Bearden - Cheap Clean Energy from the Vacuum, Energy from the Vacuum

Clean Electrical Energy from the Active Vacuum

Tom Bearden

Jan. 2002

Introduction

No electrical engineering department in the Western World presently teaches what powers an electrical circuit, or what actually powers the electrical power grid. None ever has. It also does not appear in a single electrical engineering textbook in the Western world, nor has it ever appeared in one.

All the hydrocarbons ever burned, nuclear fuel rods ever consumed, steam turbines turned, and generators rotated, have not directly added a single watt directly to the external power line and to the power grid. Nor has any windmill, nuclear power plant, battery, or hydroelectric generator or solar cell array. None ever will.

Every electrical circuit ever built — and those built today — are in fact powered by electrical energy extracted by the circuit dipolarity from the local seething vacuum, from active space itself. But our engineers are trained to build circuits which also self-destroy the extraction of that vacuum energy, faster than they power their loads.

The leaders of our scientific community — including the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and National Academy of Engineering (NAE) — are unaware of what actually powers an electrical circuit or the electrical power line. Scientists have not integrated into classical electrodynamics and electrical engineering — and in their own thinking — the broken symmetry of opposite charges — such as of a common dipole or dipolarity — that has been proven in particle physics since 1957 {,,}. Neither have our great national laboratories, etc. made this integration in their official power system thinking. Instead, on energy matters these institutions, organizations, and leaders continue to inappropriately advise the policy makers of the U.S. Government. The government then inappropriately spends the taxpayer's money in the field of energy research, based on that advice.

Consequently, billions of U.S. research dollars are spent annually on an electrical energy science that is archaic and flawed. More billions are spent on energy systems and centralized power grids that are cumbersome, frightfully expensive, and completely vulnerable to modern terrorist attack and natural disasters. These systems are dinosaurs waiting for the terrorist to destroy them.

To "fuel" such power systems, ever more dams, hydrocarbon-burning power plants, pipelines, oil wells, natural gas wells, tanker ships, harbor facilities, refineries, nuclear power plants, and a host of peripheral power systems such as windmills, solar cell arrays, emergency power generators, etc. are required. This great juggernaut also continues to implement a rapacious energy technology which fouls the planet, pollutes the biosphere and destroys much of it. The juggernaut kills off species, is responsible for an uncomfortable and increasing number of human deaths each year from the pollution, and contributes directly to global warming by emitting polluting hydrocarbon combustion products. It places the economy of the United States — so fragilely based on the continued and escalating availability of cheap energy from cheap fuel such as cheap oil and cheap coal — at the mercy of unfriendly states controlling much of the world's supplies of cheap oil. Terrorists are presented with lucrative and strategic soft targets, easily disrupted and destroyed.

The little-recognized basis for such startling technical statements about the powering of electrical circuits has been in particle physics for nearly a half-century. It was evidenced by the award of the Nobel Prize to Lee and Yang in 1957 for their prediction of broken symmetry. The implications of this major discovery — which profoundly impacted all of physics — still have not been incorporated into electrical engineering or the ancient Maxwell-Heaviside-Lorentz electrodynamics taught to electrical engineers.

Consequently, the ubiquitous vacuum energy source of all electrical power — for every electrical circuit and electrical power system, small or gigantic — continues to be resoundingly ignored in "energy science and technology", in our universities, and in our leading scientific institutions. The environmental activists, seeking to save the biosphere, have not yet recognized the real problem — the appalling energy advice provided to everyone (including the environmentalists) by the scientific community.

With the above "strong grabbers" to evoke the reader's curiosity and attention, let us explain why such startling and seemingly insane statements are true, how things got that way, and what can be done about it.

Brief History of the Present Classical Maxwell-Heaviside-Lorentz Electrodynamics

In the 1860s James Clerk Maxwell combined electrical fields and magnetic fields into a common model, and launched the present system of classical electrodynamics still being taught today, though in a more limited form. Maxwell's seminal paper {} was published in 1865, in quaternion-like notation. Quaternion algebra captures many more features and functions of a science which it models, than do either vector algebra or tensor algebra commonly used in electrical engineering.

As an example, with the standard tensor or vector analysis one cannot even "see" the most important functions accomplished by Nikola Tesla in his patented circuits. Quaternion analysis of Tesla's actual patented circuits does show these functions {}. Consequently, mainstream electrical scientists who use only standard tensor analysis and confidently assume that they understand Tesla's work, are very much mistaken.

In his 1865 paper, Maxwell specifically lists his 20 equations and his 20 unknowns. His work was strongly contested, because few of the three dozen electrical scientists on earth at the time were capable in quaternion mathematics. Before he died in 1879, Maxwell himself had started rewriting his 1873 book for a second edition, with simpler equations.

In the 1880s Oliver Heaviside — a brilliant but self-taught scientist who never attended university — played a major role in converting (reducing) Maxwell's equations to what today is vector algebra, after Maxwell was deceased {}. Heaviside detested potentials, and stated that they should be "murdered from the theory." The reduction work by Heaviside, Gibbs, and Hertz resulted in the modern four vector equations in some four unknowns. These are taught — along with a further truncation by Lorentz — in every university as "Maxwell's equations". They are in fact Heaviside's equations, further truncated by Lorentz symmetrical regauging {}.

In those early EM days the potentials were thought to be mathematical figments, and all electromagnetic phenomena were considered to be the result of the force fields. Hence any manipulation of the potentials that left the net force fields unchanged, was thought to result in prescribing identically the same systems. Today that is known to be untrue — e.g., in quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics, as well as higher group symmetry electrodynamics— but leading classical electrodynamicists still perpetuate the myth.

Both Maxwell's original theory and Heaviside's truncation prescribe two major kinds of electromagnetic systems: (i) those which are "in equilibrium" with their active environment, so they cannot receive and use {} EM energy from it, and (ii) those which are "out of equilibrium" with their active environment, and so can freely receive and use {} EM energy from it.

The first class of thermodynamic systems (those in equilibrium) may be compared to a rowboat floating in a still pond. It has no "net force" upon it, so if we wish the boat to go, we ourselves will have to "row" it, continually putting in force and energy to do work on the boat to force it forward.

The second class of thermodynamic systems (those in disequilibrium) may be compared to a sailboat on the same pond, with a wind blowing. Here we may have to input a little energy to the rudder to "steer" the boat, but the energy and force for the heavy propulsive power is provided freely by the wind. So our boat now "does more work in moving through the water" than the energy that we ourselves input to steer it can do. Simply put, we do not have to row the boat, but only arrange the sails and steer it with the rudder. The wind puts in the excess energy and force required to propel the boat, so the conservation of energy law is not violated. In simple terms, we gate and control the use of more energy than we ourselves have to furnish.

Such a system can even be completely "self-powering", similar to a windmill in the wind or a waterwheel driving a mill for grinding grain. We have to pay to build the windmill or the waterwheel, and to maintain it, but we do not have to input any energy or force to it ourselves, once it's up and running and the wind is blowing or the water is flowing.

The same is true for EM systems, because Maxwell's theory is a purely material fluid theory. Hence anything a fluid system can do, in theory Maxwellian systems can also do because the equations are the same and prescribe analogous functions.

Before Lorentz regauging, the Maxwell-Heaviside equations are still difficult to solve analytically. Numerical methods are often required. This posed a calculation nightmare back in the mid 1800s, before the advent of modern computers and automated calculations. Today, numerical methods can be accommodated much more easily, using computers.

To reduce the difficulty in solving the Maxwell-Heaviside equations and largely eliminate the need for laborious numerical methods, simpler "Maxwellian" equations were sought. Lorentz further reduced the Maxwell-Heaviside equations by "symmetrically regauging" them {}. This symmetry constrains the modern gauge freedom principle, whereby the potential (and the potential energy) of an EM system can be freely changed at will. In those systems covered by the reduced theory, the potential energy can still be changed. But it can only be changed in such a manner that the two new free fields produced are equal and opposite. Hence the new fields "fight each other to a draw", changing the internal stress of the system but doing no external work (which requires a net nonzero force field). This has the effect of bottling up any excess EM field energy that might be received by the system from its environment, into a force-free stress potential inside the system The system can be freely energized by the environment to stress the system, but it cannot use the free stress potential energy to perform any external work. To perform work, such a system has to have an additional input of energy where a net force field also emerges. In short, the system has to additionally be asymmetrically regauged so as to result in a net force — which means the extra asymmetrical regauging energy has to be input by the system operator or experimenter, since the Lorentz-regauged system itself prohibits the environment from furnishing such "energy with a net field".

In effect, Lorentz modified the equations to select only the far simpler "first class" of Maxwellian systems — those in equilibrium with their external active environment, and thus unable to receive and use any "free energy" from it {}. This made the resulting equations simpler and much easier to solve analytically. It also inadvertently discarded an entire class of Maxwellian systems — those in disequilibrium with their active environment, able to freely receive excess potential energy and net field energy, develop a net force as a result, and then use that net force to dissipate the excess energy to perform work in an external load.

To ease mathematical solution of the equations, Lorentz arbitrarily and unwittingly threw away the electrical windmill and sailboat, and retained only the rowboat. Electrodynamicists and electrical engineers continue to dutifully utilize the Lorentz-regauged subset equations. Consequently, our present electrical power systems — which are designed and built according to the symmetrized equations — will not and cannot receive and use EM energy from the many "electrical winds" that can easily be made electromagnetically {}. By definition, our engineers build only the "first class" of Maxwellian systems, and never build a system of the second class. Most no longer even believe that the second class of EM systems exist — because it does not exist in their archaic 137-year old EM model. In short, this is the classic case in science where one branch of the scientific community ardently defends an antiquated and imperfect model, even though better models already exist in other branches of science.

Two Kinds of Systems and Two Kinds of Thermodynamics

There are two major kinds of thermodynamics (the science of how energy is dissipated and converted). First, there is the oldest kind, for systems in equilibrium with their environment. This equilibrium thermodynamics applies only to systems which do not receive and use {} excess energy from their environment. In short, it applies to the rowboat, not to the windmill in the wind, the sailboat, the waterwheel, the solar cell, the heat pump, etc. For such a system, one must always input more energy to the system than the work we get back out of the system, because some of our input energy is wasted in the system itself (against friction, internal losses, etc.). So its coefficient of performance (work out divided by energy we ourselves input) is always less than unity. Or in short, its COP<1.0. In the real world, we can never break even in such a system {}, because the systems we build do have internal losses and inefficiencies.

Hence all our conventional EM power systems exhibit COP<1.0, and have done so for more than a century. Lorentz and our present universities see to it that our engineers design and build only those electrical power systems which self-enforce equilibrium conditions, thus obeying the "old" thermodynamics.

The second kind of thermodynamics is for systems not in equilibrium with their active environment. As an example, Ilya Prigogine received a Nobel Prize in 1977 for his contributions to this kind of thermodynamics (of systems far from equilibrium with their active environment). In short, this kind of thermodynamics applies to the windmill, the waterwheel, the sailboat, the solar cell, the heat pump, etc. It also applies to one class of Maxwellian systems, but unfortunately that is precisely the class that Lorentz arbitrarily discarded by his symmetrical regauging. Because this type of system can freely receive and use excess energy (it has a net nonzero force field) from the environment, it can output more work than the energy we ourselves input. The excess energy (with appropriate net force field resulting) to do the extra work and power the inefficiencies of the system is furnished by the external environment.

The common home heat pump is a beautiful example of a system far from thermodynamic equilibrium with its environment (the outside atmosphere). By extracting heat energy from the surrounding atmosphere and using it to heat the home, the heat pump under nominal conditions has a theoretical maximum COP = 8.22 {}. To cool the house, the heat pump reverses to extract heat from the interior air and dissipate it to the external atmosphere. Even with its internal losses, a good home heat pump will produce a
COP = 4.0 under reasonable conditions (not too cold outside, etc.). So COP>1.0 systems are well-known — except in electrodynamics, where Lorentz arbitrarily discarded them, where the electrical engineers and power scientists continue to discard them, and where all our electrical power systems for more than a century have been designed and built in accord with Lorentz's deliberate reduction of the theory!

The "Perpetual Motion Machine" Conundrum: An Exercise in Very Bad Logic

The erroneous notion that all EM systems (rather than just Lorentz-regauged EM systems) are "restricted by nature" to COP<1.0 has been ingrained in electrical engineers and electrical scientists for more than a century. Accordingly, an iron dogma has arisen around the issue. Yet it is refuted by every single charge and dipole in the universe {}.

Nonetheless, the great majority of electrical engineers and scientists firmly believe it is physically impossible and against the laws of nature to build an EM system that produces more work output than the energy we ourselves input {}. Proposing such an EM system is considered to be proposing perpetual motion machines that create energy out of nothing. The engineers and scientists consider the proponent of such EM systems a "perpetual motion nut". Yet the very electrodynamics they themselves use and teach already implicitly assumes that every charge and dipole freely creates — and continuously pours out in all directions — EM energy to change the energy density of spacetime and create their associated fields and potentials. In short, by their own "definition" and accusation, every one of them is already a "perpetual motion nut" of the worst kind.

What is true is that it is physically impossible to build a system — electromagnetic or otherwise — that outputs more work (conversion of the form of energy) than all the usable energy that is input to it and made available to it, either by the operator or by the environment, or by both {}. As an example, the Bohren experiment {} — replicable by any good university physics laboratory — always outputs more EM energy than the experimenter inputs (some 18 times as much). As another example, every charge and every dipole in the universe already outputs EM energy continuously, and we do not have to input any energy at all, once either the charge or the dipole is produced and just left alone.

A System Continuously Extracting Energy from the Vacuum Can be Made for a Dollar

Nature readily provides bountiful sources of unending EM energy, free for the taking and using — anywhere, anytime. They are called "charges" and "dipoles" — and often, source charges and source dipoles. As an example, simply place an electret or charged capacitor on a permanent magnet so that the electric field of the electret or capacitor and the magnetic field of the magnet are at right angles to each other. That silly thing will sit there and pour out EM energy in all directions, at the speed of light, so long as you just leave it alone and do not destroy it. One year after you create it, its outpouring of energy will have reached a radius of one light year — out beyond the solar system — in all directions. It will have changed the energy density of that vast volume of surrounding space of one light-year radius. And it is still pouring out energy at the same rate, steadily changing the energy density of still more space.

Even the "conventional" electrodynamicists agree that a flow of EM energy is continuously emitted from that arrangement {}. However, the conventional electrodynamics is resoundingly silent on where that steady outpouring of EM energy comes from and how it is input to the charge or dipole. There is no detectable input of EM energy to the charge or dipole, but there is a detectable and continuous output of energy from it. Seemingly, every charge and dipole is creating energy out of nothing, which of course totally destroys the conservation of energy law if true {}. Since classical electrodynamicists have not been able to solve it, their textbooks have remained very silent on this fundamental problem and its implications. By their resounding silence, classical electrodynamicists implicitly assume that every source charge and source dipole in the universe is a perpetual motion machine, freely and continuously creating energy out of nothing.

Either one rejects the energy conservation law entirely, or one explains the source charge problem. There is no middle position, because the source charge is real and it ubiquitously exists. And it ubiquitously pours out that energy.

So we point the finger right back at the self-appointed critics and ask in their own terminology, "Who are the real perpetual motion nuts here? You cannot logically consider and implicitly accept every charge and dipole as a perpetual motion machine, freely creating energy out of nothing at all, and then protest that there can be no such thing as a COP>1.0 EM system!"

All the EM energy in any EM circuit or device comes from those same source charges and source dipoles. If one cannot explain where and how those charges obtain the energy to keep pouring it out, then one knows absolutely nothing about what truly powers every electrical circuit. Since the energy being received is nonobservable, it must be received in some peculiar and normally unusable form. The charges must then transduce the received energy into usable and observable form, and re-emit it in that new form, so that the circuit can catch some of it and be "energized".

The source charge problem focuses one's attention on the real problem. Either we must discard energy conservation altogether, or we must admit that every charge and dipole is already a COP>1.0 Maxwellian EM system, freely changing the form of some unusual received energy. It is continuously doing "free" work, since work is the changing of form of energy, and every charge and dipole is freely receiving virtual EM energy and changing its form to observable EM energy, continuously.

The quandary of the source charge and its continuous outpouring of real EM energy has been called "the most difficult problem in classical and quantum mechanics" {}. Until 2000 there did not appear any classical solution to that long-vexing problem of the association of the fields and potentials — and their energy — reaching across all space, with the source charge that produces them. But the basis for the solution was already present in particle physics since the discovery of broken symmetry in 1957. In 2000 the present author proposed a formal solution {} consistent with quantum field theory {}, particle physics {}, quantum electrodynamics {}, and re-interpretation {12} of Whittaker's biwave decomposition of the scalar potential {}. We used the term "giant negentropy" since the charge and dipole continuously and freely absorb, cohere, organize, and re-emit energy from the vacuum.

Since every charge in every circuit is already continuously negentropic, then our building of entropic circuits using these negentropic charges must involve some characteristic of circuit design where we kill the negentropy. We will explain that aspect shortly.

Our universities should — but do not — focus on the main problem: How does one then intercept, divert, and collect some of that freely flowing EM energy so easily evoked by every charge and dipolarity, and use it to freely power loads, without disarranging and destroying the actual "power source"? No university seems to be working on that problem, nor is the Department of Energy, nor are any of the great national laboratories. Nor are any of the great scientific associations.

Yet that single problem is the only fundamental electrical power problem. All the rest of the "recognized power problems" are just so much psychological displacement activity so as not to have to disturb the comfortable Lorentz-regauged and crippled classical electrodynamics.

There is no problem at all in obtaining great rivers and gushers of EM energy from the ubiquitous vacuum — cheaply, easily and enduringly. Every charge and every dipole already does that. There is no problem in producing the free “electromagnetic energy winds" needed to power even the greatest loads, any place in the universe, any time. Instead, the only problem is in building a proper "electrical windmill" to divert, collect, and use some energy from such a steady electrical wind — without destroying the broken symmetry source of the wind (the source dipole) — and using (dissipating) that collected energy to power our desired load.

All our present closed-current loop circuits are designed {} to use half their freely collected energy to destroy the source dipole (in the generator or battery). The other half of their collected energy is used to power the external circuit's losses and loads. So more of the freely collected EM energy is used to destroy the "wind" source than is used to power the load. We then have to continually input at least as much energy to restore the source (the dipole) as was used to destroy it. So we must continually input more energy to restore the dipole — that the engineers unwittingly design and build the circuits to deliberately destroy — than the circuit provides to power the loads. All our engineers design and build electrical power systems that destroy their free electrical wind sources faster than they power their loads. Such inane power systems obviously provide COP<1.0, because of the deliberate circuit design used by the engineers.

It is akin to building a magnificent but flawed sailboat, which — once it starts to move in the wind — rapidly and continually lowers its own sails faster than the wind can propel the boat. To keep the boat going, one thus has to continually pay to keep raising the sails that the boat itself keeps lowering. Our electrical engineers and electrical power scientists are busily engaged in perpetuating an analogous electrical power technology, and our scientific community is busily assuring us that they are practicing "the most advanced electrical science".

We actually pay the power company to engage in a giant sumo wrestling match inside its generators, and deliberately lose.

The Modern Vacuum: Empty Space Has Unlimited EM Energy

"Vacuum" is what we usually think of as the empty space left after all the air is removed. However, in modern physics it is well-known that space is not such an "emptiness" at all. Instead, it is filled with energetic particles that appear and disappear with extraordinary speed. Hence "the vacuum" in physics is more like a seething cauldron, boiling fiercely {}. The energy density of this boiling is so great that it literally boggles one's mind {}. A bit of "empty space" the size of a sugar cube contains enough "seething electromagnetic energy" to power all the electrical loads on earth for millions of years. Obviously, if we can extract just a tiny fraction of this energy in electromagnetic form, we can use it to power our loads for free or nearly so. We need only power the "gating" or "switching" of the flowing energy, and thus cause a great deal of work to be performed, even though we ourselves input little or no energy.

Can the EM Energy of the Vacuum be "Tapped" and Extracted for our Use?

It's widely believed that it is impractical to try to extract very much usable energy from the seething, highly energetic vacuum. Oh yes, the tiny little Lamb shift {} of the orbit of one electron in a certain atom is admittedly due to vacuum energy interaction. Well, although the Lamb shift is a very small effect of a single electron in a single atom, the energy density of that interaction is greater than the surface energy density of the sun {}!

And, oh yes, the Casimir effect {} — a vacuum-induced attraction of two conducting plates when separated but close — also is due to vacuum energy interaction, but it too is a very small effect and not practical to consider {}.

Then the assertion is often made — particularly by electrical power engineers, who normally are not well-acquainted with modern physics — ...

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