The Orion Project

Tom Bearden's Response to ARPA-E

To: Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy
U.S. Department of Energy
1000 Independence Avenue, S.W.
Washington, D.C. 20585

ATTN: Director

Dear ARPA-E:

This is a serious technical response to your website's invitation to offer suggestions, recommendations, and comments. I would deeply appreciate it if you did treat this as a serious response, whose results come from 40 years of personal arduous work in the breakthrough energy area. I deeply believe that understanding some of these matters offered and discussed can directly and strongly assist you in your overwhelmingly important mission to solve -- as quickly and completely as possible -- the energy crisis now besetting our country and the other nations of the world.





  1. In 1892 electrical engineering had not yet been born. Maxwell had died in 1879, and almost immediately several scientists -- Heaviside, Gibbs, etc. -- had leaped in and savaged and highly simplified Maxwell's quaternion-like theory (which was 20 equations in 20 unknowns), producing vector algebra in the process. "Electrical engineering" had not yet been born; knowledge of electrodynamics was confined to approximately three dozen physicists worldwide who knew something about electrodynamics.

  2. Lorentz was toying with the Heaviside equations, preparing to use them as the model to be used for the new technology to be called "electrical engineering" and to be taught in the universities. Lorentz was a great scientist -- but also noted for "borrowing" other scientists' work and publishing it and receiving credit for it. This has been validated by Okun and Jackson (Jackson is one of the leading classical electrodynamicists of the world). See J. D. Jackson and L. B. Okun, "Historical roots of gauge invariance," Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 73, July 2001, p. 663-680. Discusses roots and history of gauge invariance, verifies that Ludwig Lorenz (without the “t”) first symmetrically regauged Maxwell's equations, although it has been misattributed to H. A. Lorentz (with the “t”) as being first. This is an excellent coverage of the history of who did what and when, and who got credit for it!


  4. The major electrical researcher/experimenter/inventor of impact was Nikola Tesla, who had discovered that the "medium was active" -- in short, he had discovered aspects of energy from the modern seething virtual state vacuum. Electrical engineering did not exist; for his university education, Tesla had been educated in the physics of the day. Modern physics such as quantum mechanics, special and general relativity, gauge field theory, and quantum field theory, however, was not yet born.


  6. As an aside, extracting and using "EM energy from the vacuum" has been rigorously proven by DoE's own researchers, Klimov and his group, in Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), with the work also independently replicated and rigorously confirmed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Klimov's nanocrystalline solar cell process produces a COP = 200% easily, with a theoretical maximum of 700%. And it takes the excess energy directly from the seething vacuum, as experimentally confirmed. So COP > 100% EM-generating systems are indeed possible, which extract and use excess EM energy from the active local vacuum. The Department of Energy itself has rigorously proven that statement forever.

  7. Meanwhile, circa 1890 Tesla was hell-bent on giving the world "free EM energy from the active medium". Morgan, who had prepared the plan that would forever destroy Tesla, demanded to know from his scientific advisors if those Heaviside equations being considered for the new technology "electrical engineering" to be formed and taught in universities, still contained any of those confounded Tesla "energy from the active medium systems". [We point out that T. W. Barrett, a great higher group symmetry electrodynamicists and one of the cofounders of ultrawideband radar, in fact did a proper higher group symmetry electrodynamics (quaternion electrodynamics) analysis of some of Tesla's patented circuits, and proved that Tesla indeed could have done what he said. The reference is T. W. Barrett, "Tesla's Nonlinear Oscillator-Shuttle-Circuit (OSC) Theory," Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie, 16(1), 1991, p. 23-41. Barrett shows that EM expressed in quaternions allows shuttling and storage of potentials in circuits, and also allows additional EM functioning of a circuit that a conventional EM analysis simply cannot and will not reveal. He shows that Tesla’s patented circuits did exactly this].

  8. We have had group theory in our universities since 1870, and physicists study it. So Morgan's scientists (they were physicists; electrical engineering was not yet born) simply did a group theory analysis of the Heaviside equations, and showed that the equations were still asymmetrical. Thus indeed they still contained some of those asymmetric Tesla "energy from the active medium" systems that would eliminate the need for consuming fuel to power their circuits and loads. An exasperated Morgan simply ordered them to "Fix it!"

  9. Morgan's advisors elicited Lorentz himself to "fix" the problem. Accordingly, in 1892 Lorentz "borrowed" earlier work by Lorenz (without the "t") and used it to cripple those Heaviside equations by symmetrizing them. Thus the new "Heaviside-Lorentz" equations were symmetrized, and so they only contained systems that self-enforced COP < 1.0. And these deliberately crippled and mutilated equations were and have been taught as the electrical engineering model ever since.

  10. Not long after, Heaviside also discovered the giant curled EM energy flow that pours forth from the terminals of every battery or generator, in addition to the relatively small diverged Poynting component. The Heaviside curled component is more than a trillion times the magnitude of the relatively feeble but diverged Poynting energy flow component! In any given frame (special relativity situation) the divergence of the curl is zero. Hence normally the giant Heaviside component -- more than a trillion times as much energy flow per second as the mechanical energy input that one makes to crank the shaft of the generator -- does not interact with anything or diverge into the external circuit. Instead, it just roars on off into space and is wasted.


  12. So again Lorentz was elicited in 1900, and he taught the entire just-emerging EE field to just surface integrate the total energy flow vector (containing both the Heaviside giant curled flow and the Poynting diverged flow) around a surface assumed around every volume element of interest. That neatly discards the Heaviside giant curled EM energy flow, and leaves only the very small diverged Poynting energy flow. His sly "reason" given was that "it can have no physical significance". And that practice -- of discarding the enormous Heaviside curled energy flow component -- was made universal and continues in electrical engineering and electrical science to this day. [As a matter of note, there is indeed a way to tap and collect some of that universally available giant Heaviside curled EM energy flow, by deliberately using a local general relativity process. There is an area of optical physics that does it (courtesy of the Russians] since 1967, and it produces a usable COP = 18.00 in doing so. I will be happy to explain that area to ARPA-E if desired; those physicists are severely constrained in their publications and are never allowed to discuss the thermodynamics of the process or to mention the excess energy produced. They are only allowed to discuss the dramatic increase in COP, but only to say that the "reaction cross section is increased".


With the above viewpoint and information established, we attach five papers that lay out not only the reason for the world energy crisis and how to go about solving it, but we also extend things further to restore the negative energy ripped erroneously from physics in 1934. With that negative energy/negative probabilities restored, Dirac himself pointed out a simple but very startling way to directly engineer physical reality itself. There are several processes today already using this unsuspected Dirac "tickling of the vacuum" method to engineer physical reality. One is Kanzius' independently verified watergas process, in which the Dirac process is unwittingly used to simply "unhappen" the OH bond in the water molecule of a Dirac-tickled container of water, so that statistically the water molecules begin to simply fall apart into independent H2 and O2 gas mixes. By piping the gaseous mix outside the "Dirac tickled" region, and into the combustion chamber of a combustion engine, the mixed gas will then burn smoothly and power the engine, at very little cost, with the exhaust containing only water vapor. Another independently tested mechanism is Kanzius' cancer cure, which -- again unwittingly -- "unhappens" the cancer by Dirac-tickling of the local vacuum in which the cancer resides. Several other processes exist which use this, as covered in the attached papers. Eventually the same process will allow cleanup of all nuclear wastes (easily and efficiently), curing of any and all diseases, cleanup of much of our industrial processes and the pollution of our precious biosphere, etc.

I hope you find the attached information and papers of direct interest to your vital mission in these uncertain times. We simply must have a great breakthrough in energy and other areas, or else modern civilization will increasingly become more and limited and more and more economically curtailed. At the same time, this must be a "clean" solution, as we simply must get on with cleaning up our fragile biosphere, reducing global warming, and cleanup of the ponderous wastes already confronting us (such as the 1300+ smuck reservoirs accompanying the U.S.'s coal-burning power plants. We note the present intention to "cleanup" the recent giant spill (the reservoir broke) at one of these plants in the south -- which will involve some 35,000 railroad cars of smucky wastes hauled to a community area and buried there in spite of the citizens' wishes not to have it there.



Thomas E. Bearden, PhD
Lt. Col., U.S. Army (retired)