ZPEnergy.com - Less than Zero Point Energy

Via KeelyNet.com News: For many years now, scientists have known that a vacuum is in fact not empty, and is actually teeming with particles and energy. Some have even come to the conclusion that the presence of these quantum particles can produce energy for nothing. The possibility of vacuum energy created from "nothing" represents a foot in the physics lab door by those seeking to create perpetual motion machines, and, like any vacuum salesman, they're not going to be easily dissuaded.

To cut a long (and complex) story short, Heisenberg proved that the subatomic world has particles constantly popping in and out of existence. Physicists refer to the energy that a quantum vacuum produces as zero-point energy. Physicist Charles Seife defines zero-point energy as: "The energy caused by the spontaneous creation and destruction of subatomic particles, even in the deepest vacuum. It is a prime suspect for the cause of the cosmological constant." "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," explains physicist Dr. Bernhard Haisch. "That is why matter seems to be solid, stable stuff that we, and the world, are made of. So maybe matter resists acceleration not because it possesses some innate thing called mass as Newton proposed and we all believed, but because the zero-point field exerts a force whenever acceleration takes place." The late Dr. Eugene Mallove said, "Basically, aether energy is at the root of everything. The aether is responsible for the creation and destruction of matter, it is responsible for life itself," said Mallove in his last interview in 2004, just prior to his death. You can take or leave the term aether (and since nobody knows the entire composition of the universe, I guess he's entitled to call it anything he liked), but Mallove's hypothesis may have some resonance with those who ascribe to wave theory (where all matter is comprised of waves rather than particles). "All particles are made of aether, they are not little hard things, they are - the things that we call particles today, electrons and protons and so forth - are nothing but special geometries of the mass free aether that are in a form that makes them have an inertial quality. In other words, makes them have mass," said Mallove in the interview.

Source: http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/zero_point.shtml