists finished their experiments and measurements on all the elements and their isotopes, they found that the very heavy elements, like uranium and plutonium, had an excess of mass per neutron or proton compared to carbon, while elements like iron had a deficiency of mass per nucleon. At the other end of the periodic table, the very light elements like hydrogen and lithium also had a mass excess. If the uranium and plutonium could be fissioned into iron-like elements, the difference in mass would be released as energy. In the same way, if the lighter elements could be sequentially fused together to build up iron-like elements, then again there would be an excess of mass that would be converted to energy.
If you were to ask a modern-day scientist which contains more energy: frozen hydrogen, red-hot iron, or room-temperature uranium, you will now get a different answer. For the modern scientist can see energy sources in those bricks that could not be seen before. The frozen hydrogen, if fused to iron, will release more energy than the fissioning of uranium to iron, and the red-hot iron, which used to be thought the better in the energy sweepstakes, is now seen to be comparatively devoid of energy, despite its high temperature.
Thus, the advent of special relativity produced a new energy source and reduced the number of conservation laws. We now have only three: conservation of mass-energy, conservation of linear momentum, and conservation of angular momentum. The physics textbooks firmly insist that each is always separately conserved despite some unresolved anomalies. For instance, the high speed jets that are coming from rapidly spinning black-hole quasars seem to indicate that an object which should be sucking matter in, is instead propelling it out. Also, the number of neutrinos being emitted by the fusion reactions in the Sun is only one third of what it should be, indicating that there is still some other yet unknown source of energy keeping the Sun hot.
Einstein did not stop with his Special Theory of Relativity. He next went on to develop his theory of gravity, called the General Theory of Relativity. The Einstein Theory of Gravity is an extension of the Newton Theory of Gravity. In the Newton theory, gravity is a force field generated by a mass. The gravity field generated by a mass is the same whether or not the mass is hot, moving, or spinning. In the Einstein theory, however, gravity is not caused solely by mass, but it is also produced by energy, and linear momentum, and spin!
In the Einstein theory the mass of a gravitating body produces the usual Newtonian gravitational attraction that we are familiar with. The heat, stress, and other sources of energy in the gravitating body not only add to the Newtonian attraction, but also produce gravitational stress patterns in the nearby space. The linear motion of the gravitating body also produces a gravitational field, but it is different than the Newtonian gravity. The linear momentum gravity forces tend to "drag" a nearby test body in the same direction the gravitating body is moving. Similarly, according to the Einstein theory, the angular momentum in a spinning body causes nearby objects to move in curved paths.
If mass, energy, linear momentum, and angular momentum all produce gravity, doesn't that indicate that they are all just different aspects of some more fundamental entity? We scientists studying the Einstein Theory of Gravity have given this entity a name—the mass-energy-momentum tensor, but just naming something does not mean that we really understand it.
This multi-aspect appearance of the "thing" that causes gravity in the Einstein General Theory of Relativity is reminiscent of the fable about the blind men and the elephant. One of the blind me felt the trunk and said that an "elephant" was like a snake, another felt the tail and said that an "elephant" was like a rope, another felt a leg and said that an "elephant" was like a tree trunk, while a fourth felt the ear and said that an "elephant" was like a leaf. They were all partially correct, but none could comprehend the "elephant" as a whole. Scientists today are in the same predicament. We see aspects of the "mass-energy-momentum tensor", but we still cannot comprehend it as a whole.
Could it be, that in some future day, that just as we can now interconvert two of those gravity-producing components of the mass-energy-momentum tensor—mass and energy, that we could interconvert mass, energy, and the two types of momentum?
How could that be? They are different things. Yet, with Einstein giving us the equations and the conversion constants, and Fermi giving us the experimental techniques, we found that a room-temperature brick of uranium could give us more energy than a glowing brick of iron. Could there be other sources of energy hidden in ordinary things the we could extract by conversion of linear momentum and angular momentum to energy? What we need are the right conversion equations and the right experimental techniques.
Suppose we wanted to convert linear momentum to energy. What type of conversion constant do we need? Well—energy is in joules, or kilograms times velocity squared, while linear momentum is kilograms times velocity. To convert linear momentum to energy, we need a conversion constant with the units of velocity. The natural choice is the velocity of light, giving us the conversion equation between energy E and momentum p of E=pc.
Since the numerical value of the speed of light is so high, this equation predicts some remarkable results. A one kilogram mass moving at one meter per second velocity has only one joule of kinetic energy in its motion. Yet, if the speed of light is the correct conversion constant, the linear momentum in that motion, if we could find the method to convert it completely into energy, would produce an additional 300 million joules! (Just stopping the mass will not do. That only transfers the linear momentum to your hand, and thence to the ground. The linear momentum must somehow be destroyed, not just transferred to the Earth.)
But let's go on. To convert angular momentum to linear momentum we need a unit of length. There is a fundamental unit of length, called the Planck length. The Planck length is very tiny, Lp=1.6x10-35 meters. This is a trillion, trillion times smaller than the nucleus of an atom. To convert angular momentum a to linear momentum p , we divide the angular momentum by this very tiny number, p=a/Lp. That means a very small amount of angular momentum will make a very large amount of linear momentum . . . or mass . . . or energy. The equation for the interconversion would be:
E = m c2 = p c = a c / Lp
The smallest amount of angular momentum that you can have is one unit of atomic spin—an electron orbiting a nucleus. If we could find a mechanism to convert that single unit of atomic angular momentum, then the angular momentum destroyed would reappear as either 6.5 kilogram meters per second of linear momentum (a brick flying through the air), 22 micrograms of mass, or 2000 megajoules of energy, the energy of a half a ton of TNT!
It may be that some day gyroscopes will take us to the stars. But instead of massive whirling disks of brass or steel, the gyroscopes will be the nebulous whirling particles in the atom. Once we have the proper future technology, we will be able to convert some of those spinning bundles of angular momentum into the energy and momentum that we will need to push a spaceship close to the speed of light.
But we need to find the magic trick that will make the conversion. You don't destroy angular momentum by grabbing a spinning object and bringing it to a stop. When you do that, the angular momentum is merely transferred through your body, to add to or subtract from the spin of the Earth. Unfortunately, we no longer have Fermi around to show us how to convert momentum to energy, as he once showed us how to convert mass to energy.
What we need is a scientific magician, who can convert what is now indistinguishable from magic into a working technology. Who is the person that will finally be able to "see" this mass-energy-momentum "elephant" that we grope around like blind men? Who will give us a Spin Drive to the stars?
My father-in-law, Edwin Dodson, used to be Plant Supervisor of Construction of the C&P Telephone Company of Maryland. One day after dinner he told me about watching one of his maintenance crews while they were looking for an underground cable. The approved company procedure was to get out the low frequency electrical tone generator and pickup designed by the scientists at AT&T Bell Labs, use the generator to insert a strong electrical signal into one end of the cable, then use the ultrasensitive pickup loop to scan along the surface of the ground above the path of the buried cable. Instead of taking out the scientifically and managerially approved AT&T kit, however, the crew made some dowsing rods out of two pieces of pipe and two bent copper wires and proceeded to use ESP to search for the cable. What impressed me about the story was: Those same men had to dig the hole!
The phrase ESP means different things to different people, including mind reading, foretelling the future, psychokinetics, and dowsing. All of them involve the mind being able to obtain information through extra sensory channels other than the known sensory channels of sight, seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting.
Since the people on the repair crew were the ones that had to dig the hole, it must mean something that they chose ESP over known technology. I don't believe in ESP, but I am aware that others do. I am constantly looking for some new physical law of nature, or some new way of using a known law of nature to duplicate some of the purported effects of ESP. I think I have found one, a little known quantum-mechanical phenomenon called the Aharonov-Bohm effect.
In the realm of the small, the accepted theory is called Quantum Mechanics. In the Theory of Quantum Mechanics objects like electrons and photons have both particle properties and wave properties. If you take two beams of laser light and shine them on a screen at an angle they will interfere with each other to produce a fringe pattern on the screen. Where the light waves are in phase they augment each other and where the light waves are of opposite phase they cancel each other out. It was a triumphant confirmation of Quantum Mechanics when Davisson and Germer repeated the experiment with two beams of low energy electrons, proving that the electron had a wavelength inversely proportional to its energy.
It was then pointed out by Aharonov and Bohm that the phase of the electron wave was a direct function of the electric or magnetic potential and thus these potentials could be measured directly by merely observing the position of the fringe pattern in an two electron beam interference experiment. This announcement and its subsequent experimental confirmation for both the electric and magnetic potentials caused a considerable flap among conservative scientists. From a classical point of view the potential is merely a convenient mathematical fiction since it can have any value it wants and the physical results are the same. In classical mechanics, the only observable is the differences between two potentials, not their absolute value. This is why an electrical worker can handle a power line charged up to an electrical potential of 100,000 volts as long as he doesn't let any part of his body touch something at a different electrical potential.
In these interference experiments, however, the potential was found to be directly measurable. The experiments have been done in a number of ways. In one experiment a beam of very low energy electrons was split into two equal beams by a negatively charged wire. The two beams then went off in their separate ways until they were separated by a number of micrometers. There they were deflected back in the other direction by a pair of charged plates. The two beams met again and formed a round bright spot on an electron-sensitive screen. Overlaid on the circular spot was a pattern of interference lines.
In the open area between the two beams was long, thin, tiny electromagnet. A tiny current was passed through the electromagnet causing a tiny magnetic field to exist inside the electromagnet. The electromagnet was so long and so far away from the two electron beams that there was essentially no magnetic forces on the electron beams due to the electromagnet. This was proven since the circular spot did not shift in position. When the electromagnet was activated, however, the fringe pattern inside the circular spot did shift—and by just the amount predicted by Aharonov and Bohm. The two electron beam system had detected the presence of the magnetic field at a distance. Even when the electromagnet and the electron beams are completely shielded from each other by a perfect superconducting magnetic shield, the electron beams can still sense the presence of the magnetic field at a distance. It is this ability of the Aharonov-Bohm effect to obtain information from inside shielded enclosures that makes it an interesting candidate as a possible channel for extra sensory perception.
Different underground bodies have slightly different electric and magnetic potentials. This depends upon the materials they are composed of, their temperature and water content, and their interaction with the Earth's magnetic field and the underground galvanic currents. If the brain has a sensor that can use the Aharonov-Bohm effect to detect the strength and extent of those potentials, even through a shield, then this might be the mechanism for the dowsing aspect of ESP. It is difficult, however, to see how the Aharonov-Bohm effect could be used for the other aspects of ESP.
In all the experiments done to date the size of the experimental apparatus has been very tiny, micrometers in dimensions. Also, all of the experiments have made the assumption that the quantum phase had to be measured around a closed loop. This limits the usefulness of the technique as a sensing mechanism, since it requires that the measurement path encircle the field to be measured, even through the sensing beams do not have to pass through the field to sense it.
A later publication by Aharonov has hinted that if a reference phase were available that was not affected by the potential, the beam that was affected could be compared with this reference phase without the necessity of the measuring apparatus encircling the field to be measured. One method of carrying out this measurement would be to use two particle states that can interfere but that are acted on differently by the potential fields. The existence of such states is an open question since two states which are acted upon differently by a potential are, in principle, distinguishable from each other and therefore will not interfere.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that something can be learned from the gravitational analog of the Aharonov-Bohm effect. This is the Schiff orbiting gyro experiment. The axis of a gyro in orbit around the Earth will precess due to the warpage of space caused by the mass of the Earth. The change of the direction of the gyro axis can be measured by using an optical stellar inertial reference frame which is negligibly affected by the local space curvature.
If we could somehow find a way to measure potentials directly in a simple manner, then this could lead to completely new sensing technologies for prospecting, communication, and military applications. Then if we can develop sensors that can detect potential, then perhaps we can find similar sensors in our brain. These would finally give us a scientific understanding of extra-sensory phenomena and remove ESP from the pages of the tabloids and place them onto the pages of scientific journals.
One of the most magical concepts invented by the human mind is the concept of the human spirit—a spark of something, which is our intellect, and which is supposed to live on after our body dies. Of all the many types of future science that might some day come true, one that would be completely unexpected would be a scientific understanding of the spirit.
I believe that in our present, very limited understanding of the Universe and the way it works, there exists a clue, an inkling, of what could possibly be one possible version of what a spirit might be. It would have all the magical properties that we envision for the spirit and yet does not violate the laws of nature as we now think they are.
First, I am going to define what I mean by "the spirit": The spirit is an entity which is the animating principle of individual life, especially of individual life in thinking or highly organized beings. The spirit grows and develops as the body grows and develops. However, the spirit is separable from the body at death and is immortal.
Is there any scientific evidence for this definition? To start with, let us see what present day science has to say about separating the intellect or spirit from the human body. Later, we can discuss how our intellect could exist separate from all matter as an independent, immaterial, and immortal entity. Science is already fairly sure that your intellect is relatively independent of the specific matter in which it resides. When you were born as a baby, your brain had built into it a number of instinctive reaction mechanisms that kept the body alive. But except for those animal-like mechanisms, your brain was a blank slate upon which your environment, parents, siblings, pets, and teachers started placing experiences. You learned and grew. You developed response patterns and intelligence. Finally you developed a personality. When this process was completed, your memories, your habits, and your personality were in your brain in the form of coded molecules, coded synapse levels, and coded pathway patterns set up in and among the nerve cells in your brain.
The important thing to recognize is that the information content that presently makes up your intellect is in the patterns. Patterns in molecules and patterns in the intercellular nerve interconnections. The nerve cells are the same nerve cells that were in the baby, but now they are arranged into patterns. It is the patterns, not the cells, that form your intellect. The patterns would be the same if all the cells and atoms had been replaced by other equivalent cells or atoms.
So far, the only patterns that are complex enough to demonstrate intelligence have been formed in the living nerve cell tissue of flesh-and-blood bodies. Over the years, however, there have been a number of research projects on artificial intelligence, in which attempts have been made to develop intellect patterns in electronic systems rather than in living tissue. Unlike regular computers, which have highly structured designs and make mistakes if they are wired wrong, these neural analog artificial brains, or "neural nets", are deliberately formed as unorganized structures of "nerve cells". Care is taken so that the wires from the television camera "eyes" are connected to the "cells" in the "brain" instead of to each other, but at the start it doesn't matter to what part of the brain the wires are connected. The lights that indicate a response are connected to the brain cells instead of to each other or to the television camera, but again, that is all the logic that is built into the device. When the machine is finished, it is a completely imbecilic, randomly wired mess of electronic components that can do nothing.
The researchers, then, acting as teachers, proceed to show things to the television eye, such as pictures of people or the alphabet, and observe the response patterns of the lights connected to the "brain". If the researchers like the response pattern, they push a "Reward" button, which sends a signal down the pathways that are being used and increases the likelihood of those pathways being used the next time. If they don't like the response, or they wish to change it, they push the "Punish" button, until the machine changes the response to the liking of the "Teacher". In this manner, the researchers train the machine, and form patterns of preferred pathways between the electronic nerve cells. These neural net machines have learned, in an elementary and crude way, many things—like running a maze, learning the alphabet, or driving a car. We thus have the first beginnings of an experimental approach to the understanding of intelligence in machines. Right now, the machines only have the IQ of a worm, and there are many problems ahead, but as we gain an understanding of how these machines learn, we hope to gain an understanding of how we learn.
Perhaps some day there will be an electronic brain impressed with the patterns copied from a protoplasmic brain. We will then have an intellect in two forms, protoplasmic and electronic. What we will learn then is almost beyond future speculation. Is pride intellectual? Or emotional? Can a machine envy? hate? love? Or are those reactions found only in human intellects burdened with hormone-driven flesh-and-blood bodies inherited from their animal forebears?
Thus . . . one part of our question seems to be answered. Science seems to see a future where in a limited way an intellect can one day be independent of the human body. But can the intellect be a spirit—free of all forms of matter? Can it be immortal and exist without any type of body, protoplasmic or electronic, to impress its patterns on? I would like to give one possible way that this could be. It is very speculative (and probably not true), but at least it gives us some clues as to where we might find some form of future science that is presently indistinguishable from magic.
As science learns more about the Universe and the space and time in which we live and move, we are beginning to realize that space and time are not simple things that just exist and are unaffected by the rest of the Universe. Experiments have shown that space seems to have a structure and characteristics of its own.
To give one example, in high energy experiments on parity non-conservation, in which right-hand spinning and left-hand spinning particles should have been emitted in equal numbers, there was found a strong preference for left-handed particles. The explanation that the mathematics gives is that space is not uniform, but has a "left-handed twist" in this part of the Universe. There is also strong evidence that the structure of space is determined by matter itself. There are theories of cosmology that indicate that with no matter or energy, there would also be no space and no time. If you create a small amount of matter, then this matter forms a weak, tenuous space near itself and it begins to take time to do things.
If we have a large chunk of matter and form it into a hollow shell, then inside this miniature Universe there forms a relatively strong space and time, and a small particle of matter inside the shell begins to have inertia or mass. You have to give the mass a push to get it moving through the space defined by the large shell of matter, and it takes time to move from one part to another. As the mass of the outer shell is increased, the space gets stiffer and you have to push the little piece of matter harder to get it moving, and it takes longer for it to travel.
Here we see a glimmer of how mass and energy, which are solid, physical things like our body, can influence the structure of space and time, which are ethereal, immaterial things like our concept of the spirit. This effect of matter on space and time is closely related to gravity. In the Einstein Theory of Gravity, space, time, and gravity are all mixed up and are all considered different aspects of the same thing. This is why one sometimes hears that according to the Einstein Theory of Gravity, the Sun does not make a gravity field, but instead the mass of the Sun curves the space near it. The planets then move in this curved space-time in force-free "straight" lines, which look to us like curved orbits. We attribute this to a force, the gravity force, pulling the planets around in their orbits.
Thus, according to the Einstein Theory of Gravity, physical things like matter affect ethereal things like space and time, and the space and time in turn affect the motion of the matter. If the matter has patterns in it, these patterns will in turn be impressed on the space and time. If the space and time have patterns, then other matter will react to those patterns. We know that this is true for large bodies like the stars and planets. Is it equally true for small bodies like atoms?
Let us speculate. Could it be that as the atoms and molecules in our brain form into the pattern containing our intellect, that these atoms and molecules impress their pattern into the space-time matrix? If so, then we would now have the pattern that is our intellect impressed not only on some material object such as the nerve cells in our brain, but also on an ethereal object such as the space-time in which we live. This ethereal copy of our intellect could be the spirit.
At first glance it might seem that the mass of the atoms and molecules in a human body would be too small to significantly affect space and time. The atoms, however, although small in total mass, have very dense nuclei, and it is density, not mass, that counts in curving space. The curvature of space induced by an atomic nucleus near its surface is fifteen trillion times greater than the curvature of space induced by the mass of the entire Earth! All of these tiny curvature fields from all the atomic nuclei in the atoms in the brain would then form a complex pattern in space-time that is a replica of the pattern of the intellect outlined by our brain cells.
How would these localized points of space curvature behave? We don't know, because there is yet no complete theory of quantum gravity or quantum space-time. Since the space-time curvature effects are limited to a very tiny region near the nucleus of an atom, they cannot have a strong coupling at great distances. But the influence, although weak, can reach out to neighboring electrons and atoms, affecting their motion through ethereal space-time effects.
We must be cautious with these speculations, however, since a quick calculation will easily show that the nuclear and electrical forces exerted by an atomic nucleus are many, many times larger than the space-curvature effects. Also, no experiment has yet found any evidence of a space-curvature effect. Yet, the theories indicate it is there, and it just may play some part in the operation of our intellect.
How might our brain interact with its "spirit"? The curvature effects are small, but the brain is a unique organ in its drive to find patterns in the many-faceted sensory environment impinging upon it. An excellent example of the brain's desire to find patterns is found in the old belief that there were canals on Mars. Mars is covered with craters arranged in random patterns. However, the brain behind the eyes of the first observers of Mars wanted so much to make some sense out of that random dot pattern, that it forced the dots into linear structures, and led the hand to draw the non-existent Martian canals. This tendency of the brain to pull patterns out of noisy information is one of its strongest attributes. It may be that some day an understanding of this pattern-extraction process will give us a clue to an experiment to demonstrate the existence of an immaterial pattern like the spirit.
We now begin to see how the matter in our body could form a pattern of our intellect in space and time. The ethereal intellect would change and grow as the body changes and grows. In turn, this ethereal pattern in space-time could possibly influence the motion of the electronic and ionic currents in the brain cells. The awareness and influence of the intellect pattern would be strongest in the immediate space-time region where the material particles of the nerve cells exist, but its awareness and influence could extend not only through the space around us, but could also extend into the time around us. Theoretically, this could be all the way to eternity, so that in this magical view, the spirit would be immortal. However, as in the case of space-curvature, I would suspect that as the time interval gets farther and farther away from the period of time where the matter generating the pattern exists, the influence would become weaker and merge into the other patterns in space-time matrix. (Shades of the Force!)
All of this speculation is very far from presently known, hard, scientific fact. But that only indicates our lack of knowledge about the true nature of intelligence and microscopic space-time interactions.
It now looks like that the concept of our spirit as an entity containing our intellect, that is formed by our body, and yet is immaterial and exists after the body is gone, cannot be arbitrarily dismissed as unscientific nonsense. And it may be, that on some future day, rather than denying the existence of the spirit, science will prove that the spirit does have a physical reality and that there is life after death.
Free Energy:
Timothy H. Boyer, "The Classical Vacuum," Scientific American, Vol. 253, #2, pp. 70 ff (August 1985).
Daniel C. Cole and Harold E. Puthoff, "Extracting energy and heat from the vacuum," Physical Review, Vol. E48, #2, pp. 1562-1565 (August 1993).
Richard P. Feynman and A.R. Hibbs, Quantum Electrodynamics (McGraw-Hill, NY, 1965).
Robert L. Forward, "Extracting Electrical Energy From the Vacuum by Cohesion of Charged Foliated Conductors," Physical Review B, Vol. 30, pp. 1700-1702 (1984).
E. G. Harris, A Pedestrian Approach to Quantum Field Theory, Chap. 10, (Wiley-Interscience, NY, 1972).
Stephen Hawking, "The Quantum Mechanics of Black Holes," Scientific American, Vol. 236, #1, pp. 34 ff (January 1977).
J.N. Israelachivili and D. Tabor, "Measurement of van der Waals dispersion forces in the range 1.5 to 130 nm," Proc. Royal Society of London, Series A, Vol. 331, pp. 19 ff (1972).
Charles Sheffield, The McAndrew Chronicles, pp. 72-112, 234-5, (Tor Books, NY, 1983).
Reactionless Drives:
Robert L. Forward, "Spin Drive to the Stars," Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, Vol. 101, #5, pp. 64-70 (27 April 1981).
Extra-Sensory Perception:
Y. Aharonov and D. Bohm, "Significance of Electromagnetic Potentials in the Quantum Theory," Physical Review, Vol. 115, pp. 485 ff (1959).
Dietrick Thomsen, "Gauging the Aharonov-Bohm Effect", Science News, Vol. 129, p. 135 (1 March 1986).
Life After Death:
Robert L. Forward, "Speculations on the Spirit," Galileo, Vol. 2, #3, pp. 16-18, 94-95 (November 1979).