Read an Excerpt

Chapter Three
Searching for the Memory of the Universe

ON THE TRACK OF NATURE’S INFORMATION FIELD

In the beginning of the 20th century the much neglected—but now more and more rediscovered—genius Nikola Tesla, the father of modern communication technologies, spoke of an “original medium” that fills space and compared it to Akasha, the light-carrying ether. In his unpublished 1907 paper “Man’s greatest achievement” he wrote that this original medium, a kind of force field, becomes matter when Prana, cosmic energy, acts on it, and when the action ceases, matter vanishes and returns to Akasha. Since this medium fills all of space, everything that takes place in space can be referred to it. Curved space, said Tesla, which was put forward at the time by Einstein, is not the answer.

However, by the end of the first decade of the 20th century physicists adopted Einstein’s mathematically elaborated four-dimensional curved space-time and, with the exception of a few maverick theoreticians, refused to consider any concept of a space-filling ether, medium, or force field. Tesla’s insight fell into disrepute, and then into oblivion. Today it is revived. Bohm, Puthoff, and a small but growing group of scientists are rediscovering the role of information in nature, and locating nature’s information-field in the quantum vacuum, the much discussed if as yet imperfectly understood virtual energy field that fills all of cosmic space.

WHAT IS THE QUANTUM VACUUM?

A region of space may be free of matter, but it is never free of energy—more exactly, of energy-carrying fields. Matter-free space is filled with a variety of complex fields. They are fields in the quantum vacuum, the energy-sea that extends throughout space. The energies of the vacuum are intrinsically unobservable (although they have observable effects); hence they are called “virtual.” Virtual vacuum energies fluctuate around their zero-point baseline value, present even at the absolute zero of temperature. Consequently they are known as zero-point energies or ZPE, and their field is known as the zero-point field or ZPF.

Even the stability of our planet in its orbit around the Sun derives from vacuum-energy inputs. As the Earth pursues its orbital path it loses momentum, and the gravitational field of the Sun would ultimately overcome the centrifugal force of its momentum and the Earth would spiral into the Sun—just as the moon would spiral into the Earth.

The space-filling quantum vacuum is a superdense sea of energy. Pressure waves propagate through it, traversing the universe from one end to the other. According to German mathematical physicist Hartmut Mueller the observed dimension of all entities, from atoms to astronomical structures, is determined by interaction with density-pressure waves in the vacuum. His “global scaling theory” claims that the universe is dimensionally limited: on the lower end of the dimensional horizons matter- density is the greatest, and on the upper end it is the least. This is due to a pressure-wave that extends throughout space. Because the universe is finite, at the critical dimension-points the waves superpose and create enduring standing waves. The waves determine physical interactions by setting the value of the gravitational, the electromagnetic, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. They are responsible for the distribution of matter throughout the cosmos. By means of resonance they amplify some vibrations and repress others. All processes in the world have an inner rhythm according to their resonance with the vacuum’s standing waves. Mueller concludes that the vacuum is a cosmic ultraweak background that acts as a morphogenetic field.

Recent findings confirm the presence of pressure waves in the vacuum. Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory found a wave generated by the supermassive black hole in the Perseus cluster of galaxies, some 250 million light years from Earth. This vacuum pressure wave translates into the musical note of B flat. This is a real note that has been traveling through the vacuum for the past 2.5 billion years. Our ears cannot perceive it: its frequency is 57 octaves below middle-C—more than a million billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing.

A field that transports light (which are electromagnetic photon-waves), density-pressure waves, and replenishes the energy lost by atoms and solar systems, is not an abstract theoretical entity. No wonder more and more physicists prefer to speak of the quantum vacuum as the “physical vacuum”. . .