Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (51 page)

It was many years before I found out what he was talking about.
A writer named Donald Hotson sent me the typescript of a book on the identity of Shakespeare’s ‘Mr.
W.
H’.
that was so erudite and amusing that I took the trouble of making his acquaintance when I next found myself in New York.
There I was surprised to learn that he regarded Shakespeare scholarship only as a sideline—his uncle happened to be the Shakespeare scholar Leslie Hotson and the book sprang out of an argument with him.
Donald Hotson’s major interest was quantum theory and its bearing on cosmology.
When I returned to England, he sent me the typescript of a book called
Virtual Quantum Reality.

If the Shakespeare book had impressed me, this left me stunned.
Short, clearly written, with a dry humour reminiscent of Mark Twain, it argued that Einstein was probably wrong—not just about the Copenhagen Interpretation, but about virtually everything.

Now my friend Martin Gardner, in a book called
Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science,
had argued that Einstein is the happy hunting ground of half-educated cranks, and that anyone who tries to disprove Einstein is a crank by definition.
But Hotson was clearly no nut.
His temperament was closer to that of Charles Fort, except that he knew far more about physics.

He began with Maxwell’s discovery that light is a form of electromagnetic energy, and his assumption that the waves of this energy are carried by a medium called the ‘ether’, which permeates all space, although it cannot be detected.
In 1897, two physicists named Michelson and Morley reasoned that if the Earth is passing through this ether like a ship through water, there ought to be an ‘ether wind’ whistling past us.
To detect this, they shot one beam of light across the ether wind and back, and another up and down it for the same distance.
Simple mathematics shows that a swimmer who goes up a river and back takes longer than he would take to swim the same distance across the river and back.
The difference between the two times should have revealed how fast the ether wind was blowing.
In fact, the experiment detected no ether wind whatever.

A Dutch physicist named Hendrik Lorentz was not discouraged by this.
In 1904, he made the suggestion that perhaps our Earth itself is a huge ‘standing wave’ in the ether—a suggestion that nowadays makes far more sense than it did then, since we know our Earth is made of electrons, which
are
waves (until observation turns them into particles).

At this point, Einstein produced his Special Theory of Relativity.
It sprang out of the thought that if he was sitting astride a beam of light, and travelling away from the clock in the Berne main square, the time would remain unchanged as he looked back.
He went on to consider Maxwell’s insistence that nothing could travel faster than light.
But suppose you were sitting on the front of a train travelling at half the speed of light, and you shone a torch ahead of you, the torch beam surely
had
to be travelling at one and a half times the speed of light?

Not so, said Einstein.
Something’s got to give.
And that something is time—or rather, space-time (for in the theory of relativity, space and time no longer have separate identities).
For a train travelling at such a speed, space-time would distort in such a way that light would be found to travel at its usual speed.

In Einstein’s theory, the ether also becomes unnecessary, for the negative results of the Michelson–Morley experiment are now explainable as a distortion of space-time.
This, of course, still leaves the question of what light waves are ‘waving’ in.
But, since Einstein thought light consisted of particles, that question did not arise.
And, once quantum theory began to talk about ‘wave mechanics’, the question had been forgotten .
.
.

What Hotson is arguing is that the old ether theory made more sense.
Lorentz thought the Michelson–Morley experiment failed because matter itself is made of waves, which contract in the direction of motion, and Michelson and Morley’s apparatus would contract enough to nullify the result—a notion that is consistent with quantum theory.
As it was, Einstein dispensed with the ether and declared that all motion is relative.
In the nineteenth century, physicists talked about some basically fixed reference point against which all motion could be measured—Ernst Mach, for example, suggested the stars.
In 1869, Carl Neumann suggested calling the fixed reference system ‘the body alpha’.
Einstein threw all that into the bin, and said that all reference systems—trains, planets, stars—are equivalent.

Hotson argues that this was a fundamental error.
He cites, for example, E.
W.
Silvertooth’s 1989 ‘Michelson–Morley’ experiment with a revolving laser apparatus, which showed that the wavelength of light varies with its direction, and which also registered the fact that the solar system is moving towards the constellation Leo.
But, according to Einstein, it should make no difference if you measured the speed of light on a roller coaster moving at 10 million miles an hour—all reference systems should give exactly the same result.

Einstein went on to create the General Theory of Relativity, in which gravity is regarded as a warp in space.
I have to admit that, as a teenager, I found it hard to understand this explanation, which was apparently proved in the eclipse of 1919 when light rays were shown to bend in the sun’s gravitational field.
But, if light consists of particles as well as waves, I felt, that is what you would expect.
I was gratified to find that Hotson expresses the same doubts.

After that, he moves on to zero-point energy.
When Dirac’s mathematics appeared to reveal an antiparticle called the positron, and it was subsequently detected in the laboratory, he suggested the existence of a great sea of energy pervading empty space—in effect, a sea of ‘shadow electrons’.
Now and then, something boosts the energy of a shadow electron so it becomes real, and leaves a kind of hole in empty space, called a positron.

This also answered the question of why electrons do not lose all their energy and collapse in on the nucleus of the atom.
That basic level is already occupied by this vast sea of energy.

Hotson goes on to cite experiments that seem to show that Einstein was wrong about the speed of light.
In 1921, the physicist Walter von Nernst predicted that light should lose tiny amounts of energy to the ether as it travelled through it.
And, a few years later, Edwin Hubble noticed that light from the most distant stars is redder than that from closer stars.
This ‘red shift’ seemed to show that the stars were moving away at a tremendous speed—the most distant at 13 percent of the speed of light.
It looks as if the universe was exploding.
But, if Nernst was correct, then light loses energy naturally as it travels long distances—particularly through ‘empty space’ that is seething with zero-point energy.
As Hotson remarks, if your mother calls you out of the window, and her voice sounds faint, you do not assume she is travelling away from you: you assume her voice is attenuated by distance or the wind.

So, argues Hotson, the whole notion of the Big Bang becomes unnecessary.
Some of the ‘background hiss’ of microwaves—particularly the higher frequencies—that astronomers believed to be a remnant of the Big Bang can also be explained as a consequence of zero-point energy, which makes a hiss in all microwave receivers; while, in a book called
The Big Bang Never Happened,
Eric Lerner points out that cosmic dust and microfilaments of plasma absorb and retransmit microwaves at a lower frequency.

On these basic assumptions, Hotson goes on to develop a bold theory of ‘virtual quantum reality’, which has something in common with Bohm’s idea of the holographic universe.
Unfortunately, discussing it in detail would take up more space than I have available.

Since Hotson quoted Hal Puthoff as his authority on zero-point energy, and I had corresponded with him back in the days when he was testing Uri Geller, I wrote to Hal to ask for his paper on ZPE.
In reply, he sent me a dozen or so papers and popular articles that made me aware that I had been absurdly ignorant of an important development in modern physics.

Quantum theory led physicists to predict that particles would arise spontaneously in the vacuum, but would disappear before they could violate the uncertainty principle.
This continuous appearance and disappearance of particles explains why the zero-point vacuum is often referred to as zero-point fluctuation.

The papers answered one obvious question: is there any proof that the zero-point energy exists?
The answer is yes.
If two metal plates are placed very close together, some force draws them into contact.
This is because many waves in the zero-point vacuum are the wrong size to fit between the plates, so the radiation pressure outside is greater than inside, and pushes the plates together.
It is known as ‘the Casimir force’.

The physicist Willis Lamb noted another effect of the zero-point energy.
When electrons jump from one orbit to another, it shows up in the frequency lines of the spectrum.
Lamb noted a slight shift in frequency, due to the fact that electrons were ‘jiggled’ slightly in their orbit by zero-point energy (which produces a kind of jitter—or vibration).

In the early 1980s, the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov made the startling suggestion that the ZPE might be the true cause of gravity.
As the two plates are drawn together by the Casimir force, it looks as if they are being pulled by gravity.
In
Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics
(1969), Puthoff writes:

A particle sitting in the sea of electromagnetic zero-point fluctuations develops a ‘jitter’ motion .
.
.
When there are two or more particles, they are each not only influenced by the fluctuating background field, but also by the fields generated by the other particles, all similarly undergoing jitter motion.
The coupling between particles due to these fields produces the attractive gravitational force.

Puthoff went on to develop the mathematics of the notion that not only gravity, but also the force we call inertia, is due to the jitter motion.
Inertia is the tendency of things at rest to remain at rest, and of things in motion to remain in motion.
You experience it if you try to move a heavy table, which takes a great push to get it started.

We take that so much for granted that Galileo was the first to notice it.
But Newton realised that it was a real problem, like gravity.
It is easy to suppose that it is the force of gravity that makes it hard to push a table, but that cannot be so, for if you take a bucket of water, and swing it in an arc above your head, the water will stay in the bucket even though gravity should pull it downward.
This is inertia.

In 1993, Puthoff, together with his colleagues Bernhard Haisch and Alfonso Rueda, produced a paper called ‘Inertia as a zero-point Lorentz force’, arguing that inertia could also be due to zero-point energy, which resists the acceleration of energy through it.
It came to the attention of Arthur C.
Clarke, who used it in his novel
3001
(1997), in which interstellar travel is accomplished by something called the SHARP drive, the letters standing for Sakharov, Haisch, Rueda and Puthoff.
Clarke explains that Puthoff and his colleagues answered the question, ‘What gives an object mass (or inertia) so that it requires an effort to start it moving?’
by saying that both inertia and gravitation are electromagnetic phenomena resulting from interaction with the zero-point-energy field.

One zero-point-energy theorist, Timothy Boyer, has even developed a classical version of zero-point-energy physics, which he calls stochastic electrodynamics (meaning random), and has reproduced many results so far thought to require quantum mechanics, and is steadily adding new ones.
So it looks as if quantum theory is still in a bewildering state of flux, and that anyone who dared to predict where it would go next would be insane.

If we look back to the science of the late nineteenth century, the present state of affairs seems unbelievable.
Who could have foreseen that so much chaos could spring out of Planck’s suggestion that energy might come in packets?
From the perspective of the 1890s, it looked as if science had solved most of the major problems and would soon clear up the few that remained.
Geology had shown that Earth was millions of years old, and the theory of evolution had explained how man came on the scene.
The cathode-ray tube had led to the discovery of X-rays, then of the electron.
Hertz had discovered radio waves and Bell invented the telephone.