A New Physics for a New Energy
Source
"Today the vacuum [of space] is not regarded as
empty.... It is a sea of dynamic energy . . . like the spray of foam
near a turbulent waterfall."
Moray B. King, a graduate student at the University of
Pennsylvania, risked upsetting a committee of engineering professors
in 1978 with his proposal for a doctoral thesis topic that energy
could be tapped from space. The personable, good humored King had not
set out to shock. In fact, as a dutiful systems engineering student,
he had at first accepted the standard view that the vacuum of space is
useless as an energy source.
However, King had become intrigued with a new idea a
couple of summers before, after reading a book about UFOs. In his
search through the physics literature for principles that would allow
for antigravity, he ran across a concept that interested him even more
something called "zero-point energy." It not only allowed for anti-
gravity, it also allowed for an abundant source of energy.
WHAT DO THE TEXTBOOKS SAY?
Most scientists and engineers have been taught that the
vacuum of space is completely empty and still in the absence of heat,
light, and matter. Unless a student is studying quantum mechanics, his
or her textbook never mentions zero-point energy.
The quantum mechanics student does learn that the fabric
of space consists of random fluctuations of electricity. He or she
also learns that these fluctuations are collectively called zero-point
energy because they represent the energy that is present even at a
temperature of absolute zero, the temperature at which everything is
completely cold. It is the energy that exists when all other sources
of energy are taken away.
This energy is difficult to detect because it is
everywhere. Expecting someone to sense it is like asking a fish to
detect the ocean; the fish has no concept of a world that isn't an
ocean. Similarly, the fluctuations of electricity that make up space
energy are too microscopic and too quick for us to sense them, either
with our bodies or with standard detection equipment.
Why did Moray King's engineering professors fail to
teach him about zero-point energy what we refer to in this book as
space energy? The reason is that scientists assume that these vacuum
fluctuations simply even out. They call this the second law of
thermodynamics, also known as the law of entropy. Under this law,
everything is doomed to increasing disorder, until all comes to a dead
rest. This means that, according to traditional science, space energy
cannot be put to any practical purpose because its ran domness cannot
be made into an organized system. It would be as if a pile of threads
suddenly organized themselves into a shirt.
A NEW ENERGY PHYSICS: MAKING THE IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE?
King had found the most impressive reference to
zero-point or space energy in a book called Geometrodynamics. The
author, noted physicist John Archibald Wheeler, said that this energy
foaming within the fabric of space is enormously powerful if formed
into an object, it would put out more energy than a bright star.
That's a lot of power.
Does this source of incredible power really interact
with our world? King found that there, too, the physics literature
held good news.
Quantum mechanics the branch of science that deals with
protons, electrons, and other basic particles of matter teaches that
superhigh-frequency energy does interact with physical matter all the
time. It says that these basic particles are mixed with space energy.
The difference between standard quantum mechanics and
the ideas of Wheeler and other scientists is that they believed basic
particles such as protons and electrons were not only mixed with space
energy, they were actually made out of space energy. As King continued
to read thrush books on the subject, he began to see energy as a flow,
a river from another dimension of space, and basic particles as tiny
whirlpools in that river. If the river ceased to flow, the basic
particles the building blocks of all matter would disappear. So would
everyone and everything.
Filled with a sense of awe, King began to see beyond the
standard view of space energy as a random jittering of basic
particles. He found his newfound ideas confirmed by the work of
Timothy Boyer, Ph.D., a physicist and teacher. Boyer said contrary to
traditional scientific belief that space energy did influence matter,
the physical world around us, and that it wasn't random and
meaningless.
Eventually, King realized that if engineers could get
only a small part of those random energetic movements in space to line
up with each other, they could tap into a tremendous source of power
for our everyday world.
COMING UP WITH A NEW COMBINATION OF THEORIES
King wondered: Why was no one asking if all that power
could be harnessed and put to work? The answer seemed to lie in
specialization. The people who make machinery and generators to move
and heat and power things the engineers don't necessarily study
quantum mechanics. The people who do study quantum mechanics, the ones
who come up with the equations and the formulas the physicistsdon't
build machinery.
Even if the majority of neither the engineers nor the
physicists were interested in this topic, King was. He still wanted to
find out if there was a way to allow for the use of space energy. So
the young student set a task for himself. He would stick to the
standard physics literature and look for concepts that could be put
together to form a body of knowledge a combined theory about the
feasibility of tapping into that abundant energy. He searched through
the respected journals and found articles that, taken together, made a
case for doing what
his professors had said was impossible.
Academia was not particularly interested in space energy
at the time, but a growing audience, mostly outside of the ivy walls,
snapped up the book that King eventually wrote. Tapping the Zero-Point
Energy, first published in 1989, brought together published theories
about space energy and theories about the way that natural systems
organize themselves. This book laid the groundwork for the development
of a coherent theory behind a new source of energy.
From Chaos To Order
Russian-born scientist Ilya Prigogine won a Nobel Prize
in 1977 for showing how certain systems can evolve from random
behavior to orderly behavior. This means that entropy, which assumes
that all systems become more and more disordered, is no longer the
only game in the universe. It means that energy can indeed be seen as
a creative force in space, instead of disorganized chaos. This
behavior, the opposite of entropy, has since been called negentropy.
In the 1970s, before and after graduation, Moray King
started keeping a foot in two worlds, one in the world of theoretical
physics and one in the world of the practical tinkerers who were
trying to capture space energy in their home workshops. He was
introduced to that second world by new-energy author Christopher Bird,
who told King about T. Henry Moray and Moray's struggles to capture
space energy (see Chapter 3).
New-energy ideas hit King from all sides after that. At
first, he wondered if he was being introduced to a bunch of kooks, but
he soon came to appreciate these concepts. He kept asking questions,
networking and presenting papers at conferences on new-energy
technologies, and encouraging inventors to come up with a reproducible
experiment to prove that space energy could be tapped.
By 1994, King had further refined his space-energy
ideas. At conferences, he explained to eager audiences how
vortices-whirlpool or tornado-like spirals found everywhere in
nature - held a key to the energy lock. Give a sudden twist to the
nucleus of an atom, and all its neighbors, and keep spinning them,
King said, and you may pull some space energy into your
electric-generating system. Rotate the spinning materials a spin upon
a spin and you have a better chance of picking up some extra energy.
Then build pairs of counter-rotating vortices into your system, and
you would really have something.
To partially visualize this concept, you can take two
yo-yos, twist their strings, and let go so that both yo-yos start
spinning. You can then swing the yo-yos in full circles, one forward
and one backward. This is the type of motion that might give an
inventor a chance to hit the space-energy jackpot.
An Ancient Idea is Reexamined
To more fully understand King's ideas, it is helpful to
go back to a very old concept. Another way of speaking about the
background sea of energy is the ancient term prana, later known as the
anther. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the nether was
considered to be a substance filling all space, and through which
light travelled.
In 1887, two Americans Albert Michelson and Edward
Williams Morley tried to detect the aether experimentally. They could
not, and concluded that the aether did not exist. About thirty years
later, the concept was totally discarded when Albert Einstein put
forth his theory of relativity. It says that there is no background
structure to the universe, such as an aether. Instead, all objects in
the universe, such as stars and planets, affect each other. This means
that nothing in space is absolute.
But, as with all theories, there were things that
Einstein's theory could not account for. So in 1954, distinguished
English physicist P.A.M. Dirac asked science to take another look for
the aether: "The aetherless basis of physical theory may have reached
the end of its capabilities, and we see in the aether a new hope for
the future."
An American scientist, E. W. Silvertooth of Washington
state, responded to Dirac's call. In 1986, Silvertooth performed an
experiment using laser equipment and his knowledge of advanced optics.
By measuring earth's motion in space, he calculated that our solar
system is moving toward the constellation of Leo at nearly 400
kilometers a second or about 892,800 miles an hour. Silvertooth had
succeeded where Michelson and Morley had failed. The fact that earth's
motion in space could be detected meant that ther e had to be a stable
point of reference such as the aether for this motion to be measured
against.
In order for a scientific experiment to be considered
valid, it must be successfully repeated. However, Silvertooth used
some very expensive equipment, and his research was sponsored in part
by the United States Air Force and another defense agency that handles
advanced research. To my knowledge, Silvertooth's experiment has not
been repeated, although an Austrian physicist has claimed to have also
detected the aether.
A Fast-Spinning Vortex?
Today's aether theorists do not see the aether as an
invisible fluid filling all of space. Rather, they say it is a
spiralling foundation for the universe that cannot be detected by
current measuring instruments because its movements are too quick.
Moray King is not the only space-energy scientist who
thinks that the aether moves in a spiral motion. Paramahamsa Tewari,
Ph.D., of India is another. He says that the idea of there being
enormous levels of power for every square inch of space would be wrong
unless that space rotates at a fantastic speed, "like a vortex." He
sees the universe as being in motion according to its basic design,
with just a concentration of matter here and there a galaxy, a solar
system, a planet, an electron.
What makes this movement difficult to detect is the fact
that we are moving along with it, and thus have nothing to compare it
with. It is like trying to sense the spinning of the earth on its axis
because everything is spinning, including us, we do not feel the
motion. One scientist describes space energy as two giant, invisible
elephants pushing on both sides of a door. As long as they push with
equal force, the door does not move one way or the other.
The aether not only exists, the space energy it produces
energizes the earth. To understand how it works, think of a microwave
oven. If you put a potato in a microwave, you do not see it cooking,
nor do you feel any heat coming from the oven. That's because the
microwave cooks the food from the inside out. The oven remains cool,
but the inside of the potato becomes very hot. In the same manner,
space energy "cooks" the earth's core, which is very hot, while the
earth's surface remains relatively cool. The big difference is that
the energy in a microwave comes from outward-moving forces of decay,
explosion, or combustion, while space energy takes the form of an
inward-moving spiral as explained in "Spirals of Energy" on page 13.
Despite a theory that supports a universal abundance of
space energy, many engineers cannot let go of their belief in a world
ruled by a finite amount of energy. To be fair to the engineers, they
don't want to give up that belief because it has worked well as a
basis for practical engineering. It is the idea at the heart of the
Industrial Age.
However, the new-energy theorists say that space energy
does not violate the laws of conservation of energy, which state that
energy can be neither created nor destroyed. According to these
theorists, this energy has always existed, and thus is not being
created out of nothing. It can simply be put to human use. "People are
having trouble deciding whether they want to believe it or not," King
says.
MAGNETS AND ENERGY
The key to many of the devices that you will be reading
about is the magnet. The earth's own magnetic field the one that makes
a compass point north may interact somehow with space energy. And
new-energy researchers find that the smaller magnetic fields which
surround manufactured magnets play a key role in getting their
energy-generating hardware to work. Some inventors use super-powerful
magnets made of rare materials, while others use the sorts of ordinary
magnets that are found in stereo sound systems.
How exactly do magnets tap into space energy? It is not
possible to answer that question with any authority, since scientists
are unable to explain exactly what a magnet's force field is the force
that attracts metal objects to the magnet. Nor can they explain
exactly what that field interacts with. One electronics engineer says
that we are like early humans discovering fire; they knew what it did,
but they didn't know why. Many new-energy researchers have come up
with differing theories of what makes magne ts work. But these
theories have not yet jelled into one body of knowledge that is
accepted by the
scientific establishment.
One thing we do know about magnetism is that it is
related to electricity. In the 1830s, English scientist Michael
Faraday showed that magnets could be used to produce electricity, and
that an electric current produces a magnetic field. While it is not
fully understood why this happens, this knowledge has been put to
practical use in electric motors and generators. So it is not
surprising if in fact space energy is electric in nature that magnets
can be used to capture space energy, even through we don't fu lly
understand how.
MAVERICKS IN HIGH PLACES
In the past decade, Moray King has been joined by
scientists around the world in space-energy research, and their
results have caused great excitement in the new-energy world. Former
astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell, Ph.D., predicted this excitement in 1980
when he said:
"There are types of energy which lie outside the
electromagnetic spectrum. Unfortunately, these research efforts have
not been given recognition. For the most part, they have been
performed by individuals . . . without any support, whose work lies at
the threshold of present-day science, and who are years ahead of
science which is already established."
The fact that many of space energy's newer proponents
are people who have been part of the science establishment means that
space energy, long thought of as an oddball idea, will have to be
taken seriously.
Harold Puthoff, Ph.D., of the Institute for Advanced
Studies in Austin, Texas, is giving space energy the publicity that
Mitchell thought it lacked. Puthoff is a scientist whose low-key
personality fits into a variety of settings, from security-clearance
laboratories to meetings of environmentalists. His background includes
corporate work, several years with the United States Department of
Defense, and a stint with Stanford Research Institute International.
He gives briefings to top govermnent officials and oil industry
executives, and to other audiences worldwide.
Puthoff was named Theorist of the Year in 1994 by New
Energy News, for a paper that News editor Hal Fox, Ph.D., called the
century's most important theoretical paper. Puthoff and two coauthors
say that inertia the tendency of a body in motion to remain in motion,
or a body at rest to remain at restcan be explained by the presence
of space energy. Puthoff explains by saying it is space energy that
knocks you down if you are standing on a train and the train
accelerates quickly from a full stop.
Fox says, "The way the various institutions of science
are structured, it is important to work within the system to
successfully introduce new scientific theories and facts. This is what
Dr. Harold Puthoff has gently accomplished over the past few years."
Thomas Bearden, a retired United States Army lieutenant
colonel, is a more controversial theorist who is considered to be
almost a guru by some in the space-energy field. Bearden believes
that present-day mechanical and electrical engineering concepts and
mathematics are based on the manipulation of effects, and not of
underlying causes, in the same way that a driver can accelerate and
deaccelerate a car without understanding how an engine works. The
devices made by mainstream engineers do the work they are intended
for, he notes, but are crude compared to the hardware that could be
made if the deeper causes were understood.
Bearden's quest parallels King's to learn how to create
order in a small part of the seething vacuum of space and put that
tremendous energy to work: "We can dip our paddlewheel into that
river."
Puthoff and bearden are only two of the many
conventionally trained scientists who have found in space-energy
theory a new way of seeing the world. And their ideas of theoretical
physics are not only important to the world of science. Their ideas
form the basis for a technology that will ultimately affect everyone.
In the next chapter we meet inventors who have tried to
turn space-energy theory into space-energy devices.
Floyd Sweet - Solid-State Magnet Pioneer
"There is suppression launched against any free-energy
inventor who succeeds or is very close to succeeding." - Ret. Lt. Col.
Thomas Bearden
The late Floyd "Sparky" Sweet created a breakthrough
magnetic solid-state energy generator. For complex reasons, he did not
develop his device into a commercially viable product. However, as a
magnetics specialist with a distinguished industrial career, Sweet was
not a man whose technical claims could be easily dismissed by critics.
Sweet's story is important for three reasons. First,
creditable witnesses saw his invention convert the invisible energy of
space into useable amounts of electric power without fuel, batteries,
or connection to an outlet. Second, he was subjected to the same kinds
of harassment that the inventors we met in Part I had to face,
including threats on his life. Third, and most important, Sweet's
research has inspired the work of other space-energy inventors, some
of whom may well produce a useful stationary-magn et device.
FLOYD SWEET AND MAGNETS
Floyd Sweet (1912-1995) grew up in Connecticut, in an
era when radios were home-built crystal sets. At the age of nine, his
intense interest in how things work was directed into building and
disassembling radios and other electrical apparatus, such as a small
Tesla coil (see Chapter 2) energized by a Model T spark plug.
When Sweet was eighteen, a family friend helped him find
work at the nearby General Electric plant while he went to college. He
got the nickname "Sparky" after he Disconnected some wires one day,
which resulted in an instrument exploding in a spectacular spray of
sparks. Despite this incident, his employers were pleased with his
work especially his intuitive gift for coming up with answers to
electrical problems.
Sweet stayed with GE after completing his education. He
worked in the company's Schenectady, New York, research and
development center from 1957 to 1962 a dream job in which he could use
a well equipped laboratory to follow his hunches on intriguing
magnetics projects. That line of research fascinated him. In 1969, he
obtained a master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
By the mid-1970s, Sweet and his wife, Rose, had moved to
the Los Angeles area to enjoy semiretirement. Besides serving as one
of GE's preferred consultants, Sweet designed electric equipment for
other customers.
Floyd Sweet was more than a professional scientist who
worked with magnets. He had a passion for magnetism, and for the
concept that the entire universe is permeated with a magnetic field.
Once he fully retired in the early 1980s, he would have happily spent
many hours each day building a device that could tap into the energy
of that magnetic field. But Rose fell ill, and was an invalid for the
last seven years of her life. This demanded Floyd's attention and
forced him to dip into their savings. He also had to cope with his own
ill health, including a period of near blindness. Despite these
problems, he worked on his device when not preparing meals and tending
to his wife's needs.
SWEET'S VACUUM TRIODE AMPLIFIER: DEFYING CONVENTION
For decades, new-energy researchers talked about the
possibility of treating a magnet so that its magnetic field would
continuously shake or vibrate. On rare occasions, Sweet saw this
effect, called self-oscillation, occur in electric transformers. He
felt it could be coaxed into doing something useful, such as producing
energy. Sweet thought that if he could find the precise way to shake
or disturb a magnet's force field, the field would continue to shake
by itself. It would be similar to striking a bell a nd having the bell
keep on ringing.
As usual, Sweet-who said his ideas came to him in dreams
turned for inspiration to his expertise in magnets. He knew magnets
could be used to produce electricity, as we learned in Chapter 4, and
wanted to see if he could get power out of a magnet by something other
than the standard induction process. That process involves either
moving a magnet past a wire coil a coil of conductive wire, such as
copper or moving a coil through the field of a magnet. This changing
magnetic field causes an electric current to flow in the copper wire.
What Sweet wanted to do was to keep the magnet still and
just shake its magnetic field. This shaking, in turn, would create an
electric current. One new-energy researcher compares self-oscillation
to a leaf on a tree waving in a gentle breeze. While the breeze itself
isn't moving back and forth, it sets the leaf into that kind of
motion. Sweet thought that if space energy, discussed in Chapter 4,
could be captured to serve as the breeze, then the magnetic field
would serve as the leaf. Sweet would just have to supply a small
amount of energy to set the magnetic field in motion, and space energy
would keep it moving.
By 1985, he had come up with a set of specially
conditioned magnets, wound with wires. To test his device, Sweet
discharged a current into the wire coil around the magnet. As a
result, the coil disturbed the magnet's field. It was as if Sweet had
snapped the magnet's Held out of position to set it in motion. Sweet
then connected a twelve-volt lightbulb the size used in flashlights to
the coil. If the device was producing electricity, the bulb would
light.
The results were more than Sweet expected. A surge of
power came out of the coil and there was a bright flash from the bulb
which had received so much power that it melted. Years later, Sweet
remembered that Rose had seen the flash and called out, "What did you
blow up now?"
The inventor was baffled by the dazzling flash of light
why so much energy? He returned to his workbench to make further
models. Needing a theory to explain his startling discovery, he
remembered hearing about Thomas Bearden, retired Army officer and
nuclear physicist, and John Bedini, an electronics expert, on a local
radio show. Sweet called Bedini, who arranged for Bearden to visit
Sweet.
Bearden saw the curious device pull nearly six watts of
electric power out of the air with only a tiny fraction of a watt
going into the machine. Bearden ran tests to his heart's content, and
was delighted to see a little unit embodying the unorthodox concepts
that he had written about over the years, the concepts behind space
energy. He called Sweet's assembly of magnets and wire coils the
Vacuum Triode Amplifier (VTA). Bearden decided that the device was
serving as a gate through which energy from space w as being herded
into a electric circuit.
The most amazing aspect of Sweet's device was that it
put out so much more power than it took in. How much more? In a 1988
model, Sweet found that 330 microwatts 330 one-millionths of a watt of
input power made it possible for the VTA's wire coils to put out more
than 500 watts of usable energy, or about one and a half million times
the input power.
The VTA's Special Effects and Difficult Development
The VTA turned out to have some very odd effects, but
Bearden's research background prepared him for that. So in 1987,
Bearden asked Sweet to perform an antigravity experiment. Bearden
calcu1ated that the six-pound machine would levitate when about 1,500
watts of power were drawn out of it, but that the magnets might
explode at about the same power level. He warned Sweet to limit the
output to no more than 1,000 watts. A VTA would be placed on a scale
so that its weight could be carefully monitored while it was hooked up
to a box of lighibulb sockets. Screwing bulbs int o the sockets would
draw off the power.
About a week later, Sweet excitedly read off results
over the phone to Bearden who was home in Alabama as Sweet screwed in
ten 100-watt bulbs, one at a time. The device gradually lost weight
until it was down to 90 percent of its original weight. For safety
reasons, Sweet and Bearden stopped the experiment before the device
could begin to hover or fly.
Why did the VTA lose weight? According to Bearden's
theory, gravity becomes a pushing force rather than a pulling force
under certain conditions. Bearden also says that space energy has a
pressure, referred to as energy density. If the pressure above an
object is decreased while the pressure under the object is increased,
the object will be drawn upwards. The VTA may have changed the energy
density by drawing on space energy.
The technology could sometimes do spooky things. Walter
Rosenthal of California, a test engineer who has helped many
struggling inventors test their devices, recalls an incident that
Sweet had told him about. The incident occurred while Sweet was trying
to document his antigravity experiment:
"The machine's weight was observed [to be] decreasing
with an increased load [of lighibulbs], in a quiet orderly fashion,
until a point was suddenly reached when Floyd heard an immense sound,
as if he were at the center of a giant whirlwind but without actual
air movement. The sound was heard by Rose in another room of their
apartment and by others outside the apartment."
This experience has been confirmed by a Canadian
space-energy researcher, who heard a similar whirlwind sound during
one of his experiments.
Another unusual effect of Sweet's VTA was the fact that
it produced cold, instead of the heat usually generated by electric
equipment. The inside of the VTA was as much as twenty degrees cooler
than the surrounding air. The greater the load put on the device, the
cooler it became. When VTA wires were accidentally shorted out, they
flashed with a brilliant burst of light, and were found to be covered
with frost. One time, a brief contact with the equipment froze some of
Sweet's flesh, causing him pain for ab out two weeks afterward.
Sweet discovered other interesting effects. But
development of the VTA was slowed by trouble with materials and
processes, and by financial entanglements. Sweet had to find magnets
that could hold the self-oscillation effect. That required magnets
with force fields that didn't vary much across the face of the magnet.
Also, standard mathematical calculations didn't work
with the VTA. In 1991, Sweet produced a math theory for the VTAan
engineering design model that showed how factors such as the number of
turns of wire in the coils affected the device's behavior. Producing
this theory was an important step. Without it, other researchers would
not reproduce Sweet's work.
Sometimes it was difficult for Sweet to reproduce his
own work. As with first models of any new technology, the VTAs he
built were very unreliable. For example, at times their output went
down at night and picked up again during the day. Sometimes, they just
plain stopped working for no apparent reason. But when the VTA worked,
the power it put out for its size was unprecedented.
Sweet Challenges the Laws of Physics
Bearden contributed to the theory that explained Sweet's
invention. Much of the theory that Bearden used to explain how the VTA
worked came from advances in the field of phase conjugate optics, a
specialized study of light used by laser scientists and weapons
researchers. Using information from this field, Bearden said that the
VTA was able to amplify the space energy it took in.
The science establishment requires that an invention be
explained by accepted laws of physics, and so much output from so
little input seems to violate those laws, which do not allow for such
a thing. However, Sweet and bearden recognized that these laws apply
to ordinary, or closed systems, systems in which you cannot get more
energy out than what you put in. Because the VTA allowed energy to
flow in from the vacuum of space, it was not operating in a closed
system, but in an open one. (See Chapter 1 for a discussion of closed
versus open systems.) A VTA operating in the flow of space energy is
like a windmill operating in the wind. Both receive excess energy from
an outside source. But since neither operates m a closed system,
neither violates the laws of physics.
In 1991, a paper by Sweet and Bearden was read at a
formal gathering of conventional engineers and physicists in Boston.
Neither Bearden nor Sweet were able to attend Bearden was called away
on business, and Sweet was recuperating from heart surgery. Walter
Rosenthal went instead. The paper said that the VTA had the signs of
being a true negentropy device, or a device that was able to turn
random space energy into usable electricity (see Chapter 4).
How did this work? It helps to think of a handful of
marbles on a tabletop. You can either roll them all in one direction,
or you can scatter them in all directions. If you scatter the marbles
into a reflector, the reflector will roll them back to you in an
orderly fashion. Although the language they used was quite technical,
what Sweet and Bearden basically said is that the VTA was able to take
energy "marbles" and keep rolling them back and forth, building energy
as they went along.
After Bearden's paper was read, Walter Rosenthal stood
up and startled the audience of skeptical engineers: "I have
personally seen Floyd Sweet's machine operating. It was running . . .
those small motors you saw in the video. It was jump-started with a
ninevolt battery. There was no other electrical input required....
There was no connection to the power line whatsoever." And, no, there
were no moving parts.
Although most of the audience listened politely, it was
too much for one engineering professor. He stalked out of the room,
saying, "To present such a remark at an engineering conference is the
height of irresponsibility! It violates virtually every conceivable
concept known to engineers."
SWEET IS HREATENED
Could activity at the Sweet home been secretly watched
by strangers? Sweet told the story of a time in the late 1980s when a
man accosted him as Sweet was leaving a supermarket. Sweet remembered
the man's expensive-looking shoes, and the fact that he was
immaculately dressed. But in the stress of the moment, Sweet couldn't
focus on much else.
What made the inventor nervous was the photograph that
the man held, a photograph showing Sweet at work on his tabletop-model
VTA in the supposed privacy of Sweet's own home. In what Sweet said
was a remarkably clear photo, he was sitting in the dining room on the
second story of the apartment building where he lived with Rose.
"He walked me all the way to my building, telling me
what would happen to me if I didn't stop my research," Sweet recalled.
"How they took that picture through my window, I'll never know." As
Sweet remembered it, the man claimed to be connected with a
conglomerate that did not want the VTA to come onto the market at that
time. He told Sweet, "It is not beyond possibilities to take you out
of the way."
Sweet said that afterward he called the FBI in Los
Angeles. He believed that two agents staked out his house for a couple
of weeks, but that nothing came of it.
Around the time of the photo incident, Sweet was getting
telephone calls and death threats from strangers. He said there were
"people calling at all hours. The police put a tap on my line and over
a six-month period, over 480 calls came in from all parts of the
United States. But they were from pay stations." Thus, the police
could never find the callers.
Early in the VTA's development, someone broke into
Sweet's apartment and stole his notes. He then began to code his
notes.
Sweet temporarily stopped work on his invention, out of
concern for his ill wife. "They must have known I stopped; they didn't
torment me any more."
FOLLOWING IN SWEET'S FOOTSTEPS
On July 5, 1995, Floyd Sweet suffered a fatal heart
attack at the age of eighty-three. A couple of weeks before his death,
Sweet said that the automotive industry was testing his power unit for
use in cars, and that they had a unit running for 5,000 hours. He said
he was dealing with people at General Motors, but no one has been able
to confirm Sweet's claims.
The VTA itself is bogged down in legal problems. But Tom
Bearden, who put much of his own time and money into the project,
hopes that the VTA can be resurrected so that the world will realize
what a pioneer Floyd Sweet was. And despite the confusion surrounding
Sweet's affairs at the time of his death, other researchers are
continuing this line of research.
Confusion and Secrecy
The automotive industry may not have been the only
potential investor that Sweet was dealing with. At the time of his
death, there was some confusion concerning the rights to Sweet's
hardware and papers, held by Sweet's second wife, Violet. Bearden says
that Sweet signed a number of agreements with a number of backers, and
that some of these people have claimed rights to the invention. At
least two of these investors say they want Sweet's laboratory
equipment, inventions, and technical papers to go into a p roposed
Floyd Sweet Museum so that other researchers could study the
technology. Walter Rosenthal is trying to help all parties work
towards an agreement.
Despite Bearden's urging, Sweet never had the VTA
certified by independent testing. "He feared that his life would be
snuffed out immediately if he even attempted such a thing," Bearden
says.
Sweet also frustrated his fellow researchers by keeping
secret his most important process how he conditioned the magnets that
are at the heart of the VTA. Did he pump the magnets with powerful
electromagnetic pulses to shake up their internal structure? He
refused to give details, and said it wasn't likely that other
researchers would learn his secrets: "The odds against them finding
out is like trying to open a safe with 100 dials set from zero to a
hundred, without knowing the combination."
Sweet not only feared for his life, but once said he
feared that if he described how he made his device work, unscrupulous
people would build models without giving him his due. He was also
concerned about what would happen if the VTA was widely sold
everywhere at once, replacing many other electric devices. "If it all
came out at once, the stock market would collapses'' he said. "The
government doesn't want it." To be fair to Sweet, I would point out
that he is not the only inventor who has been uncomfortable in
disclosing key aspects of his work.
Other Researchers and the VTA
Other inventors are trying to carry on Sweet's work. The
VTA is well-known on computer bulletin boards that list "free energy"
as a topic of discussion. Experimenters scramble for details of how
the device was built.
One researcher who has claimed some success is Don
Watson, a self-educated inventor from Texas. Watson says he has built
a working device similar to Sweet's VTA, which he works on at night
after working during the day as a telephone systems installer.
In Somerset, England, electronics expert Michael Watson
(no relation to Don) built a replica of Sweet's VTA, but claimed no
success in the experiment. Despite that, he says, "In my opinion the
inventor of the VTA, Floyd Sweet, has made a scientific discovery of
[the] greatest importance."
Watson thinks that attempts to reproduce Sweet's results
may run into problems because the type of magnets Sweet used are no
longer available. But he says, "The important point about the VTA is
that a form of magnetic instability exists that can act as a
significant energy source."
When this fledgling space-energy science reaches
maturity, what could the VTA do for the lives of the rest of us?
Bearden speculates that the new physics will change our lives in
undreamed-of ways:
"By mastering, controlling, and gating the vast,
incredible energy of the seething vacuum [of space], we can power our
automobiles, flying machines, and technology inexhaustibly. Further,
it can be done absolutely cleanly; there are no noxious chemical
pollutants.
With practical antigravity, ships can be developed to
cross the solar system as readily as one crosses the ocean today....
The inexhaustible vacuum fills every system, everywhere, to
overflowing."
Despite the difficulties that Sweet ran into in his
attempts to perfect his invention, he helped science take a leap into
the future. It perhaps could have leaped further if he had cooperated
more freely with other researchers in the last decade of his life, and
if he had been tidier in his business dealings. But Sparky Sweet
deserves praise for charting a new course.
Rotating-Magnet Energy Innovators
"I think it is possible to utilize magnetism as an
energy-source. But we science idiots cannot do that; this has to come
from the outside."
"The magnet is a window to the free space energy of the
Universe."
As we saw in Chapter 6, magnets can be used to capture
space energy and put it to work. Magnetic fields can be tinkered with
so that they serve as gates, guiding space energy into electric
devices in the same way that a sluice in a river guides water into a
waterwheel. This opens a whole new world of energy possibilities.
This chapter introduces us to two inventors who have
shown that it is possible to use magnetism as a power source. Unlike
Floyd Sweet and his stationary-magnet device, these men use rotating
magnets to convert space energy into electricity. One began his career
as a physics teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(WI ) and is now self-exiled in New Zealand, while the other is an
aviation safety consultant who recently gave a lecture to a group of
physicists
at MIT. We will also see how space en ergy is being pursued in Asia,
even as it is being ignored in North America.
BRUCE DEPALMA AND THE N-MACHINE
While his brother Brian has spun a Hollywood career
directing films such as Carrie, Scarface, and The Untouchables, it
looked like Bruce DePalma would live a secure life in academia,
wrapped in the respect accorded an MIT faculty member. After receiving
an electrical engineering degree from MIT in 1958, he worked in both
government and industry before going to Harvard in 1961 for graduate
work in applied physics. He became an MIT lecturer in the late 1960s.
During that turbulent time, DePalma's life underwent a
change, a period of soul-searching that was spurred by both the
student movement and by his sense that society was disintegrating. As
a result, he dropped out of academia and headed west to Mendocino,
California, where he took up meditation. One afternoon, his thoughts
turned to something he had played with as a kid and never understood
why does a gyroscope behave as it does? A thought came out of the blue
maybe the rotation of the gyro wheel somehow locked onto the space
around a spinning body such as the earth.
Experiments With Rotation and Energy
Sometimes the simplest of experiments leads to new
understanding. In the sixteenth century, Galileo's first breakthrough
came from dropping a big rock and a small rock from the Leaning Tower
in Pisa and finding, contrary to accepted belief at the time, that
they both fell at the same rate.
DePalma's breakthough also came from a simple
experiment. He rotated ball bearingssteel balls like those found in
pinball machines at a high rate of speed, and launched them into the
air while carefully taking multiple time-lapse photographs. He
discovered to his surprise that they rose farther and fell faster than
ball bearings that were not spinning when launched. He thought this
indicated that the spinning bearings were interacting with a new kind
of energy what we now call space energy.
DePalma was even more intrigued when he launched pairs
of ball bearings, one spinning to the left and the other spinning to
the right. He found that each bearing rose and fell at a different
rate, indicating that each might be interacting with this different
source of energy in a different way.
DePalma felt his findings were important, and took them
to a prestigious mentor of his, a Princeton physicist. But he failed
to raise the man's interest.
So DePalma retreated with some friends to a farm in
Pennsylvania for more research with rotating objects. Starting with
what was at hand, he put the pendulum from a grandfather clock into a
vacuum to rule out any air-pressure effects and found that spinning
the bob did in fact make a difference in the length of the pendulum's
swing. He then did an experiment which showed that if you collide a
rotating object into something else, it rebounds further than if it
had not been rotating. As with the ball-bearing experiments, these
results indicated that an object might pick up space energy while
spinning. (See "Spirals of Energy" on page 13.)
As a result of his experiments and of the experiments of
othrs -DePalma now imagines that space energy flows through a metal
conductor and gives it different properties, just as fluid flowing
into a dry sponge gives weight to the sponge. (See Chapter 4 for a
more complete discussion of the theory behind space energy.)
DePalma continued his gravity and inertia research when
he moved to a home in the foothills of Santa Barbara, California. His
living room was full of unusual sights, such as a circle of grass
growing above a spinning stereo turntable and weights hanging from
ceiling hooks for pendulum experiments.
DePalma Develops the N-Machine
DePalma decided to take the results of his newfound
knowledge from the realm of swinging objects into the realm of
electric meters, where accurate measuring instruments are available to
everyone. His intuition led him, step by step, to learning about the
properties of rotating magnets, and to an energy discovery that
further changed his life.
DePalma turned to the writings of the famous British
pioneer of electricity and magnetism, Michael Faraday (1791-1867).
Faraday is well known for inventing the two-piece induction generator,
a piece of equipment that, in its basic principles, is still used to
generate electricity today.
But Faraday also invented what he called a homopolar
generator in 1831. He found that electric current can be taken from a
spinning copper disk when the disk is rotated along with the magnets,
instead of past the magnets, as in the induction generator. This
unique setup may have allowed Faraday to tap into a different source
of energy space energy. However, Faraday never fully developed the
homopolar generator into a fully functional piece of practical
equipment. DePalma studied this generator with intense interest,
convinced he had found something of tremendous value
Nearly 150 years later, DePalma repeated Faraday's
experiment except that DePalma used modern materials, such as
super-powerful magnets, to extract the electricity. DePalma has named
his device the N-machine, "meaning to the nth degree," because he sees
the N-machine's potential as being almost unlimited. The name also
refers to his speculation that a magnet taps energy from another
dimension. He believes the magnets cause a distortion of the aether, a
concept we discussed in Chapter 4, allowing space energ y to flow into
the machine.
From 1978 through 1979, Bruce DePalma and his assistants
used the workshop of a California commune the Sunburst spiritual and
agricultural community near Santa Barbara to build a prototype
generator called the Sunburst homopolar generator. After a year of
refinements, they began serious testing in 1980. Sunburst test results
indicated that output power was more than the input power, and that
the N-machine was much more efficient than a standard generator.
Then a professor of electrical engineering from Stanford
University tested it. Robert Kincheloe did a series of tests on a
machine designed by DePalma and built by Charya Bernard of the
Sunburst Community from 1985 through 1986. Kincheloe also got more
output power than input power. He reported:
"Depalma may have been right, in that there is indeed a
situation here whereby energy is being obtained from a previously
unknown and unexplained source. This is a conclusion that most
scientists and engineers would reject out of hand as being a violation
of the accepted laws of physics, and if true has incredible
implications."
DePalma Runs Into Trouble
"I thought everybody would beat a path to my door after
I did these experiments, but I ran into a stone wall," says DePalma..
"It's as if science were in its old age and it's gotten a long way
from the laboratory." He adds that it is as if the science
establishment took the experiments that were done in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, reduced them all to mathematical
equations, and made them into a gospel. "If you go to Washington, D.C.
to the Department of Energy with a new way of liberating energy, they
will bring out all these old relationships and say, 'It isn't in
accord with the [law of]
Conservation of Energy' or 'It violates Einstein's Theory of
Relativity."'
DePalma himself had fully believed in the law of energy
conservation, which says that you can't get more energy out of a
system than you put into it. But what about the results of his
experiments? like most other energy researchers we have met so far, it
dawned on him that the excess energy was coming right out of space
itself. Therefore, the law of conservation wasn't really being broken.
A skeptical science establishment has not been DePalma's
only source of trouble. In 1990, he wrote:
"Three or four commercial groups have approached me to
supply money for the commercial manufacture of N-machines. Many
promises have been made, but no funds yet. What generally gums things
up is the greed of the money people, not the ability of my machine to
perform.... What is needed now is a movement to develop the N-machine
source of electrical power as a national priority."
At that time, I asked DePalma why he didn't close the
loopfeed part of the power output back into the machine to produce
continuous motion. Powering a house or a set of appliances with such a
setup would be the demonstration that would convince skeptics.
He replied that one reason he hadn't developed the
prototype further in the United States was "because I would get my
head blown off." He added that a threat was passed on to him through a
messenger with highly placed connections to the United States
government. In 1992, he perceived that space energy was wanted
elsewhere, but not in the United States. Therefore, he expatriated
himself, first to Australia and then to New Zealand, where he
continues to work on his invention.
BERTIL WERJEFELT AND THE MAGNETIC BATTERY-GENERATOR
Bertil Werjefelt sports a Hawaiian suntan because the
islands are his adopted home, but he has little time for the beach.
Consulting on aviation safety, overseeing a small corporation, and
writing technical papers make up only part of his life. Werjefelt has
also been working on a magnet-energy device for several decades. A
representative of the Sumitomo Corporation who visited Werjefelt's
manufacturing facility said that the invention could be "the most
important discovery this
century."
Werjefelt was educated in his native Sweden and then
came to the United States in the early 1960s. He furthered his
education in mechanical engineering at both the University of Utah and
the University of Hawaii. He now heads a research and development
group, Poly Tech USA, that devises safety equipment for airplanes'
such as a system that allows pilots to see the flight path and vital
instruments regardless of how much smoke is in the cockpit.
A New Device From Old Concepts
In the 1970s, Werjefelt was one of many people who
became concerned about the problem of fossil-fuel pollution. So he
used his engineering background to create an energy invention - a
generator powered by energy extracted from magnetic fields.
Standard generators, which use magnets, are subject to a
problem known as magnetic drag. Drag is a residual magnetism that
slows the spinning of the rotor, the part that either moves the
magnets past an electric coil or the coil past the magnets, depending
on the generators design. Werjefelt improved the standard generator;
he added a special spinning system that cancels magnetic drag by
counteracting it with the force fields of additional magnets. The
result is a generator that puts out
more power with the same input.
That raises a question: Where does the excess energy
come from? "I don't know," Werjefelt says. "It could be [space]
energy, or something we don't even know about."
Werjefelt's experimental models have not yet evolved
into the Remanufacturing stage they have only produced more power
output than input for several minutes at a time. But results are
impressive enough to keep him going. For example, at one point his
generator has shown 160 watts input and 450 watts output, or almost
triple the power. He believes his crew has solved some of the most
troublesome technical problems and that magnetically powered electric
generators could be available for everyday use within a few years.
Some onlookers in the new-energy field are as impressed
with the scientific paperwork Werjefelt has done as they are with his
experimental models. After he came up with the design, Werjefelt
realized that he would need to explain the results in order to get a
patent. He would also need to convince a skeptical scientific
community.
So Werjefelt dug into the physics literature and found
evidence to Support his claim. He used this evidence in a 1995 lecture
at MIT to argue that standard science's teachings on magnetism have
been incomplete from the beginning, and that as a result, the
scientific community declared early on that it was impossible to use
magnetism as an energy source. The other fundamental forces in nature
nuclear physics and gravitation have been harnessed in the forms of
nuclear power plants and hydroelectric dams, but science has been
blind to the
possibility of using magnetism as a source of power.
In general, though, Werjefelt refuses to become caught
up in what he calls "paralysis by analysis." He is more interested in
proving that his device works. "Look at it as a quantum leap in the
energy field,'' he says, "like the leap from slide rulers to handheld
electric calculators."
Corporate Interest From Japan
In 1990, Werjefelt sent a notice to large corporations
such as General Electric and Westinghouse in the United States,
Siemens in Europe, and Hitachi and Sumitomo in Japan about his
discovery Most of the replies were, "It is not possible." Others
thanked him and said, "Call us when the patent is issued."
It turned out that the Japanese were very interested in
magnets and energy. In October 1993, Japanese television aired a
program, The Dream Energy, in which Japanese scientist Terohiko Kawai
discussed a device similar to Werjefelt's.
Well-funded Japanese research teams have engineered this
discovery into reliable units for existing motors. Werjefelt spent two
days with an official from Sumitomo and learned that the Japanese
motors are running for hours, days, weeks. Japanese industrialists are
switching over to the new units, which will use about half as much
fossil fuel as existing motors. For example, the television program
showed a refrigerator, a vacuum cleaner, and other common appliances
with such motors.
Werjefelt, on the other hand, is more interested in
producing electricity. He estimates that if power plants are built
using his Magnetic Battery-Generator instead of conventional
equipment, they could put out fifteen to eighteen times as much
electricity.
GOVERNMENT BACKING FOR INVENTORS ELSEWHERE
As we have seen in Bertil Werjefelt's saga, American
corporations are generally staying aloof from new-energy developments,
while other countries' governments underwrite corporate research in
this field. For example, two countries are working on devices similar
to Bruce DePalma's N-machine.
Japan Becomes Involved
In Japan, a soft-spoken scientist is getting government
help on his variation of the N-machine. Shiuji Inomata, Ph.D., worked
at the electrotechnical laboratory of the Ministry of International
Trade and Industry (MITI) in Ibaraki, Japan. Inomata's version of the
Nmachine named the JPI, after a private research institute produced a
small amount of excess power as a first prototype.
Now retired, Inomata continues to work on the JPI, and
is interested in seeing others continue his research. "Politicians and
industry are increasingly becoming aware of the new energy
breakthrough,,, he says. This could give Japan a considerable lead in
the race to produce N-machine technology. For further discussion on
why new energy fascinates the Japanese, see page 101.
India Also Pursues Space Energy
Japan is not the only Asian country that is actively
pursuing space energy. In India, a government-employed nuclear
scientist is also orking on a type of N-machinc with his employer's
blessing.
Paramahamsa Tewari, Ph.D., is a senior engineer with the
Depattment of Atomic Energy's Nuclear Power Corporation (NPC). HIS
version of the N-machine is called the Space Power Generator (SPG).
Among the Westerners who have encouraged Tewari over the years is
Bruce DePalma. Tewari says, "But for DePalma, I wouldn't have been
able to tie up my theory. He was working on ular ideas and kept
sending his results to me."
Tewari is project director of the NPC's Kaiga Project in
the state of Karnataka. Although his spare time for refining the SPG
is limited, Tewari is enthusiastic about it. The NPC's managing
director, S. L. Kati, says, "Tewari's prototype SPG can be considered
a major breakthrough."
It is unusual for a government to encourage one of its
nuclear physicists to explore space energy. But Tewari has gotten
special treatment from his government. For example, instead of
travelling on a private passport to a new-energy symposium in the
United States several years ago, Tewari's passport had been cleared by
the Indian government, which smoothed his way through airports. In
building SPG prototypes, he uses the services of electricians and
mechanics, as well as a workshop, at the nuclear plant whe re he
works. Tewari is pleased with how things are going at his day job the
project is moving forward. Thus, he feels well justified in putting a
"do not
disturb" sign on his door twice a week to work on the SPG for a couple
of hours.
Why has Tewari found such cordiality from an agency that
provides megaproject power? He says, "They feel that if something
meaningful comes out of (the Space Power Generator), the world may
benefit." He adds:
"I am heading the whole electrical department of a
nuclear project.... I do my job great, and there is mutual respect.
People didn't [get] in my way. I also very bluntly threw away any
Opposition. I just said, "Look. I don't care about you. I earn my
living as a government officer, yes. But I have my research to do and
you can't stop me.""
Solid-State Energy Devices and Their inventors
"Imagine a world in which endless, nonpolluting, and
virtually free energy powers our cities, cars, and homes."
"Our electrical company tells us that the only two
practical choices for their power are coal or nuclear. There is
another alternative.
In this chapter, we'll meet three of the leading North
American inventors of solid-state energy devices, or devices that use
no moving parts. These inventors are only three of many.
These men have diverse backgrounds and personalities. In
California, a scientist described by Omni magazine as a star in the
electronics field works in a high-tech private laboratory funded by
financial backers. In Florida, a former government official pays for
his research out of his retirement savings, and makes discoveries in
his garage. In Canada, a self-described eccentric, well-known in Japan
but unknown in his own country, cooks up a crystal-based energy device
in a tiny kitche - using ordinary rocks.
What these inventors have in common is a zest for
exploring. Their work on the leading edge of energy science holds
promise for the development of small-scale, quiet but powerful
converters devices that convert space energy into useable electric
power.
THE CHARGE CLUSTERS OF KEN SHOULDERS
Solid-State Energy Devices and Their Inventors
Ken Shoulders,Ph.D., a tall, solidly built man, wears
the expression of someone not inclined toward ordinary concerns. He is
a discoverer on the frontier, and lets others worry about whether his
findings fit into the accepted boundaries of scientific theory.
In the early 1960s, Shoulders developed much of today's
microcircuit technology. Now, he is working on an even more advanced
concept: the high-density charge cluster. It is a concept that holds
great promise in the space-energy field, since these donut-shaped,
microscopic clusters put out more than thirty times the energy
required to produce them.
Shoulders spent decades doing work in various
institutions, wherever he had a chance to learn more about science and
to try things out. This work included nonteaching staff positions at
universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in
laboratories such as Stanford Research Institute, and in private
corporations. Along the way, Shoulders accumulated the equipment he
needed to set up his own laboratory, which he did in 1968.
Like Nikola Tesla, the father of new energy we met in
Chapter 2, Shoulders made a discovery that could render his previous
work in microcircuit technology obsolete. It was a discovery made by
accident.
Around 1980, Shoulders was introduced by physicists at
the Stevens Institute In Hoboken, New Jersey, to strange strings of
particles what scientists call vortex filaments. After working on them
for awhile, Shoulders found that they weren't strings at all, being
about as broad as they were long. They showed up as strings on the
instruments of most researchers because the researchers could never
stop the motion of these extremely fast-moving blobs. When Shoulders
learned how to get clear pictures of the blobs , he found they were
little beadlike
structures. The simplest name for them is charge cluster, although
Shoulders calls them Electrum Validum, a name that means "strong
charge."
What Is a Charge Cluster?
The basic idea of a charge cluster is rather simple. It
is a tightly packed cluster of about 100 million electrons, an
electron being the part of an atom that revolves around the nucleus.
Shoulders has been able to create conditions under which electrons
break free from their nuclei and join together into remarkably stable
little ring-shaped clusters, like tiny donuts. "It is the wildest
electronic effect you will ever see," Shoulders says, calling his
creations "little engines of vast complexity that just don't die!"
As simple as the charge cluster is, conventional science
has a hard time accepting its existence. That's because it violates a
law of physics: "Like electrical charges, either negative or positive,
repel." Since all electrons carry a negative charge, conventional
science says that they should not cluster.
Hal Puthoff, whom we met in Chapter 4, has worked with
charge clusters, and thinks that the force which holds them together
is the result of an effect named after Dutch physicist Hendrik
Casimir. The Casimir effect refers to the tendency for two perfectly
smooth metal surfaces placed near each other to come closer together.
Puthoff explains the effect this way: imagine two metal plates
hovering in space, close to each other. Because the plates shield each
other from space energy coming from one direction, t he space energy
pressing in on each plate from the opposite direction would slam the
two of them together, releasing energy as heat.
Shoulders uses the Casimir effect to pinch a cold plasma
a special form of gas that conducts electricity to create heat and
charge clusters. The electricity he uses is static electricity, the
electricity in the spark that snaps from a doorknob if you drag your
feet across a carpet. In Shoulders's system, this electricity provides
the electrons that make up the cluster. It is, essentially, an
electric charge compressed into a visible form.
What inspires Shoulders's awe about these tiny entities
is that they almost seem to have an intelligence about them they are
selforganizing. The clusters appear to form into various sizes, but
are uniform in organization and behavior. They often look like a ring
or a necklace of tiny donuts. "It's some law of nature that's just not
spelled out for us yet," Shoulders says.
Shoulders discovered the link between charge clusters
and space energy when he tried to find out what could supply the large
amounts of energy needed to make electrons overcome their tendency to
repel one another and join into tightly packed clusters. Their high
energy makes charge clusters very powerful they can bore holes through
ceramic tile without losing strength. Because of the Casimir effect,
space energy
appears to fit the evidence from Shoulders's experiments as a likely
source of this energy.
As futuristic as this technology seems, Shoulders has
been able to convince a tough customer of its value the United States
Patent Office. While past attempts to base a patent on space energy
have been unsuccessful, Shoulders has broken through with a 1991
patent titled, "Energy Conversion Using High Charge Density." It is a
milestone the first successful patent to say that space energy can be
used as a source of practical electric energy.
Charge Clusters and Commercial Products
Now working with his son, Steve, Ken Shoulders continues
to make breakthroughs. What Shoulders sees under the microscope is
another world, hinting of future machines that will be thousands of
times more powerful than our current machines.
Charge-cluster technology could be one of the first
space-energy technologies to be commercialized. Unlike some of the
other space energy inventions, charge clusters do not need magnetic
fields or low temperatures to work. One new-energy writer says the
charge cluster may be one of the most promising areas of research
since the transistor.
Providing abundant clean energy is not the only thing
that charge clusters can do. There is a whole range of possible
products based on charge-cluster technology, according to Puthoff, who
lists a few of the products besides energy devices that could result
from developments in this field:
* High-resolution television screens flat enough to hang
on a wall.
* Notebook computers more powerful than the largest
mainframe.
* Tiny X-ray machines that can enter the body and kill
cancer cells without harming surrounding tissues.
While the Shoulders team makes advances in the
laboratory, a private firm with the necessary product-placement
know-how makes plans in the marketplace. This firm will ensure that
chargecluster technology can be licensed worldwide for eventual
development into a number of products.
THE CERMET OF WINGATE LAMBERTSON
In Florida, Wingate Lambertson, Ph.D., lights a row of
lamps in his garage using what he says is electricity taken from the
energy of space. It took years for Lambertson, a former director of
Kentucky's Science and Technology Commission, to overcome his academic
skepticism about claims that you could get something for nothing yet
energy freely available from space could be tapped for useful work.
After getting his doctorate from Rutgers University,
Lambertson works for United States Steel in Chicago before going into
the United States Navy. After going back to Rutgers for more
postgraduate work, he joined Argonne National Laboratory, where he
worked on nuclear fuel technology.
Then Lambertson discovered the large body of
space-energy literature that has been written by researchers in the
field. Eventually, he came to believe that something similar to an
nether - the basic stuff Of the universe discussed in Chapter Could
exist, and that where collected, it could be used to make electricity.
After more than two decades of research and
experimentation, Lambertson is certain that space energy can be turned
into a practical power source through a process he calls World Into
Neutrinos (WIN). He envisions it being engineered into units that will
probably be set outside the home on a small concrete pad, like central
air conditioning units are now, and wired into the home's master
electric switchbox. The price? About $3,000 for either sale or lease
cheaper than buying or leasing a car.
The WIN Process and Cermet
The most important part of the WIN process is
Lambertson's E-dam, and the most interesting component in the E-dam is
cermet. Cermet is a heat-resistant ceramic-and-metal composite
invented in 1948 and considered by NASA for rocket nozzles and
jet-engine turbine blades. Lambertson, who spent almost his entire
career working with advanced ceramics, is experimenting to develop the
best cermet for his device. The E-dam contains a plate of cermet
formed into a round spacer about
three inches in diameter, sandwic hed between metal plates of the same
size.
The process starts with an electrical charge basically,
a stream of electrons from a standard power supply. The charge flows
into the E-dam, where it is held in the cermet: "It stores electrons
like a [regular] dam stores water," Lambertson says. When the dam is
opened, the electrons are released. As they accelerate, the falling
electrons gain energy from the space energy that is present in the
E-dam. This gain in energy is what allows the device to put out more
power than it
takes in.
The current of electrons then flows into the device to
be powered, such as a lamp, and then moves into another E-dam for
recycling. Lambertson says there is no way for the process to become
dangerous - if too much power were generated, the E-dams would
overheat, shutting down the system.
For years, Lambertson was more interested in proving
that the process gained energy than in the actual amount of energy
gained, since he thought scaling up the process to higher efficiencies
would be a relatively simple engineering problem. When his first of
three patent applications was rejected, he saw it as a blessing
because it forced him to study the space-energy literature more
carefully. By the fall of 1994, he had improved the process to the
point where it put out twice as much energy as it started with.
Lambertson Finds Help
Meanwhile, Lamberston was having a frustrating time in
trying to find funding and marketing help. Responses to his proposals
usually fell into one of two categories:
* "This will not work, your calculations are in error."
* "You get it working and free of all technical
problems, and we will take it off your hands."
He learned, as have other inventors in this book, that
it's a waste of time to try to convince people of the validity of
one's claims when those people don't want to listen. But he did find
support in 1987, when he spoke at a new-energy conference in Germany.
There, he found people who saw the need for his invention and agreed
to market it when the WIN process is perfected.
Lambertson says that he now has active associates in
Switzerland, in addition to interest shown by the United States Navy.
Three different groups have shown interest in taking over and
developing the WIN method.
THE DIRT CHEAP ROCKS OF JOHN HUTCHISON
If you ask the other residents of a certain apartment
building in Vancouver, they may admit to being curious about John
Hutchison. They see a tall, muscular man who carts old consoles of
electronic equipment onto the elevator nearly every week. Their
curiosity increased the day a Japanese television crew showed up and
disappeared inside his apartment for a few hours. And in the summer of
1995, Hutchison further puzzled onlookers by sitting on the curb and
picking out stones. Why would a rockhound sort through ordinary
street rocks?
What the neighbors do not know is that John Hutchison is
well-known in new-energy circles, and is even known to some who move
in the circles of established science. His visitors have included
distinguished physicists. But unlike Shoulders and Lambertson, he is a
self-taught scientist. As a boy in Vancouver, he read about Nikola
Tesla (see Chapter 2) and then startled neighbors with Tesla coil
experiments in his backyard.
While in his twenties, he developed a medical problem
that resulted in his living on a small disability pension. For years,
he lived a generally reclusive life, digging for rare electrical
equipment in military surplus stores and junkyards, and carrying his
finds home on the city bus. Apart from time spent as a volunteer at a
local ecology center, he spent hours in his bedroom-turned-laboratory,
patiently rebuilding equipment. He considered opening a museum.
Antigravity and the Hutchison Effect
Hutchison's life changed drastically in 1979 when, upon
starting up an array of high-voltage equipment, he felt something hit
his shoulder. He threw the piece of metal back to where it seemed to
have originated, and it flew up and hit him again. This was how he
originally discovered the Hutchison effect. When his Tesla coils,
electrostatic generator, and other equipment created a complex
electromagnetic field, heavy pieces of metal levitated and shot toward
the ceiling, and some pieces shredded.
What is the Hutchison effect? As with much of the
new-energy field, no one can say for sure. Some theorists think the
effect is the result of opposing electromagnetic fields cancelling
each other out, creating a powerful flow of space energy.
A Vancouver businessman heard about the Hutchison
effect, contacted Hutchison, and brought in a consulting engineer to
form a company that would promote technology developed from the
effect. Despite demonstrations to potential customers from both Canada
and the United States, things did not work out, and Hutchison and the
company parted ways in 1986.
After a couple of other abortive business tries,
including a sojourn in Germany, Hutchison returned to Vancouver in
late 1990 and again lived a relatively reclusive life. Piece by piece,
he sold what remained of his laboratory equipment in order to pay his
bills. It would be several years before he could reestablish his
collection.
Hutchison wanted to connect with other researchers, but
the local media had given his work the weird-science treatment, and
didn't take him seriously. However, material on the Hutchison effect
was included in a Japanese book on Hutchison's life and work that sold
well in Japan. Living in a country with almost no natural resources
has led the Japanese to take new-energy ideas very seriously, as we
will see in Chapter 8.
As a result, Hutchison was asked to speak in Japan,
where thousands of people paid to attend his two lecture tours. These
tours were organized by Hiroshi Yamabe, a well-known Tesla lecturer
who made his fortune in such advanced engineering fields as robotics
and artificial intelligence. Yamabe offered to set up a laboratory for
Hutchison, but the Canadian was ambivalent about the prospect of
moving to Japan.
Beyond the Hutchison Effect: The Dirt Cheap Energy
Converter
Hutchison was undecided about what to do. He had moved
beyond the Hutchison effect and into the field of space energy, and
had acquired a Canadian business manager. The winter before his 1995
Japanese tour, Hutchison built a working space energy device about the
size of a microwave oven. The Hutchison Converter was based on Tesla's
resonance principle. Tesla demonstrated this principle by steadily
pulsing bursts of energy into his electric coils, each burst coming
before energy from the previous burst had time to die away. This led
to higher and higher amounts of energy, like a child going higher and
higher on a swing.
Hutchison captured the same pulsing, rhythmic energy by
using crystals of barium titanate, a material that can capture the
pulses of certain electromagnetic frequencies in the way that a radio
can pick up certain radio frequencies. When the crystal pulses, or
resonates, it produces electric power.
I saw a demonstration in which the converter put out six
watts, enough to power a motor that kept a small propeller spinning
furiously. The whirring of a tiny propeller looked rather silly, until
one realized that the apparatus contained no batteries, no fuel, and
no connection to a power outlet It worked continuously for months.
One day while experimenting, however, Hutchison cracked
a crucial part and decided to take the unit apart.
He built a smaller, more portable model to take on his
speaking tour. Resembling an Oscar statue in size and shape, the
portable converter put out slightly more than a watt of power. It lit
a tiny lamp as a demonstration and also ran a small motor.
At the end of the tour, in front of an audience of about
500 Hiroshima residents, Hutchison slapped the device onto a table lit
by the bright lights of a television crew. He quickly unscrewed all
the parts and revealed its inner details, while the camera zoomed in
for a closeup and a pair of chopsticks provided a scale to show the
size of the device. It was clear that the converter contained no
batteries. Afterward, men crowded around Hutchison, offering him their
business cards and asking him to sell them a supply of barium
titanate.
Back home, Hutchison's business advisor fretted that the
inventor had given away his secrets. But Hutchison shrugged his
shoulders; he had gone beyond the prototype technology he had taken to
Japan. He now had a new secret - the stovetop process he called Dirt
Cheap because the ingredients included common rocks.
The new process grew out of his use of barium titanate..
He wondered, "Why can't I make a material that works even better?"
Hutchison knew that other researchers had put electrodes on certain
rocks to show that the rocks generated a tiny electric current,
somehow soaked up from the cosmos.
So Hutchison sorted through small stones on the street
in front of his apartment and threw them into a test tube-sized metal
container. Next, he added a mixture of low-cost, common chemicals he
won't reveal which ones and put this rock soup on the stove to simmer.
This allowed water to evaporate and tiny pockets of air to rise from
the stones so that the chemicals could enter them. Before the mixture
cooled into a solid, he added specially treated posts to draw
electricity from the
crystal-like substance th at had formed. Again, no one is entirely
sure as to how the Dirt Cheap method works, although one physicist
told Hutchison that the Casimir effect, used by Ken Shoulders to
create charge clusters, may be at work (see page 61).
When he first discovered his Dirt Cheap process,
Hutchison didn't bother to patent it. He had heard from other
inventors how their laboratories had been vandalized and their
property had been stolen once the Patent Office had been notified, and
he was not eager to be the first inventor to take a bold step by
manufacturing a large home-or factory-sized unit that could
restructure industries. Besides, in the 1980s - when he was still
working with the Hutchison effect - he had received a few threatening
comme nts from strangers.
How could Hutchisonn enjoy his peaceful life and still
get a space energy product to the public in a low-key manner? He says
he has hit upon an unusual strategy: building miniature flying saucers
powered by Dirt Cheap-supplied electricity, and selling them as
space-energy children's toys. Hutchison hopes an environmentally safe
toy that lights up without batteries will intrigue the public into
buying Dirt
Cheap devices that could power large appliances. And perhaps, the Dirt
Cheap process could help lead to a world of nonpolluting new
energy.
by Jeanne Manning
- Harold Puthoff, Physicist
-Werner Heisenberg, Nobel laureate
-Bruce DePalma, Inventor
-Owen Davies, Science writer
-Wingate Lambertson, Inventor