How much Energy is there in the Aether?

Copyright © 1998 Harold Aspden


Before I begin this discourse on the energy content of the aether, I wish to present the summary description that appears on the back cover of my book: 'Aether Science Papers'. It reads:



The author has, for some 40 years now, sought to interest the world of science in his discoveries concerning the nature of the force of gravitation. His contribution has not been heeded because the research findings have not developed from the conventional theoretical stream. Yet, from his Ph.D. research at Cambridge on anomalous energy activity in ferromagnetism, Dr. Aspden could see so clearly where the mathematical philosophers had erred drastically in replacing the aether by mathematical symbols before they had fully understood how it stores energy. The aether plays a creative role, besides constituting a universal energy bank, giving us the means to deposit and withdraw energy. Left to its own devices it even absorbs the energy we shed as waste and which we write off under the heading `entropy' but it does something our textbooks say is impossible. It thrives on that energy and regenerates it in a material form by creating the particles we know as protons and electrons. However, scientists have become blind and cannot `see' such an aether in their vision of things. They look only at how created matter evolves and see no creative source. So they devise computer programs to test their imagination of a universe in a notional Big Bang scenario, with scant regard to the simple problem of how the energy of electromagnetic induction is actually stored in `empty' space in our laboratories here and now on earth. In so doing they create obstacles in science where none exist, imposing their will on Nature's province and missing key issues which should be obvious to any mechanic. They use equations to represent electrodynamics, say energy has mass, introduce a quantum jitter which makes the position and momentum of that mass uncertain, and then forget to look for whatever it is that accounts for dynamic mass balance and so keeps their jittering wave mechanical universe from tearing itself into pieces. They try to understand gravity as a property of matter and cannot see that it is a property of the aether by which it responds to the presence of matter to keep it in dynamic balance. They complicate gravitation by declaring it to be a distortion of `space-time' by matter but still cannot reach their objective of field unification. In adopting Einstein's theory mathematicians have confounded our understanding of physics, without realising that there is a better way forward by which to solve the mystery of unification of gravitation and electrodynamics. Although this unification is of clear record in the scientific literature, one needs a guide map to find a way to the relevant clearing in the jungle of periodicals which line university library shelves. This book provides that guidance and goes further in presenting the full text of fourteen of the basic papers. The reader will see from these papers how easy it is to derive the constant of gravity in terms of the electron charge-mass ratio and determine by simple theory the precise value of the proton-electron mass ratio. Given this unifying connection between gravitation and matter creation, one can see a way forward by which to tap some further energy from the same source as that which fed the creation of the universe. We are now on the brink of a technological revolution that will deliver us energy in abundance with no risk of pollution, but we need to understand its source, that real medium, the aether, that so many think of as a mere vacuum.

ISBN 0 85056 015 2
Sabberton Publications, P.O. Box 35, Southampton SO16 7RB, England

The Energy Resource

You may not believe that what we call a vacuum can contain energy. On the other hand you may have your doubts, especially so if you have read an article by Dr. Hal Puthoff of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, of 4030 W. Braker Lane, Suite 300, Austin, Texas 78759-5329, USA. It appeared in 'Infinite Energy'. July-November 1997 issue at pp. 72-75. It also featured in the December, 1997 issue of 'Space Energy Journal' at pages 19-24.

The article had a rather challenging title: 'Can the Vacuum be Engineered for Spaceflight Applications?'. It referred to the fact that space is really full of energy, a vast amount of energy, as evidenced by experiments which measure the Casimir force. It suggested that the vacuum is 'the source of gravity and inertia' and, under the heading: 'Engineering the vacuum for "warp drive"' it implied that, in the long term, future generations could enjoy the prospect of space travel on what amounts to a magic carpet that somehow is propelled by the action of whatever constitutes the vacuum.

Well, I do believe that that is not an unreasonable way of presenting the prospects ahead if only we really do come to understand what there is in the so-called 'vacuum'. However, I do not myself accept the logic on which Dr. Puthoff bases his case.

The Casimir force is not a sufficient foundation on which to develop a case leading to the prospect of antigravity. I would need to see an explanation of gravitation based on the Casimir force before I could extrapolate from there into the realm of antigravity. It is not sufficient to say that the vacuum is really a plenum containing a vast amount of energy or that inertia is explained by the inward radiation of energy returning from space.

Inertia was explained in the 19th century when J. J. Thomson argued that an electric charge has a mass property simply because its 'field' gains electromagnetic energy related to its motion. Its electric energy, as augmented by motion, is the embodiment of its inertia. The only problem that upset this basic foundation on which one could build was the knowledge that the collective acceleration of billions of electrons could actually radiate energy.

It was here that physicists, or engineers, or whatever brand of scientist developed these theories, took leave of their senses and applied the principles of mechanics to electrical phenomena, not realizing that there is no such thing as mutual kinetic energy as an embodiment of the energy of mutual inductance.

They assumed that, because billions of electrons could work together in a cooperative venture to set up electromagnetic waves, then they must give their all, as it were, and destroy themselves by radiating their own energy as well. So they missed seeing what was obvious. The inertial property of an electron, for example, arises because it has energy that increases according to its speed, but, when acted upon by an electric field which promotes its acceleration, that electron will do whatever is necessary to keep its own energy intact. Its self-energy is conserved!

Accordingly, the electron moves in just the way necessary to ensure that it does not radiate its own energy. That is the basis of its inertia as represented by the formula E= Mc2. You can, if you wish, say that Einstein's equations control that electron. You can, if you wish, say, as does Hal Puthoff, that the electron radiates energy but gets it back from the vacuum environment so as never to lose any. That is your choice. But do keep in mind that there is some history concerning ideas such as this. Indeed, there was a time when the cosmologist Fred Hoyle was saying that the acceleration of an electric charge is governed by 'signals from the future', meaning that the electron not only gets back the energy it radiates, but it knows it is coming back before it decides on its rate of acceleration.

Why, may I ask do physicists who teach students make their task more difficult, by ignoring the obvious? Energy is conserved and so an electron will not radiate energy and it will accelerate or decelerate as necessary to ensure that it does not shed its energy by radiation! That way you do not need Hal Puthoff to tell you that the energy comes back from the zeropoint field.

If you do not believe me then check the classical history of the subject and see how the idea that an electron radiates energy, meaning the Larmor radiation formula, was derived. There is something missing in the analysis. It is one thing for us to accept that God said: "Let there be light" but quite another when a physicist says: "Let the electron be accelerated." I ask: "By what?" and then look for the effects of the interaction of that 'something' upon the electron. Then I see why the electron refuses to radiate its energy, but understand how its mutual effects with other electrons accelerated with it will set up waves which can promote energy transfer.

So I disagree with Dr. Hal Puthoff's interpretation of inertia. I go further and say that the estimates of the energy content of space, whether asserted by Wheeler, Feynman, or whoever, if they are on the scale implied in Dr. Puthoff's account, are grossly exaggerated.

Now, at this point, I am going to digress very slightly to present to you, first, part of a Letter to the Editor that I wrote on May 3, 1966. It was published by the Institution of Electrical Engineers in their journal 'Electronics and Power' in Volume 12 at p. 236 (1966).

Dear Sir - I read with interest P. Knight's letter on the radiation pressure discrepancy.

The fallacy in the discrepancy may lie in the assumption used in deriving the Poynting vector itself. This is that the field energy in an electromagnetic wave actually moves with the wave. The quantum theory and experiment have shown that an energy quantum can be received at a region remote from a wave source long before enough energy to sustain the quantum has, using the Poynting vector, been intercepted by that region. The Poynting vector may really have no significance in electromagnetic energy transfer. An electromagnetic wave is a disturbance of the medium which propagates it, and may well be sustained by energy deployed from that medium. The process of electromagnetic energy transfer may be a lot more complicated than we presently believe.

Moving on 5 years, and converging now onto the theme championed by Dr. Puthoff, I had a Letter to the Editor of that same journal published in volume 17 at p. 84 (1971), which read:

Dear Sir - F. Hoyle, in his 1970 Kelvin Lecture, surprised us by speaking of signals from the future. It is of interest to note that, from relativistic formulations, Dirac showed in 1938 that the radiation of energy by the accelerated electron led to this same conclusion. The equations showed that electron acceleration was possible when there was no incident field, and, as Dirac put it:
'the electron seems to know about the pulse before it arrives'.

Hoyle's signals?

To make sense of this discovery, Dirac wrote:

'In this way a signal can be sent from A to B faster than light. This is a fundamental departure from the ordinary ideas of relativity and is to be interpreted by saying that it is possible for a signal to be transmitted faster than light through the interior of the electron.'

Dirac also notes that:

'mathematically, the electron has no sharp boundary and must be considered as extending to infinity.'

His conclusion was that:

'the interior of the electron is a region of failure of some of the elementary properties of space-time.'

I believe that the puzzle just presented is enough to confound any member of our institution. It is, however, made worse by Dirac's reliance on the 1915 result of Schott, who showed that, when an electron moves in an electric field, all the absorbed field energy is converted into kinetic energy and 'none is radiated'. Thus, to supply a source of energy to sustain radiation, Schott invented what he, and later Dirac, termed 'acceleration energy'. Schott said:

'Its existence is a direct consequence of a mechanical theory of the aether.'

Now, according to Herrara, in a paper published recently, such energy, now termed 'Schott energy', is important because, apparently, if it is neglected, the particle radiates more than its initial kinetic energy.

Therefore it seems that the future is telling us to revive the aether and to reject Einstein's relativity. Or perhaps it will soon be realised that we have merely to say that an electron does not radiate energy at all, but that it is occasionally a catalytic agent in quantum-energy exchanges between atoms and whatever it is that provides the backcloth to our material world.

1. Dirac, P.A.M.: 'Classical theory of radiating electrons', Proc. Roy. Soc., 1938, A 167, pp. 148-149.
2. Herrara, J.C.: 'Relativistic motion in a constant field and the Schott energy', Nuovo Cimento, 1970, B 70, pp. 12-20.
3. Schott, G.A., 'On the notation of the Lorentz electron'. Phil. Mag., 1915, 29, pp. 49-62.

I will aim in these Web pages to show you how to estimate the energy density of the vacuum medium. I want you, the reader, to work it out for yourself, albeit with a little guidance that I will provide. Before we talk of extracting that energy or warp-driving our space crafts, we must get our house in order in understanding the physics involved.

I can jump ahead and declare that the amount of energy in every cubic cm of space is virtually the mass energy of two muons per unit cell of space, a cell being cubic and of side measuring approximately 6.37x10-11cm. A muon has a mass-energy that is approximately 207 times that of the electron. So we are talking about a vast amount of energy, but nothing like the amount that Dr. Puthoff has in mind if he accepts the figures 'conservatively estimated by Feynman and others to be of the order of nuclear energy densities or greater'. An atomic nucleus has a mass far greater than that of the muon and it is confined within a volume of space that is a billion, if not a billion, billion, times smaller than the space cell that my theory indicates. So I say we should get on with understanding protons and muons and their creation before we try to imagine tapping space energy and driving ourselves off into space.

Now, I began writing this account at a time when BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, was televising the Christmas Lectures from the Royal Institution. They were about science and were addressed to a young audience, ranging from the age of 12. The 1997 Lectures were delivered by a mathematician, Professor Ian Stewart, and he sought to show how numbers play an important part in Nature.

It was about order and chaos as evidenced in plant life and even in weather patterns and we heard about the 'butterfly effect' by which the momentary flutter of a butterfly's wings can change the Earth's weather. It was all of interest, even to those of us who have reached the age of 70 and more. However, I felt a shock wave (no doubt attributable to a solitary butterfly) when, in the closing phase of Professor Stewart's fifth and last Lecture, he began to talk about 'supersymmetry'. What, I wondered would a 12-year old comprehend from such a word?

To complicate things further his audience of young people then heard him say something about 'time reversal' and a youngster was invited to come forward from the audience and handed a 'Royal Institution teapot', which he was told to handle with care. Obviously, the boy had been briefed beforehand and told to fumble a little and drop the teapot so that it shattered. This allowed Professor Stewart to make the point that if only we could run time backwards we could expect the fragments of that shattered teapot to come back together again and reconstitute that teapot in its former form.

The operative words here were "If only", but we were then invited to think that, in physics, there could really be 'time reversal'. Indeed, I was then wondering how the subject of mathematics and numbers had suddenly got into the imaginary world of the deluded physicist.

To show what he meant he had assistants who had made a video recording of the boy shattering the teapot and the recording was run backwards to show the teapot reforming as if by magic, but demonstrating what time reversal could mean if it were a real phenomenon.

The facts underlying this kind of science were then summarized very briefly by Professor Stewart. There were 'black holes' which could prevent energy in the form of light from escaping. There were also the opposite, the time-reversed version of a 'black hole', the 'white hole' which one can only presume must emit light energy with the same efficiency as a 'black hole' can absorb such energy. Then Professor Stewart told those children of his audience that a 'black hole' and a 'white hole' can combine to form a 'worm hole'! He then told them and a T.V. audience of millions that if one passes through a 'worm hole' one can go backwards or forward in time, depending upon the direction of that passage!

Here I could but wonder at the damage that Einstein had inflicted upon the world of science by his notions about the merger of time and space, but that is with my wisdom of a 70-year old. Those children would have to travel through time in their own way, but I can see no worm hole pathway backwards in time, speaking personally.

To give weight to Profeessor Stewart's words, the boy who had broken the teapot was invited to collect together the broken pieces and then crawl through a tubular structure brought in by assistants. He entered at one end and, though one could not see him progressing inside the enclosure, he eventually emerged at the other holding a teapot that was intact.

There was applause from the audience. The wise professor explained that we did not know at this time how to form a 'worm hole' but, maybe in 10 or even 20 years, or so, the onward research in science would make such a discovery.

So that youthful community can progress forward to learn more about science, mathematics and physics, confident that one day they will experience 'time reversal' and enjoy their travels into history and the future by passing through those 'worm holes'!

Hopefully by their exploration of the future they will discover how to solve our energy problems of today, but I would not gamble on their success in such a venture.

Nor, even without those 'worm holes', do I think we can expect to see much energy coming back to us 'from the future'! At best, we can enjoy a state of energy equilibrium if we keep our minds on technology and push aside the notions of the future mathematicians who come under the spell of the doctrine of 'time reversal'.

The task ahead is to find a way in which to serve our energy requirements by tapping the vast energy resource of that aether sea in which we swim as fish unable to see where we are going. We cannot just live on in the hope that we will come to a 'worm hole' in space-time.

Press the following link button to proceed to the next Essay in this 'Question' series:

'Question No. 4'