Brilliant Disguise: Light, Matter and the Zero-Point Field

Is matter an illusion?

No.

Is the universe floating on a vast sea of light,

Only partly. Virtual photons are not the entire story. All spin 1 & spin
1/2 virtual quanta contribute. This is correctly explained by Lenny
Susskind's book "Cosmic Landscape".

whose invisible power provides the resistance that gives to matter its
feeling of solidity?

No, there is a paper on this in Rev. Mod. Phys. BTW. I will post the
reference later.

Astrophysicist Bernhard Haisch and his colleagues have followed the
equations to some compelling -- and provocative -- conclusions.

by Bernard Haisch


Is matter an illusion? Is the universe floating on a vast sea of light,
whose invisible power provides the resistance that gives to matter its
feeling of solidity? Astrophysicist Bernhard Haisch and his colleagues
have followed the equations to some compelling - and challenging -
conclusions.

"God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light."

It is certainly a beautiful poetic statement. But does it contain any
science? A few years ago I would have dismissed that possibility. As an
astrophysicist, I knew all too well the blatant contradictions between
the sequence of events in Genesis and the physics of the Universe. Even
after substituting eons for days, the order of events was obviously
wrong. It made no sense to have light come first, and then to claim that
the Sun, the moon and the stars - the obvious sources of light in the
night sky of the ancient world - were created only subsequently, be it
days or eons later. One could, of course, generalize light to mean
simply energy, and thus claim a reference to the Big Bang, but that
would, to me, be more of a stretch than a revelation.

My first inkling that the deceptively simple "Let there be light" might
actually contain a profound cosmological truth came in early July 1992.
I was trying to wrap things up in my office in Palo Alto so that I could
spend the rest of the summer doing research on the X-ray emission of
stars at the Max Planck Institute in Garching, Germany. I came in one
morning just before my departure and found a rather peculiar message on
my answering machine; it had been left at 3 a.m.by a usually
sober-minded colleague, Alfonso Rueda, a professor at California State
University in Long Beach. He was so excited by the results of a
horrifically-long mathematical analysis he had been grinding through
that he just had to tell me about it, knowing full well I was not there
to share the thrill.

What he had succeeded in doing was to derive the equation: F=ma. Details
would follow in Germany.

Jack Sarfatti's comment:
[This is simply silly. In the modern POV
F = ma is a NON-GEODESIC equation in curved spacetime.

D^2X^u/ds^2 = F^u/Mc^2 is Newton's second law in Einstein's General
Relativity

D^2/ds^2 is the second order covariant derivative with respect to
invariant proper time. M is the relativistic mass of a test particle in
the curved field. F^u is an external non-gravity force on the test
particle at X^u(P).

D^2X^u/ds^2 = d^2X^u/ds^2 + {^u|vw}(dX^v/ds)(dX^w/ds)

is a first-rank tensor under Diff(4) the base-space symmetry group for
Einstein's 1915 theory of gravity.

Where the symmetric (in v,w) torsion-free Levi-Civita connection field
for parallel transport is {^u|vw}.

The equivalence principle EEP is

{^u|vw} = 0 in an LIF (Local Inertial Frame) at space-time event P

{^u|vw} =/= 0 in an LNIF (Local Non-Inertial Frame) at SAME space-time
event P

"Physics is simple when it is local." Wheeler

Only "local coincidences" matter. Einstein

The reason macroscopic space-time physics is local is because curved
space-time is an emergent c-number effective field theory from the
post-inflationary COHERENT Higgs vacuum field.

If the Planck-scale inflation phase transition degenerate vacuum
manifold G/H has the topology S2 with 2 Goldstone phases theta & phi,
then the Einstein-Cartan 1-form gravitational field has the local
scalar-invariant form, with exterior derivative d

e = 1 + B

B = (hG/c^3)^1/2[(dtheta)(phi) - (theta)(dphi)]

Note the - sign. This is not a closed form because

dA = (hG/c^3)^1/2dB = 2(hG/c^3)(dtheta)/\(dphi)

is the element of area flux density.

With a closed non-bounding S2 in physical space surrounding a point
defect where the Higgs field vanishes, the surface integral of dA is
quantized as 2Lp^2(Wrapping Integer) from the non-trivial second
homotopy of the Planck Higgs vacuum manifold G/H = S2. Curved
space-time is emergent at 10^-33 cm way before the electro-weak field
splits to form the rest masses of quarks and leptons and weakons from a
subsidiary COHERENT Higgs field that branches off this one at 10^-16 cm.

Einstein's 1915 GR comes directly from

guv = eu^InIJev^J

ds^2 = guvdx^udx^v

nIJ is the flat Minkowski metric

eu^I = Iu^I + Bu^I

B = Bu^Idx^udx^v&I

The RANDOM virtual photons DO NOT explain Newton's 2nd law and do not
explain inertia.]

End of Jack Sarfatti's commment


Most people will take this in stride with a "so what?" or "what does
that mean?" After all what are F, m and a, and what is so noteworthy
about a scientist deriving a simple equation? Isn't this what scientists
do for a living? But a physicist will have an incredulous reaction
because you are not supposed to be able to derive the equation F=ma.
That equation was postulated by Newton in his Principia, the foundation
stone of physics, in 1687. A postulate is a law that you assume to be
true, and from which other things follow: such as much of physics, for
example, from that particular postulate. You cannot derive postulates.
How do you prove that one plus one equals two? The answer is, you don't.
You assume that abstract numbers work that way, and then derive other
properties of addition from that basic assumption.

But indeed, as I discovered when I began to write up a research paper
based on what Rueda soon sent to Garching, he had indeed derived
Newton's fundamental "equation of motion." And the concept underlying
this analysis was the existence of a background sea of light known as
the electromagnetic zero-point field of the quantum vacuum.

To understand this zero-point field (for short), consider an
old-fashioned grandfather clock with its pendulum swinging back and
forth. If you don't wind the clock , friction will sooner or later bring
the pendulum to a halt. Now imagine a pendulum that gets smaller and
smaller, so small that it ultimately becomes atomic in size and subject
to the laws of quantum physics. There is a rule in quantum physics
called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that states (with certainty,
as it happens) that no quantum object, such as a microscopic pendulum,
can ever be brought completely to rest. Any microscopic object will
always possess a residual random jiggle thanks to quantum fluctuations.

Radio, television and cellular phones all operate by transmitting or
receiving electromagnetic waves. Visible light is the same thing; it is
just a higher frequency form of electromagnetic waves. At even higher
frequencies, beyond the visible spectrum, you find ultraviolet light,
X-rays and gamma-rays. All are electromagnetic waves which are really
just different frequencies of light.

It is standard in quantum theory to apply the Heisenberg uncertainty
principle to electromagnetic waves, since electric and magnetic fields
flowing through space oscillate like a pendulum. At every possible
frequency there will always be a tiny bit of electromagnetic jiggling
going on. And if you add up all these ceaseless fluctuations, what you
get is a background sea of light whose total energy is enormous: the
zero-point field. The "zero-point" refers to the fact that even though
this energy is huge, it is the lowest possible energy state. All other
energy is over and above the zero-point state. Take any volume of space
and take away everything else - in other words, create a vacuum - and
what you are left with is the zero-point field. We can imagine a true
vacuum, devoid of everything, but the real-world quantum vacuum is
permeated by the zero-point field with its ceaseless electromagnetic waves.

The fact that the zero-point field is the lowest energy state makes it
unobservable. We see things by way of contrast. The eye works by letting
light fall on the otherwise dark retina. But if the eye were filled with
light, there would be no darkness to afford a contrast. The zero-point
field is such a blinding light. Since it is everywhere, inside and
outside of us, permeating every atom in our bodies, we are effectively
blind to it. It blinds us to its presence. The world of light that we do
see is all the rest of the light that is over and above the zero-point
field.

We cannot eliminate the zero-point field from our eyes, but it is
possible to eliminate a little bit of it from the region between two
metal plates. (Technically, this has to do with conditions the
electromagnetic waves must satisfy on the plate boundaries.) A Dutch
physicist, Hendrik Casimir, predicted in 1948 exactly how much of the
zero-point field would end up being excluded in the gap between the
plates, and how this would generates a force, since there is then an
overpressure on the outside of the plates. Casimir predicted the
relation between the gap and the force very precisely. You can, however,
only exclude a tiny fraction of the zero-point field from the gap
between the plates in this way. Counterintuitively, the closer the
plates come together, the more of the zero-point field gets excluded,
but there is a limit to this process because plates are made up of atoms
and you cannot make the gap between the plates smaller than the atoms
that constitute the plates. This Casimir force has now been physically
measured, and the results agree very well with his prediction.

The discovery that my colleague first made in 1992 also has to do with a
force that the zero-point field generates, which takes us back to F=ma,
Newton's famous equation of motion. Newton - and all physicists since -
have assumed that all matter possesses an innate mass, the m in Newton's
equation. The mass of an object is a measure of its inertia, its
resistance to acceleration, the a. The equation of motion, known as
Newton's second law, states that if you apply a force, F, to an object
you will get an acceleration, a - but the more mass, m, the object
possesses, the less acceleration you will get for a given force. In
other words, the force it takes to accelerate a hockey puck to a high
speed will barely budge a car. For any given force, F, if m goes up, a
goes down, and vice versa.

Why is this? What gave matter this property of possessing inertial mass?
Physicists sometimes talk about a concept known as "Mach's Principle"
but all that does is to establish a certain relationship between gravity
and inertia.

mass. In fact, the work that Rueda, I and another colleague, Hal
Puthoff, have since done indicate that mass is, in effect, an illusion.
Matter resists acceleration not because it possesses some innate thing
called mass, but because the zero-point field exerts a force whenever
acceleration takes place. To put it in somewhat metaphysical terms,
there exists a background sea of quantum light filling the universe, and
that light generates a force that opposes acceleration when you push on
any material object. That is why matter seems to be the solid, stable
stuff that we and our world are made of.

Saying this is one thing. Proving it scientifically is another. It took
a year and a half of calculating and writing and thinking, over and over
again, to refine both the ideas themselves and the presentation to the
point of publication in a professional research journal. On an academic
timescale this was actually pretty quick, and we were able to publish in
what is widely regarded as the world's leading physics journal, the
Physical Review, in February 1994. To top it off, Science and Scientific
American ran stories on our new inertia hypothesis. We waited for some
reaction. Would other scientists prove us right or prove us wrong?
Neither happened.

At that point in my career I was already a fairly well-established
scientist, being a principal investigator on NASA research grants,
serving as an associate editor of the Astrophysical Journal, and having
many dozens of publications in the parallel field of astrophysics. In
retrospect, my experience should have warned me that we had ventured
into dangerous theoretical waters, that we were going to be left on our
own to sink or swim. Indeed, I would probably have taken the same
wait-and-see attitude myself had I been on the outside looking in.

An alternative to having other scientists replicate your work and prove
that you are right is to get the same result yourself using a completely
different approach. I wrote a research proposal to NASA and Alfonso
buried himself in new calculations. We got funding and we got results.
In 1998, we published two new papers that again showed that the inertia
of matter could be traced back to the zero-point field. And not only was
the approach in those papers completely different than in the 1994
paper, but the mathematics was simpler while the physics was more
complete: a most desireable combination. What's more, the original
analysis had used Newtonian classical physics; the new analysis used
Einsteinian relativistic physics.

As encouraged as I am, it is still too early to say whether history will
prove us right or wrong. But if we are right, then "Let there be light"
is indeed a very profound statement, as one might expect of its
purported author. The solid, stable world of matter appears to be
sustained at every instant by an underlying sea of quantum light.

But let's take this even one step further. If it is the underlying realm
of light that is the fundamental reality propping up our physical
universe, let us ask ourselves how the universe of space and time would
appear from the perspective of a beam of light. The laws of relativity
are clear on this point. If you could ride a beam of light as an
observer, all of space would shrink to a point, and all of time would
collapse to an instant. In the reference frame of light, there is no
space and time. If we look up at the Andromeda galaxy in the night sky,
we see light that from our point of view took 2 million years to
traverse that vast distance of space. But to a beam of light radiating
from some star in the Andromeda galaxy, the transmission from its point
of origin to our eye was instantaneous.

There must be a deeper meaning in these physical facts, a deeper truth
about the simultaneous interconnection of all things. It beckons us
forward in our search for a better, truer understanding of the nature of
the universe, of the origins of space and time - those "illusions" that
yet feel so real to us.

Bernhard Haisch, staff physicist at the Lockheed Martin Solar &
Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, California, is a scientific editor
of The Astrophysical Journal and editor-in-chief of the Journal of
Scientific Exploration.

http://www.science-spirit.org/current.php