“Energy from the vacuum” is a term often used in the context of speculative or fringe physics theories and pseudoscience. It typically refers to the idea of harnessing energy from empty space, also known as the vacuum or the quantum vacuum. This concept is not supported by mainstream physics and is associated with various misconceptions.
In mainstream physics, the vacuum is not empty but is instead filled with quantum fluctuations. These fluctuations give rise to particles and antiparticles spontaneously appearing and annihilating each other in a continuous process. These phenomena are well-described by quantum field theory.
Claims of “energy from the vacuum” often involve ideas such as “zero-point energy” or “vacuum energy.” Zero-point energy is the lowest possible energy that a quantum mechanical physical system may have, even at absolute zero temperature. However, this energy is usually not considered practically accessible or exploitable for energy generation due to the challenges associated with extracting it.
Many devices and theories that claim to tap into “energy from the vacuum” have been proposed over the years, but they generally lack empirical evidence and are not accepted by the scientific community. Claims of perpetual motion machines, free energy devices, and overunity devices often fall into this category.
The universe has the background energy called vacuum energy. This background energy is the result of zero-point field derived from Heisenberg’s energy–time uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics. Both quantum electrodynamics (QED) and stochastic electrodynamics(SED) estimate the vacuum energy of free space to be 10113 joules per cubic meter. However, using the upper limit of the cosmological constant, this is only estimated to be 10−9 joules per cubic meter. This huge discrepancy is known as the cosmological constant problem.
In his paper “ON EXTRACTING ELECTROMAGNETIC ENERGY FROM THE VACUUM,” Thomas E. Bearden wrote:
“Generators and batteries do not furnish any of their internal energy to their external circuit, but only dissipate it internally to perform work on their own internal charges to form a source dipole. Once formed, the dipole’s broken symmetry extracts observable energy from the virtual particle exchange between dipole charges and active vacuum. The extracted observable energy is reradiated as the energy flow through all space surrounding the external circuit. The tiny Poynting fraction intercepted by the surface charges enters the circuit to power it, while the huge nonintercepted Heaviside fraction misses the circuit and is wasted. So electrical loads are powered by energy extracted from the vacuum, not by chemical energy in the battery or shaft energy input to the generator. Any EM system may be asymmetrically regauged freely, changing the energy of the system by changing its potential.
By placing the source dipole in a closed current loop with external loads and losses, half the free excitation energy then discharged by the circuit destroys the source dipole while half powers loads and losses. This applies Lorentz symmetrical regauging so that additional internal generator/battery energy must be made available to dissipate on the internal charges to reform the dipole. Such self-crippling EM power systems exhibit COP < 1.0 a priori. Requirements for COP > 1.0 EM systems are given, as are recognized examples of such processes. We also propose the ubiquitous unaccounted Heaviside energy as the “dark matter” gravitational energy long sought by astrophysicists.”
The New Energy by Thomas E. Bearden
Taming the Fierce Energy of the Vacuum
Clean Energy from the Active Vacuum
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 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 – or into 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. 112,3].
Neither have our great national laboratories, etc., integrated this into 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 taxpayers’ 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 comet 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, and 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. 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 half a 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 into 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.
