"God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light."
It is certainly a beautiful poetic statement. But does it contain
any science? A few years ago I would have dismissed that possibility.
As an astrophysicist, I knew all too well the blatant contradictions
between the sequence of events in Genesis and the physics of
the Universe. Even after substituting eons for days, the order of
events was obviously wrong. It made no sense to have light come first,
and then to claim that the Sun, the moon and the stars — the obvious
sources of light in the night sky of the ancient world — were created
only subsequently, be it days or eons later. One could, of course,
generalize light to mean simply energy, and thus claim a reference to
the Big Bang, but that would, to me, be more of a stretch than a
revelation.
My first inkling that the deceptively simple "Let there be light"
might actually contain a profound cosmological truth came in early July
1992. I was trying to wrap things up in my office in Palo Alto so that
I could spend the rest of the summer doing research on the X-ray
emission of stars at the Max Planck Institute in Garching, Germany. I
came in one morning just before my departure and found a rather
peculiar message on my answering machine; it had been left at 3 a.m.by
a usually sober-minded colleague, Alfonso Rueda, a professor at
California State University in Long Beach. He was so excited by the
results of a horrifically-long mathematical analysis he had been
grinding through that he just had to tell me about it, knowing full
well I was not there to share the thrill.
What he had succeeded in doing was to derive the equation: F=ma. Details would follow in Germany.
Most people will take this in stride with a "so what?" or "what does that mean?" After all what are F, m and a,
and what is so noteworthy about a scientist deriving a simple equation?
Isn't this what scientists do for a living? But a physicist will have
an incredulous reaction because you are not supposed to be able to derive the equation F=ma. That equation was postulated by Newton in his Principia, the foundation stone of physics, in 1687. A postulate is a law that you assume
to be true, and from which other things follow: such as much of
physics, for example, from that particular postulate. You cannot derive
postulates. How do you prove that one plus one equals two? The
answer is, you don't. You assume that abstract numbers work that way,
and then derive other properties of addition from that basic
assumption.
But indeed, as I discovered when I began to write up a research
paper based on what Rueda soon sent to Garching, he had indeed derived
Newton's fundamental "equation of motion." And the concept underlying
this analysis was the existence of a background sea of light known as
the electromagnetic zero-point field of the quantum vacuum.
To understand this zero-point field (for short), consider an
old-fashioned grandfather clock with its pendulum swinging back and
forth. If you don't wind the clock , friction will sooner or later
bring the pendulum to a halt. Now imagine a pendulum that gets smaller
and smaller, so small that it ultimately becomes atomic in size and
subject to the laws of quantum physics. There is a rule in quantum
physics called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that states (with
certainty, as it happens) that no quantum object, such as a microscopic
pendulum, can ever be brought completely to rest. Any microscopic object will always possess a residual random jiggle thanks to quantum fluctuations.
Radio, television and cellular phones all operate by transmitting or
receiving electromagnetic waves. Visible light is the same thing; it is
just a higher frequency form of electromagnetic waves. At even higher
frequencies, beyond the visible spectrum, you find ultraviolet light,
X-rays and gamma-rays. All are electromagnetic waves which are really
just different frequencies of light.
It is standard in quantum theory to apply the Heisenberg uncertainty
principle to electromagnetic waves, since electric and magnetic fields
flowing through space oscillate like a pendulum. At every possible
frequency there will always be a tiny bit of electromagnetic jiggling
going on. And if you add up all these ceaseless fluctuations, what you
get is a background sea of light whose total energy is enormous: the
zero-point field. The "zero-point" refers to the fact that even though
this energy is huge, it is the lowest possible energy state. All other
energy is over and above the zero-point state. Take any volume of space
and take away everything else — in other words, create a vacuum — and
what you are left with is the zero-point field. We can imagine a true vacuum, devoid of everything, but the real-world quantum vacuum is permeated by the zero-point field with its ceaseless electromagnetic waves.
The fact that the zero-point field is the lowest energy state makes
it unobservable. We see things by way of contrast. The eye works by
letting light fall on the otherwise dark retina. But if the eye were
filled with light, there would be no darkness to afford a contrast. The
zero-point field is such a blinding light. Since it is everywhere,
inside and outside of us, permeating every atom in our bodies, we are
effectively blind to it. It blinds us to its presence. The world of
light that we do see is all the rest of the light that is over and
above the zero-point field.
We cannot eliminate the zero-point field from our eyes, but it is
possible to eliminate a little bit of it from the region between two
metal plates. (Technically, this has to do with conditions the
electromagnetic waves must satisfy on the plate boundaries.) A Dutch
physicist, Hendrik Casimir, predicted in 1948 exactly how much of the
zero-point field would end up being excluded in the gap between the
plates, and how this would generates a force, since there is then an
overpressure on the outside of the plates. Casimir predicted the
relation between the gap and the force very precisely. You can,
however, only exclude a tiny fraction of the zero-point field from the
gap between the plates in this way. Counterintuitively, the closer the
plates come together, the more of the zero-point field gets
excluded, but there is a limit to this process because plates are made
up of atoms and you cannot make the gap between the plates smaller than
the atoms that constitute the plates. This Casimir force has now been
physically measured, and the results agree very well with his
prediction.
The discovery that my colleague first made in 1992 also has to do
with a force that the zero-point field generates, which takes us back
to F=ma, Newton’s famous equation of motion. Newton — and all
physicists since — have assumed that all matter possesses an innate
mass, the m in Newton's equation. The mass of an object is a measure of its inertia, its resistance to acceleration, the a. The equation of motion, known as Newton's second law, states that if you apply a force, F, to an object you will get an acceleration, a — but the more mass, m,
the object possesses, the less acceleration you will get for a given
force. In other words, the force it takes to accelerate a hockey puck
to a high speed will barely budge a car. For any given force, F, if m goes up, a goes down, and vice versa.
Why is this? What gave matter this property of possessing inertial
mass? Physicists sometimes talk about a concept known as "Mach's
Principle" but all that does is to establish a certain relationship
between gravity and inertia. It doesn’t really say how all material
objects acquire mass. In fact, the work that Rueda, I and
another colleague, Hal Puthoff, have since done indicate that mass is,
in effect, an illusion. Matter resists acceleration not because it
possesses some innate thing called mass, but because the zero-point
field exerts a force whenever acceleration takes place. To put it in
somewhat metaphysical terms, there exists a background sea of quantum
light filling the universe, and that light generates a force that
opposes acceleration when you push on any material object. That is why
matter seems to be the solid, stable stuff that we and our world are
made of.
Saying this is one thing. Proving it scientifically is another. It
took a year and a half of calculating and writing and thinking, over
and over again, to refine both the ideas themselves and the
presentation to the point of publication in a professional research
journal. On an academic timescale this was actually pretty quick, and
we were able to publish in what is widely regarded as the world's
leading physics journal, the Physical Review, in February 1994. To top it off, Science and Scientific American
ran stories on our new inertia hypothesis. We waited for some reaction.
Would other scientists prove us right or prove us wrong? Neither
happened.
At that point in my career I was already a fairly well-established
scientist, being a principal investigator on NASA research grants,
serving as an associate editor of the Astrophysical Journal,
and having many dozens of publications in the parallel field of
astrophysics. In retrospect, my experience should have warned me that
we had ventured into dangerous theoretical waters, that we were going
to be left on our own to sink or swim. Indeed, I would probably have
taken the same wait-and-see attitude myself had I been on the outside
looking in.
An alternative to having other scientists replicate your work and
prove that you are right is to get the same result yourself using a
completely different approach. I wrote a research proposal to NASA and
Alfonso buried himself in new calculations. We got funding and we got
results. In 1998, we published two new papers that again showed that
the inertia of matter could be traced back to the zero-point field. And
not only was the approach in those papers completely different than in
the 1994 paper, but the mathematics was simpler while the physics was
more complete: a most desireable combination. What’s more, the original
analysis had used Newtonian classical physics; the new analysis used
Einsteinian relativistic physics.
As encouraged as I am, it is still too early to say whether history
will prove us right or wrong. But if we are right, then "Let there be
light" is indeed a very profound statement, as one might expect of its
purported author. The solid, stable world of matter appears to be
sustained at every instant by an underlying sea of quantum light.
But let's take this even one step further. If it is the underlying
realm of light that is the fundamental reality propping up our physical
universe, let us ask ourselves how the universe of space and time would
appear from the perspective of a beam of light. The laws of relativity
are clear on this point. If you could ride a beam of light as an
observer, all of space would shrink to a point, and all of time would
collapse to an instant. In the reference frame of light, there is no
space and time. If we look up at the Andromeda galaxy in the night sky,
we see light that from our point of view took 2 million years to
traverse that vast distance of space. But to a beam of light radiating
from some star in the Andromeda galaxy, the transmission from its point
of origin to our eye was instantaneous.
There must be a deeper meaning in these physical facts, a deeper
truth about the simultaneous interconnection of all things. It beckons
us forward in our search for a better, truer understanding of the
nature of the universe, of the origins of space and time — those
"illusions" that yet feel so real to us.
Bernhard Haisch, staff physicist at the Lockheed Martin Solar &
Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, California, is a scientific editor of
The Astrophysical Journal and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Scientific
Exploration.
Source: http://www.science-spirit.org/article_detail.php?article_id=126