Is it, though?
Science fiction is basically a story written about one or more "scientific"
ideas (whatever "scientific" means). It's usually somewhat speculative,
suggesting possibilities not yet realized.
What's fascinating is how often these possibilities are realized -
and often quite soon after such a story is written. Science fiction is often
science prediction.
Take some very obvious examples:
Until the early-to-middle 1900's, there were no such things as electronic
computers. One of the first was used to crack the German ENIGMA code and
thus lead to a much more rapid Allied victory over Nazi Germany than would
have been possible otherwise, if at all. (Click
here
to read the Wikipedia article.) This, and other early computers, consisted
of large, bulky pieces of interconnected equipment.
Computers (and robots, which act essentially as arms and legs for computers)
existed in science fiction long before they became a reality. But now
computers are everywhere; and the most amazing thing about them is their
small size. In fact, they're now so ubiquitous, and so often replaced with
newer models, that they've given rise to a problem foreseen by nobody: large
quantities of toxic substances from junked electronic components in
landfill. (Have a look at
this page
to get some extra perspective on this.)
Until the mid-1990's, few people had ever heard of the internet. Then,
suddenly, there it was - and here you are now, reading something on your
computer that I've written on mine, and that has found its way from my
computer to yours via this amazing medium.
What is it that makes possible global communications (including, to an
extent, the internet)? Satellites, of course! And who foresaw this quite
some time before it existed?
Arthur C. Clarke,
one of the great science fiction writers, who realized the potential of
satellites (and also foresaw the importance of the
geostationary orbit,
at least for the early part of the communications revolution).
There are many, many other examples of science fiction as prediction,
including powered flight, the
atomic bomb,
"death rays", and even the most obvious one: space flight.
Then there are phenomena which at least look like science fiction.
Classic examples are Nikola Tesla's invention of the commutator-less
induction motor,
and his championing of AC power against Edison's very wrong-headed
insistence that DC was the way to go. (Tesla was also the true originator of
radio, which was an amazing phenomenon in its time - although we now take it
for granted.) Then there's radar (click
here
to read about Arthur C. Clarke's involvement with this), not to mention the
totally unexpected, very surprising phenomena associated with
electromagnetism
itself.
"Science fiction? Bah! Fairy tales..."
Don't you believe it.
So what's my point?
On
this
web-page, you can read about the 1995 première of a TV documentary which
featured Arthur C. Clarke explaining how there are four stages in the way
scientists react to the development of anything of a revolutionary nature:
a) "It's nonsense,"
History shows that, all too often, major scientific discoveries are
accompanied by howls of "science fiction" from the uneducated masses, and
"pseudo-", "fringe" or "crackpot" science from the scientific establishment.
(The media - both general and scientific - have a lot to answer for in this
regard.)
Here's a classic example:
You may think (as I did, until comparitively recently) that the speed of
light has only been known with any degree of accuracy for the last century
or so. Names like Einstein, Maxwell, Lorentz, Michelson and Morley spring to
mind as having had something to do with it. Along with the development of
electromagnetic theory, X-rays, and the discovery of radio, somewhere along
the line the speed of light made its grand entrance. Right?
Wrong. The fact that the speed of light is finite, rather than infinite
(i.e. requiring light to take no time to travel from its source to an
observer, as was once believed), has been known for close on three hundred
years! Click on one or more of these links to read the story of Danish
astronomer
Olaus Roemer
(1644-1710):
http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/waves_particles/lightspeed_evidence.html
http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/bc/ahp/CellBio/SBAM/SBAM.Speed.html
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/measure_c.html
There are plenty of other pages on the WWW which tell this story. The
following one also mentions how Roemer had to endure disbelief from his
contemporaries, including the great Jean-Dominique Cassini (after whom the
"Cassini division" in the rings of Saturn was named) - but how it was
eventually proved that Roemer was right after all:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/ance-c.html
That last link also mentions the antagonism Michael Faraday experienced in
regard to his belief that light was an electromagnetic phenomenon, and how
eventually James Clerk Maxwell showed conclusively that Faraday was right
after all. Truth must always emerge eventually!
You want a more recent example of alleged "crackpot-ism"? 1989, "cold
fusion". (Yes, research into this phenomenon continues, quietly and out of
the public spotlight, by people whose credibility - or more - will be on the
line if they don't keep their heads down and their backs covered.)
You'll find more about cold fusion further down in this page, along with a
link to another of my pages which mentions it - as well as links to several
pages on other websites which also address the issue.
Then, of course, there is the classic example of
Galileo
(1564-1642), who was forced by the Church (a very powerful institution at
the time) to
recant
(on 22nd June, 1633) his
scientific discovery
that the Earth revolved around the sun, rather than vice versa - even
though he knew with absolute certainty that he was right.
(It wasn't until 1992 that the Church finally apologized for its error, but
- as already mentioned - truth must always emerge eventually!)
So why is original thought so often derided, so seldom honoured?
Well, I'm convinced that - in recent times, at least - it's because of what
I now call the "Three P's": pride, politics and power.
Pride
This is always some combination of "why didn't I think of that first?" and
"how dare they - they didn't go through the Right Channels!". Either way,
it's basically sour grapes. It's an all-too-human failing, and it
would be nice to think that scientists - intelligent seekers after truth -
could rise above it. Sadly, that's often not the case.
(In this connection, on the subject of "scientific method", I encourage you
to visit
this page,
and read it very carefully. It's refreshing and gratifying to find that
there are other people in the world who have reached the same conclusions
on this issue as I have. If anything, the thoughts expressed in this article
are perhaps too politely expressed; I tend to be somewhat more scathing
about it all. If this author is a bit like Bono, I'm a lot more like Bob
Geldof by comparison. (Also, just by the way, I must say that I find the
author's somewhat dismissive remarks about "the ether" to be somewhat out of
kilter with the rest of the article!) For more thoughts on these and other
matters by someone who is not afraid to "stir the pot", visit
this page.)
Politics
Somewhat akin to the "pride"-factor just mentioned, but usually involving
people of less intelligence. In the interests of "national (in)security"
and/or "the economy", governments don't like citizens getting up to tricks
and finding out more than is good for them to know. "Can't have that!"
Power
Again, obviously bits of the other two P's come in here - but this time, I'm
referring to the more blatant, less obviously underhand activities of big
business. (These days, of course, you're hard pressed to spot the difference
between big business and government. If you haven't already, see my
Why is Mad Teddy mad?
page for more on this theme; also
here.)
Anything that threatens "market share" is taboo. Big businesses will stop at
nothing to kill stone-dead anything that renders their operations
irrelevant. And, in the current political/economic environment, governments
will back them to the hilt.
Okay - so just what is Zero-Point Energy? Well, it's something that's been
known about for approximately half a century and suspected for over a
century.
It's something which exists in colossal amounts, everywhere. Not just here
on Earth, but in space - so that it's entirely possible that it could even
be harnessed to power spaceships.
It holds the promise of making possible an appropriately-sized,
self-contained power-supply for every home, business, or industry in the
world. After the initial outlay, the cost of running a device to turn ZPE
into usable electricity would be insignificant (occasional maintenance may
be necessary). It will certainly be a lot less than the regular
power-bill for grid-supplied electricity which we all have to pay now.
Once the technology is developed, and once the price drops to an affordable
level (as always happens with any new technology), it will make possible a
cheap supply of energy everywhere - including developing countries - thus
making possible a modern lifestyle for all the world's citizens.
Best of all, it won't involve the production of greenhouse gases, nuclear
waste, or any other kind of pollution. Clean and green to the max - and it
will never run out!
More detail about ZPE is given in the pages whose links appear below.
Ever since
Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888)
introduced the concept of "entropy", it's been all too easy to decry any
reference to "free energy" as crackpot science. The Second Law of
Thermodynamics (so the litany goes) makes impossible any such notion.
Perpetual motion machines can't exist.
Well, maybe they can and maybe they can't - depending on your definition.
Either way, that's not the point. Neither is the Second Law itself, really.
The point is that there is a vast sea of energy just waiting to be tapped
into. People who know and understand this don't need to justify their
position in terms of the Second Law and entropy. If we can get at this
zero-point energy (ZPE) at all, we can do it without needing to
violate any existing thermodynamic principles. Even if we do need to "run
the universe down" a bit to access this huge store of energy, it won't
matter - the benefits will outweigh the costs by a (quite literally)
astronomical factor. (Visit
this web-page
for more information about this, under the heading "FORWARD THOUGHT
EXPERIMENT", about two-fifths of the way down the page.)
So just how much of this energy is there? Some sources say that the amount
of ZPE in a volume the size of a coffee cup would be enough to boil the
world's oceans, if we could get it all out
(here
is a link to one of many web-pages with more information;
here's
another). Let's hope nobody ever gives this a try, otherwise we would all
really have cause to worry about "weapons of mass destruction".
In the chapter of Arthur C. Clarke's book "Greetings, Carbon-based Bipeds!"
entitled "When Will the Real Space Age Begin?", Clarke reports that
Nobel-laureate physicist Richard Feynman referred to the amount of ZPE in a
cubic metre of space being enough to boil the world's oceans, rather
than the amount in a volume the size of a coffee-cup. So perhaps
there is a bit of uncertainty about this.
But does it really matter? Even though there is a difference of three orders
of magnitude, this pales into insignificance in terms of the amount of
energy being discussed - which is enormous, regardless of which of
these two volumes is cited.
Lest anyone should wish to quibble, it's a somewhat analogous situation to
Olaus Roemer's demonstration that the speed of light is finite, as opposed
to infinite. The actual figure implied by his experimental results is not as
accurate as the currently accepted value - but so what? That's always been
the way: science (at its best) will always strive to improve its technique
and refine its results. It just takes time, and in no way detracts from the
thrust of the underlying principle under investigation.
The point here is that, either way, there is vastly more ZPE
available than we are ever likely to need.
On a related matter:
It's not necessary to know absolutely everything about a scientific
phenomenon before putting it to work. A classic example is electricity
itself. Until 1897, nobody was really sure what it actually was.
Since the 1750's, when
Benjamin Franklin
was performing his very risky experiment involving kite-flying during a
thunderstorm
A.K. Solomon, one of the early researchers into nuclear physics, in his book
"Why Smash Atoms?" (Pelican Books, first published in 1940), takes up the
story:
By the end of the nineteenth century the body of knowledge regarding
electricity had become far more complete. Electricity could be described,
could be generated, and even accurately measured, yet the question still
remained: 'What was electricity?' Finally, in 1897, Professor J.J.
Thomson, working at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, gave the
first definite answer. Electricity was particles.
Note that this only happened in 1897 - significantly, a year
after Nikola Tesla's Niagara Falls power station commenced operations, and two years after Launceston's
Duck Reach power station
did so!
(Also, note the practical importance of Thomson's experiments. As a direct
result, starting in the early-to-middle 20th Century, we have had radar
screens, televisions, oscilloscopes, computer monitors, and various medical
diagnostic and imaging devices - ECG, CT, MRI etc. - all made possible by
the invention of the cathode-ray tube.)
What has all this to do with zero-point energy?
Precisely this: we may not know the exact nature of ZPE, or even exactly
how much of it there is - but we do know that it's there, lots of
it, and that in principle it can be accessed and put to work.
Certainly, more "R&D" needs to be done - but, ultimately, it's an
engineering problem! So let's just get on with it!!!
I've made my point. I'm not interested in the exchange of childish
mud-slinging to defend my position. If you're still reading this - if you
haven't "switched off" and decided that I'm just another nut-case after all
- may I invite you to visit the following web-pages and learn more, if you
feel the need to do so:
http://www.nuenergy.org/alt/tesla_energy.htm
(Nikola Tesla recognized the existence of something he called "radiant
energy"...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy
(A good introduction to the topic.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect
(An article which describes the work of Dutch physicists Hendrik B. G.
Casimir in 1948, and Marcus J. Sparnaay in 1958, which established the
existence of zero-point energy beyond any doubt.)
http://www.secret-solutions.com/zpe.htm
(Yes, it's an ad for a book. No, I'm not getting paid anything to put a link to it
on my website. Yes, I do think it's worth a look. Whether you buy the book
is entirely up to you. I haven't read it so I can't either recommend it or
fail to do so. We're all grown-ups here.)
(This page contains plenty of links. I haven't checked them all out. Just a
word of warning: it's a "temperamental" site, and doesn't always "work".
When it does, it appears to be one of those websites that need you to have
Javascript turned on.
http://www.padrak.com/ine/ZPESCIAM.html
(From a sceptic. Note the use of loaded expressions like "technological
trappings - some seemingly of the backyard variety", "optimists",
"pseudoscience that could leech funds from legitimate research",
"contraption", "wishful thinking", "zeropoint-energy chauvinists", and
"would-be utility moguls", along with such telling statements as "In fact,
physicists quite often 'renormalize' equations to get rid of infinities, so
that they can ascribe physical meaning to their numbers" and "...if it
sounds too good to be true, it probably is".
Read the final paragraph on that page, and then ask yourself if lasers,
radio, X-rays, MRI,
heart pacemakers,
affordable powerful computers, the internet, powered flight, the Apollo moon
landings, Voyager II etc. - even the amazing phenomenon of
electromagnetism
itself - are all too good to be true.)
We need sceptics; be kind to them. They are to the scientific world what
critics are to the artistic world. They're necessary, if only to remind us
how much more difficult it is to be creative (and build things up) than it
is to be destructive (and tear things down).
Just one more thing about that "sceptical" page:
Its author is pretty scathing about research by amateurs of the "backyard
variety". Contrast this with the following comment by
Dr. Hal Puthoff,
one of several participants in an episode of "Equinox" - a British TV
series - on the subject of alternative energy, reported in
this link
(already given above, in another context):
This is an area of physics that specially seems to draw amateurs and/or
low-tech labs and so therefore they don't have a lot of money to spend on
the apparatus ... the first things put together by some maverick in his
garage are probably going to be pretty low-tech and pretty crude. But that's
okay, I mean the first observations of radioactivity or whatever were really
quite crude. Actually if you look (at) the history of invention most often
breakthroughs were found by mavericks working outside the field.
Or, to put it another way - in the words of Bloody Mary's song
"Happy Talk",
from Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1949 musical "South Pacific":
"You got to have a dream, if you don't have a dream
More ZPE-specific links:
http://www.padrak.com/ine/ZPESCIAM2.html
(A link within the "sceptical" page above. This one is very informative,
packed with considerable detail - and not cynical or sarcastic at all.
Highly recommended!)
(Too good to be true? Wotcha reckon?)
http://jnaudin.free.fr/meg/meg.htm
(Okay? Dr. Bearden has a patent on the device. The patent office takes pride
in not granting patents for crackpot ideas.)
Here's a link to an article which summarizes the issue quite well:
http://www.prahlad.org/pub/bearden/scalar_wars.htm
- and a link within that article (another page in the Tom Bearden website):
http://www.cheniere.org/correspondence/012202a.htm
Finally - a link to another page within this website, which deals with what
I consider to be a most interesting aspect of the matter:
http://www.madteddy.com/quasars.htm
In late 2003, I found in a local bookshop (and promptly purchased) a book
entitled
"The Scientist, the Madman, the Thief and their Lightbulb",
written by Keith Tutt (Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2001).
It contains a foreword by Arthur C. Clarke, whose credentials have already
been established earlier in this page. He refers to the revolution in
science initiated by the discovery of X-rays in the late 1800's, and says
that another revolution is urgently needed. He is also quoted as describing
the scorn shown to the discoverers of cold fusion as "one of the greatest
scandals in the history of science".
(Thanks to the staff at Simon and Schuster for permission to include this
scan of the book's front cover.)
There's no mention here of Tom Bearden and the Motionless Electromagnetic
Generator; but then, the book had been published earlier under the title
"The Search for Free Energy" - in 2001, the year before Dr. Bearden obtained
the patent on the MEG - hence the omission is easily explained.
Interestingly, however, Dr. Eugene Mallove, a spokesman for cold fusion,
does rate a mention. If you've visited
my second page on electromagnetism,
you may have followed
this link
which mentions Dr. Mallove's untimely demise under mysterious
circumstances, and provides
this further link
which gives more detail. Also, click
here
to read a long but highly significant article by Dr. Mallove himself.
Finally, click
here
to see a memo from Dr. Mallove to the White House in 2000 - which,
incidentally, contains further highly relevant quotes from Arthur C. Clarke.
(At the time Keith Tutt's book was published, Dr. Mallove was still alive.)
So what does it all mean?
Well, you can admit (grudgingly) that ZPE does exist - lots of it -
but take the point of view that it's not proper science and that therefore
precious time, talent and resources shouldn't be wasted on it. Or you can
take the point of view that we can't have the revolting peasants getting off
the grid, not paying their hefty power bills, and thus not contributing as
they should to "the economy" - much less having knowledge of what simply
must remain military secrets. Or you can take the point of view that the oil
industry, along with its associated pollution, wars and other atrocities, is
here to stay - at least until the oil runs out - and that the punters had
better just get used to it.
Or you can acknowledge the fact that the world is in crisis, and that there
is a crying need for cheap (if not free) non-polluting energy. You can
decide to do what you can to help give developing nations some natural
justice. At the very least you can try to help raise awareness of the fact
that, just below the surface, there is a vast ocean of energy just waiting
to be tapped into. (That's what this page is for: it's my attempt to help
give a wake-up call.) If you have the means - brains, money, or just plain
human decency - you can get involved and do something to help, before
this world goes up in flames and all the fantastic pioneering work of
Oersted, Faraday, Henry, Hamilton, Maxwell, Tesla and others will have been
for naught.
The choice, as the saying goes, is yours.
'Nuff said?
I don't have a working model of a MEG or other ZPE device - not yet, anyway.
I may never have such a thing. It may all be BS and not worth a cracker
(although, somehow, I don't think so). If I ever do succeed in making one,
it will be posted on this website if I have anything to do with it.
UPDATE, Thursday 27th March 2008
On Tuesday 18th March (just over a week ago), Sir Arthur C. Clarke died,
aged 90. This marks the end of an era: he was the last of the
"Big Three"
science-fiction writers of the 20th Century to have passed away, the
other two being Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. (Click
here
to read a tribute to all three.)
My home page
Preliminaries (Copyright, Safety)
Zero-point energy
It's easy to dismiss new ideas as "science fiction". Those who do so
presumably think - and hope - that people who come up with such ideas will
quietly back down and go away, taking that phrase as a reprimand.
b) "It is not important,"
c) "I always said it was a good idea," and
d) "I thought of it first."
Originally, I had several updates here - added at various times
during 2006 - to the point where this page became too big and
unwieldy. So I've taken them out and put them in a page by
themselves. Click on the arrow if you'd like to read them.
My old "39...Again?" coffee mug holds about 300 mls. Thus one cubic
metre would hold about 3,333 mugfulls - a factor (by volume) of between
1,000 (103) and 10,000
(104), corresponding to a difference
of three orders of magnitude.
, there had been a debate about the
true nature of electricity. It was known that were two "types" of static
electricity - positive and negative - but the debate centred around whether
electricity was a fluid of some kind, or made up of particles.
J.J. Thomson achieved this by effectively building the first evacuated
cathode-ray tubes, showing that cathode rays in a vacuum could be deflected
both by an electric field and by a magnetic field. From this he was able to
deduce that the cathode rays were made up of particles - which came to be
called "electrons". (Visit
this page
to see a more detailed account.)
)
Please - visit
this page
to read the inspirational words of
Earl Bakken,
inventor of the heart pacemaker (see link above), about how ordinary people
with a bit of motivation can, and often do, make highly significant
contributions.
How you gonna have a dream come true?"
OKAY?
"Maverick Teddy"?
This book addresses the contribution of several researchers including Nikola
Tesla, Thomas Henry Moray, Michael Faraday (the "N-machine"), Paul Baumann
(the Thesta-Distatica), Randell Mills (Blacklight), and Kohei Minato (the
permanent magnet motor), among others.
To quote yet again from Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon":
"We've all got to go sometime"; but it saddens me that
Sir Arthur didn't live to see a world in which zero-point energy had begun
to be taken seriously as the ultimate energy-source. If I ever do
succeed in making a working "proof-of-concept" ZPE device, I think I'll
dedicate it jointly to the memories of Arthur C. Clarke and Nikola Tesla.
(I've got a few ideas running around in my head - stay tuned...)
If you have the necessary know-how and resources, why don't you build
a MEG - or some other means of tapping into the ZPE? If you do, and put it
on your own website - and if it's "fair dinkum", as we say in Australia -
contact me
and I'll be more than happy to include a link to your page.
To close, a quote from Nikola Tesla in a speech to the American Institute of
Electrical Engineers:
Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power
obtainable at any point in the universe.... it is a mere question of time
when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork
of nature.
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