New Realities recorded on January 20, 2018
Summary
Host Alan Steinfeld interviews physicist Dr. Hal Puthoff about his pioneering research in zero-point energy and the CIA’s remote viewing program. They discuss the potential of extracting energy from quantum vacuum fluctuations to replace fossil fuels, exploring theoretical physics, general relativity, string theory, and cosmology. Puthoff also examines the profound implications of consciousness and remote viewing, suggesting a deeply interconnected universe where physics and mind might eventually be unified in future scientific paradigms.
Transcript
Alan Steinfeld
Welcome to New Realities. My name is Alan Steinfeld. Coming up is my archival interview with Hal Puthoff. Hal Puthoff is someone who’s been in the news lately with disclosure and To The Stars. And in this interview, he leaves some very interesting hints about his future work. Stay tuned. And now my interview with Hal Puthoff from 2005. This was done in Panama City, Florida. Special thanks to John and Molly Chesher.
Alan Steinfeld
Welcome to New Realities. My name is Alan Steinfeld. On this program, I like to bring together the latest in scientific, spiritual, quantum research. Tonight’s guest is someone who is an expert in all these fields and he is developing now a foundation for using zero point energy as an inexhaustible means of replacing this oil economy and giving the world the energy it needs to live in the 21st century. He’s also one of the originators of the remote viewing program that the CIA used for psychic spying, and that’s a whole field of study as well. So his name is Dr. Hal Puthoff of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin. So you’re the developer of basically these two divergent fields, the remote viewing and then the zero point energy. Is there any way that these two come together?
Hal Puthoff
Well, it’s not clear from a scientific standpoint whether they come together, but there’s at least the possibility that at least in the case of psychokinesis, something like that could be cohering of this so-called vacuum zero-point energy. But it’s not up to a place where we can for certain make a connection.
Alan Steinfeld
So zero-point energy basically is, there’s the vacuum or the void has fluctuations within that that are energetic, they’re vibrations. In a sense the void is not empty. There is no such thing as a vacuum.
Hal Puthoff
That’s right. Originally, physicists thought that empty space was empty, truly empty. But once quantum theory went forward, it was found that it’s a result of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle that there’s always some jitter going on at some deep level. And so it turns out that once quantum theory came along, it was recognized that this is an inherent part of nature. Interesting, at first the enormous energy that was said to be in empty space seemed to be so enormous that physicists thought, well, maybe it’s a mathematical artifact of, we don’t have quantum theory quite right. But then an experiment was done and it was noticed that the light that comes out of, say, hydrogen atoms when they’re excited didn’t quite, the theory of it didn’t quite match the experimental data. Then they took into account the fact that these atoms aren’t sitting in an empty void, they’re sitting in this sort of frothy, bubbly foam of so-called zero-point energy, that that would actually affect their orbits somewhat and then they could match theory and experiment. So the next step was, well, okay, this is real, but it’s not very important, it’s just minor corrections to atomic calculations or something. But then as time went on, it began to be realized that they play more and more of a central role. For example, fluorescent lights, you put electric discharge in it, excites the atoms, and then the atoms emit light. And they emit light by a process called spontaneous emission. Spontaneous emission is sort of like the equivalent of setting a pencil on its point and then it falls over, and in this case the atom is in an excited state and it’s sort of like a pencil on its point and it falls down and emits its energy. And at first it was just considered, I mean Einstein had coefficients for stimulated emission as we have in lasers and for spontaneous emission, and it was considered separate phenomena. We now know, though, that spontaneous emission isn’t so spontaneous. It’s actually brought about by the quantum fluctuations. So the very reason we have fluorescent lights actually depends on the fact that empty space has this underlying quantum energy. When that idea first came out, it was pressed forward in the 80s, there was an immediate test, because it still was sort of skeptically looked at, let’s make a cavity, we’ll put atoms in it, we’ll eliminate the modes so there won’t be any zero point energy in those modes, and in that case the excited atom should stay excited. They built it and it worked. They were able to actually show that if you reduce the vacuum fluctuations at the key frequencies that are going to stimulate this event to occur, they actually don’t occur.
Alan Steinfeld
They don’t occur. So you narrow the gap within these fluctuations. There’s actually some control over the fluctuations. And this is what you’re going for in your research to develop a way of tapping into this energy.
Hal Puthoff
Exactly. The first person to recognize that that might be a possibility was Hendrik Casimir. He was the research director at Phillips Laboratories. And this energy is electromagnetic in part. And so, just like if you go into a shielded room and you can’t hear your cell phone or something, because the room is shielding, similarly, if you could have a region of space that you actually shield, you partially shield these fluctuations and cause there to be a deficit in between. And it turns out that when you do the calculations, that deficit results in the radiation pressure associated with the deficit trying to push the plates apart is not as strong as what’s outside trying to push the plates together. The plates come together, bang, they hit, they create heat. And so there you have some slight conversion of vacuum energy to heat. So that was the first sort of demonstration that it could be tapped, at least in principle.
Alan Steinfeld
And it proved to you that this is a possible unlimited source of energy that with the right kind of details or materials, that you could somehow get to be an unlimited source.
Hal Puthoff
That’s right. When you calculate how much energy is in there in a region of space, Feynman and others have said, well, it’s at least on the order of nuclear energies even in empty space. So it’s a case of trying to find out how to collect the energy.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, how close are you to actually getting to this? Like we talked about earlier, Edison experimented with 1,200 different elements or materials before he got tungsten to create the light bulb. How close are you?
Hal Puthoff
In fact, in our proposals to our investors, we actually use the Edison story to point out, this may take a while. There are four or five techniques in principle whereby we see it might be doable. But we’re still basically, anyone working in this field is still looking for the right engineering setup, the right construction, to do it. It turns out that this effect, in general, you get the most energy at very small levels. So it may require a lot of nano-machining or something. And so, unfortunately, it’s not like a big fire that you can just ignite microscopically.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, are you confident that it will happen, that you will be able to get what you’re going for?
Hal Puthoff
I’m confident that eventually we will. What I’m not confident about is stating a specific timeline. I certainly hope it’s within my lifetime, and I expect it to be within my lifetime.
Alan Steinfeld
Have you had remote viewers look and see what this substance is, or possibly using some of these other areas to kind of tune in?
Hal Puthoff
Actually I have, and although some have volunteered that they’ve looked on their own and they’ve sent me data, but it’s still not specific enough.
Alan Steinfeld
You’re looking for a material, is that what you’re actually looking for?
Hal Puthoff
We’re probably looking more, it’s going to involve materials, it’s also going to involve geometrical shapes. But also, it can actually involve the process. I mean, just to give you an idea, for example, the example I gave with plates coming together, that’s a very mechanical thing. Another case is to make arc discharges, sort of microscopic ball lightning. And there you get a plasma that gets squeezed, and very similar. Another case is setting up bubbles in liquids with sound waves, and then the bubbles collapse, and there’s a possibility that that also would release zero point energy. Schwinger, as a Nobel Prize laureate, wrote a number of papers where he felt that that could be a mechanism that might show up in phenomena known as sonoluminescence. So all these different approaches are wildly different from each other. You’ve got plates, you’ve got electrical discharges, you’ve got bubbles being created in a liquid, others we’ve looked at involve gases.
Alan Steinfeld
So zero point energy vacuum, it’s a medium that things can travel through. The fluctuations are kind of like water or water molecules.
Hal Puthoff
It’s sort of like looking at the electrical or electromagnetic equivalent of the froth at the base of a waterfall. Just a lot of random motion. That’s why generally we don’t notice that it’s there because it’s all random and therefore any effect in any given direction is going to be canceled out by an effect in an opposite direction. Although there is one case where we do notice that this energy is there, and that’s in inertia so-called, where if you’re standing on a train and it takes off with a jerk and you end up flat on your back, what is it that knocked you down? It actually ran into this wall of energy. It’s very similar to if you put your hand in a pool and you go like that, you’ll feel the back pressure in your hand. Similarly, if something tries to accelerate you through this vacuum fluctuation energy, the back pressure that knocks you down in the case of the train is actually this network.
Alan Steinfeld
So the background fluctuations are holding mass in place in the form of inertia. Is that what you’re saying?
Hal Puthoff
You hold it in place unless you apply a force. Or, as it turns out, unlike throwing something through the wind, if you’re just going at a constant velocity, there’s no resistance either. It’s only when something tries to accelerate you. Then there’s a resistance proportional to acceleration, and that’s why you have to apply a force proportional to acceleration, F=MA, to accelerate, because you’re trying to beat against a resistance force which is proportional to acceleration.
Alan Steinfeld
So yeah, I think I follow that pretty much, but it’s sort of like there’s this medium that things exist in, but it’s not quite this dimension of existence, because it exists within a void space. How does it apply to non-locality where let’s say a photon here is affecting another photon there and they say that instantaneously happens, does that have to do with this medium of the quantum fluctuations?
Hal Puthoff
There is a connection, and that is that this vacuum fluctuation energy, which I’m concentrating on the electromagnetic part, actually there are other parts also, have all wavelengths and frequencies. So that means that not only is it wavelengths of a few centimeters or something, but there are wavelengths that are as big as the universe. So in that sense, we are not just figuratively or metaphorically, but we are literally in touch across the universe, because our atoms are bathed in this sea of energy that includes all these wavelengths, some of whose wavelengths stretch out across the solar system or whatever. But the thing you mentioned about this quantum correlation and non-locality is possibly somewhat different, we haven’t actually been able to pin down. The chauvinists, CPE chauvinists among us think there is a direct connection, but as far as the scientific community goes, that’s yet to be shown whether those are similar or different phenomena. And that has to do with the fact that there’s a small school of people who think that you might explain much of quantum theory just by taking into account the effects of the vacuum fluctuations. And vacuum fluctuation theory, zero-point energy theory, has been used to derive a lot of results that you would think you needed quantum theory for, but actually you can get it by this path. So the question is, well, can you get everything in quantum theory by this path? For example, non-locality. This is still a relatively new area, pushing into those areas, so we don’t know the answer.
Alan Steinfeld
And the whole space-time thing where you talked about contracting space in front of a ship and then having it travel at warp speed, that has to do with this background fluctuation.
Hal Puthoff
That’s right, changing the density, or as we say, changing the polarizability of the vacuum is another way of looking at it.
Alan Steinfeld
So you’re accelerating through the vacuum. Because when you say you’re accelerating within this quantum fluctuation, it has an effect on that background field, right?
Hal Puthoff
That is certainly the case, because it’s essentially pushing aside the vacuum fluctuations to some degree, and that’s what’s causing the resistance that we call inertia. But again, for example, in the case of the Casimir plates, just a simple example, you’ve got a depleted area of zero point energy here, so you’ve actually got forces that will push you in that direction, down into this depleted region.
Alan Steinfeld
So how would you actually contract space-time to do that? I mean, what kind of an effect could you put out there to have that?
Hal Puthoff
Well we know from switching over to the general relativity side of it that you can look at the equations, whether you’re using standard general relativity or some of the other approaches to general relativistic type effects, and very strong fields, strong masses, I mean the mass of the earth affects the space around it, which thinking in terms of zero point energies, is affecting the distribution of zero point energy. So if you go to that equation F=MA, where the mass times the acceleration equals force, if you create a force, you can generate a mass that would have an effect on space-time. You might generate a force that would move a mass and start to accelerate it, or I mean what you’d really like to do is just scoop out the energy in front of us, and the energy behind us would just shoot us forward. So manipulating the density or the vacuum polarizability or space-time metric, all those words have a relationship with each other, that would be the way to do it.
Alan Steinfeld
And that’s possible. That’s not just a Star Trek concept, but you’ve seen…
Hal Puthoff
No, we know I mean, small effects. All of general relativity, for example, is based on these principles. And we can calculate well gee, if only we had so much energy, then we could make this big effect, we could power a spaceship and so on. It’s just that we don’t have the engineering tools to do it right now. And frankly, those of us who are working on it think there’s still something missing in the theory because it’s so hard to do. We don’t see that it could ever really be done. And yet, maybe there’s some evidence that there are spaceships out there that don’t belong to us, but somebody else. Well, in that case, they must have gotten around it. So there may be some unexpected factor that could suddenly cause a resonance to occur where with a lot less energy you could get a big effect. And that usually happens in science that they back into a solution instead of…
Alan Steinfeld
Right. And usually it’s even by accident. In fact, even though we think we’re smart enough that we should figure this out, we have something we call the Maverick Inventor Program.
Hal Puthoff
And the idea of our Maverick Inventor Program is that as smart as we think we are, maybe some guy in the garage who’s half crazy, who stumbles across something, nobody will pay any attention to him. He doesn’t have good instruments because he doesn’t have enough money to buy them, so his measurements are all messed up. But nonetheless, he may actually stumble on something. So who’s going to pay attention to him? The academics aren’t, the corporations aren’t. So we have our Maverick Inventor program where we put out the word on the internet and elsewhere saying, you know, if you think you have beat the system, if you think you’ve come up with a novel energy source or a propulsion source, bring it to our laboratory and we’ll investigate it. And so we’ve investigated many things brought to us. They all go up on the website so great, gory detail, you can see what we’ve learned.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, you know what I thought, and you could use this if you want, is that somehow inert gas represents a kind of boundary to this dimensional space. I mean, with the electrons filling up certain shells, so there might be some kind of way to get beyond that boundary that inert gases represent in order to access some of this…
Hal Puthoff
Well, it turns out that some of our best experiments that actually have shown what we would call over-unity energy generation have involved striking spark discharges in noble gases. And as a result, we’ve actually seen some evidence for energy generation or energy conversion. That was the good news. The bad news is was it was at the nano-watt level and the devices were immediately corroded and didn’t last. And then all attempts to scale up those particular devices, it turned out that the losses scaled up faster than the good effect. So even though we have something like seven patents that have been covered, have been patented and the patent office bought off on our claim, which was these were devices to convert vacuum fluctuation energy into some other form. But nonetheless, we haven’t actually come up with the right connection yet.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, philosophically speaking, if we can just kind of relax a little bit into that, if let’s say we do come up with this source, that we tap the void, the free energy that’s out there, doesn’t that change the whole social psychology of society that says, yes, there is a free lunch. I mean, won’t it have huge ramifications sociologically?
Hal Puthoff
Oh, it’ll have actually a lot of ramifications, sociologically, psychologically. For example, from the geopolitical standpoint, when you have an oil economy, you’re tied to the geopolitical sources. This energy, which is everywhere, is in that sense more democratic, because it doesn’t matter where you are, you could in principle tap it. It also could in the long run, as people really soak into their philosophies, affect things in a way I’ve thought of, and that is, our entire physics structure is hierarchical. We have the sun, it provides energy to the earth, it grows the plants. We obviously have a hierarchy of where we as beings and individuals get our energy from. On the other hand, this is not a hierarchical process. It’s a broad scale process. And so it’s like really a conversion from a hierarchical attitude toward a whatever you would call it.
Alan Steinfeld
Everybody has access. Right. Because isn’t science always sought nature as an ally? Isn’t that the basis of science is to kind of make our life here more comfortable and to make…
Hal Puthoff
Yes, and it goes through phases where nature is an enemy to be conquered, and then nature is something to be accommodated to and interacted with. And generally speaking, well, we see it going both ways, obviously we have appliances that make drudgery in life easier and then we have hydrogen bombs.
Alan Steinfeld
Same as fire.
Hal Puthoff
Exactly. So similarly, I look on zero-point energy as being like those. They’re a tool, but in the end, it’s what people do with it that counts. And unfortunately it would appear that our sociological and ethical levels are barely, if at all, keeping up with our technological progress.
Alan Steinfeld
Well maybe that’s what consciousness itself is waiting for to have this invention or this discovery to really be implemented on the planet. The ethics need to mature to match.
Hal Puthoff
Have enough of a challenge to say, okay, we’re going to really have to get our act together, we’re not going to handle this.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. I mean, was Tesla onto anything because he, you know, the story is that he said you could stick one of his lightning rods in the ground and get energy. Is there any truth to any of the Tesla devices?
Hal Puthoff
Well certainly Tesla was a genius, there’s no doubt about that. I mean, it’s still hard for electrical engineers to go through school to really get their mind around how some of his complex AC machinery operated. I mean, there’s no doubt he’s a genius. And he also had a strong intuitive feeling, that he stated in a number of his papers where he’d write philosophy basically. And this was before quantum theory, he made the statement which I can’t quite remember the exact quote, but he said he felt that space was full of energy. If it was static, it wouldn’t do us any good, but if it was dynamic, we would yoke man’s inventions to the wheelwork of nature or something like that. And of course now that we know that zero point energy, vacuum fluctuation energy is dynamic, it does fill all of space. If you look back and say, well his intuition was right, although he didn’t have the details down. Now as far as the stories of the various devices he made, some of them like his attempt to generate energy with his antennas that would then propagate around the world, it makes some sense, but it’s not clear that it really would have worked the way he thought. There are some more urban myth kinds of things that, well, he built one of these free energy generators and ran a car, but no one’s been able to really pin down, that’s not in his patents, no one has really, it’s basically anecdotal stories. So it’s hard to know just how far… I mean, you’re looking at a genius, he comes up with things you don’t come up with, and a lot more, and then you say, well, since these are true, should I believe those? And it’s just hard to evaluate until we can cover the same track. But there are a lot of people interested in Tesla.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, the same thing could be true of Newton who, you know, after developing his laws of thermodynamics, studied alchemy for the rest of his life and maybe he was onto something or maybe he was crazy.
Hal Puthoff
Yeah, maybe that’s right.
Alan Steinfeld
But, you know, in reading some of the materials, there’s something called the cosmological constant, where the relationship of the electron is somehow related to the size of the universe?
Hal Puthoff
Yes, some of the zero-point energy modeling that I and my colleagues have studied and we did come up with some ways of relating the size of the universe to the quote classical size of an electron. And that relationship comes out of zero point energy modeling. So we’re pursuing things like that. In that sense zero point energy modeling at the intense level we’re pushing it is like trying to get a step deeper than the usual equations and usual effects. So some of it still needs to mature before we’re sure we’re on to something but…
Alan Steinfeld
I mean could the universe itself be an electron in some greater vaster unfathomable…
Hal Puthoff
Well, it has been talked about the fact that the universe, when you look at the numbers associated with it, could itself be a black hole. We might be in a black hole.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah.
Hal Puthoff
And who knows how many others there are out there. Actually, this idea that you just mentioned about well, couldn’t we be like the small component in a much larger, there are a lot of serious theoretical work going on now by cosmologists about the possibility that our whole universe is just one of many universes. Linde at Stanford, this Russian who is now there at Stanford, is one of the most respected cosmologists. He has the opinion that, well, this universe got spawned. There’s no reason why another one couldn’t. And today is no better than yesterday. So maybe it’s like a fractal tree and universes are being spawned all over the place on a continuing basis. We just happen not to be connecting up with them. But then even that theory has gone a step further where now people are talking about maybe sometimes these universes run into each other and then you have a big release of energy and maybe that’s behind some of these mini Big Bangs or Quasars or whatever. So these days, cosmology and astrophysics is outstripping science fiction so fast you can hardly keep up with it. And theories are proliferating, and in the old days if you had a wild theory, it might be shunned. But these days the data is coming in so fast and we have so many inexplicable phenomena going on that basically it’s okay in physics now to have really wild theories that you’re going to try to check against the data.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, what’s one of your favorite inexplicable theories? What do you really are drawn to?
Hal Puthoff
Well, where the energy from quasars comes from or gamma ray bursters. There are humongous amounts of energy. There was a gamma ray burster just a few years ago that basically as far as we can tell, released more energy second only to the Big Bang so called. And so accounting for that is difficult. And there are actually a number of papers that have been published on the idea that maybe it was, in fact there are papers called Casimir Collapse of Supernova, indicating that maybe some vacuum energy is being released in some of these phenomena.
Alan Steinfeld
Well obviously more that we don’t know than we do know. It’s always been like that.
Hal Puthoff
I mean, now it’s really getting down to the embarrassing point where we recognize that 4% of the universe we can account for, and the other 96% is in dark matter and dark energy and we don’t know what either of them are.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, and string theory and interdimensional and multi-dimensional.
Hal Puthoff
Yeah, it just goes on and on.
Alan Steinfeld
So I mean there could be something behind the zero point vacuum energy. I mean what it seems like in some of the other literature, maybe some of the metaphysical literature, is there’s a grid that then gets coherent that lines up the quantum fluctuations. Do you have any evidence of some kind of other dimensional type grid that’s behind the fluctuations?
Hal Puthoff
In my case, I happen to have done a particular calculation and published it actually in Physical Review A, where I took a different tack, and that is, you got all these charged particles, all these atoms, electrons, and so on. They’re all jiggling around in the zero point energy sea and radiating away. And then any given atom is caught in the radiation pattern of all the other jiggling particles. So I did a cosmological calculation and found that it appeared to be the electromagnetic equivalent of putting a speaker by a microphone and getting a squeal. Particles are all radiating, causing the other particles to jiggle, and then they’re jiggling as a feedback mechanism causing them to radiate to cause the first particle. And so this thing is like a self-perpetuating mechanism. And it turns out that the frequency distribution of zero point energy is goes as the frequency cubed, frequency the third power. So there’s more and more energy in the higher and higher frequencies. And this particular calculation predicted that cubic frequency distribution. So in my modeling, I don’t need any extra dimensions. But I know there are other people who consider that maybe zero-point energy is something pouring in from another dimension. It just happens not to be the tack I’m taking.
Alan Steinfeld
Well there’s something behind it. There’s another more subtle layer. Let’s say there is this foam that exists and then something is generating that.
Hal Puthoff
Well, actually, this is an area that I and my colleagues at the Institute for Advanced Studies are looking at right now, because even when you say, okay, I’ve got zero point energy, and say, well, what exactly is that? Well, it’s electromagnetic. Well, what do you mean it’s electromagnetic? Well, it’s got electric and magnetic fields. waves..okay, well what is an electric field? A wave in what? And so in some sense, unless you just want to draw the line and say mathematically it works and I’m not going to worry about it, there are still the questions, well, obviously there’s something even deeper than that, because we’re not describing what the zero-point energy electromagnetic waves are waves of.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, exactly. And what I’m starting to get to is this whole idea of consciousness. You’re saying that you can’t really shield, or you’ve been able to shield some of the zero-point energy field, but you couldn’t shield it from a remote viewer. So consciousness somehow is traveling in some medium or part of some non-local aspect that’s even beyond these fluctuations.
Hal Puthoff
That certainly has got to be the case. These fluctuations are handled by normal physics, they appear in the textbooks and so on. But no one has a model for how something like remote viewing could really work. So obviously there’s a lot more going on even beyond what we can model.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, but there probably is a science or there’s some maybe more subtle medium in which consciousness can travel.
Hal Puthoff
It’d be reasonable. I assume if it walks, it’s physics. So if it travels even spiritually, it’s physics. It’s interesting that ages ago, religion was the big thing. And then at a certain point in our development, we carved out a piece of religion and called it philosophy. And then we carved out a piece of philosophy and called it natural science. And in that transition, I’ve always marveled at the fact that what was alchemy then became chemistry. What was astrology became astronomy. What was metaphysics became physics. This always gets the goat of my psychology friends: what was demonology became psychology. And that process was a process whereby we were trying to get rid of the subjective element, make it totally objective. Unfortunately, in that process, we somewhat threw out the baby with the bathwater. But I think it was a necessary step to go through to get the subjective element out. But now that science has gotten its legs and is somewhat strong, it’s beginning to reincorporate some of this stuff. So for example, we had astrology saying things depend on the stars. And then we had chemistry where there’s no subjective factors. Now it’s been recognized pretty much by scientists who are open-minded that there is a so-called Mars effect, that people born under the sign of Mars happen to fill up the books for athletes. Similarly, numerology then became mathematics, so the magic of numbers kind of went away. But now that we have really advanced mathematics, we’re beginning to realize that principles like supersymmetry are kind of saying there is a magical aspect to mathematics. And similarly, I can go from alchemy to chemistry.
Alan Steinfeld
But even quantum theory says the observer is maybe the center that affects everything around it. So just by having the observer affect something means that consciousness is sort of a center point of the universe. Each individual consciousness, let’s say, is at the center of totality. That’s how I see it.
Hal Puthoff
Well, certainly some physicists have really pressed that point home. Eugene Wigner has especially pressed that point that really, as long as we’re leaving consciousness out, we’re making a mistake, and consciousness is somehow involved in the observation process. And certainly, from a physics standpoint, any measurement which yields information to an individual obviously somewhere along the line had consciousness involved. So it’s a case of just how much was it involved? John Wheeler, who is one of the icons of physics, has made a big issue out of that it’s a participatory universe is his phrase, rather than just a remote observer.
Alan Steinfeld
Well if it is participatory, then we have an effect on the quantum fluctuations. Wasn’t your initial going into the remote viewing field based on a quantum understanding?
Hal Puthoff
Right. I was interested in whether quantum physics could be extended to account for living processes. And at that time there were some ideas floating around. And so that is what got me started looking at consciousness issues and doing that experiment that ended up with the government showing up at my doorstep.
Alan Steinfeld
But you also told a great story about how you started to investigate levitation.
Hal Puthoff
Oh yeah, well that was later on when we were looking at the literature about so-called psychokinesis. And in fact, we weren’t getting any in the lab really. We did get some magnetometer experiments.
Alan Steinfeld
With mental projection,
Hal Puthoff
Basically someone sat there and we had a sensitive magnetometer or gradiometer actually. And on a random schedule that was spit out by a random number generator, the person had to make something happen on it or not. And we got statistically significant evidence. But they’re always really small-scale effects. So that’s when I did think of, well, we have a literature where people are claiming that we have levitating saints or whatever. So I decided to look in the literature. I wanted to see the descriptions of these phenomena to see if there’s some physics there we could learn. And I must admit, I started out skeptically. This is probably maybe the church bragging about their magical people or whatever. But when you actually go into the records, it turns out it wasn’t that way at all. It turned out that somebody out in the boondocks was levitating, and it might be a very profane person. And so in fact, at the time, the church went out to debunk it. Well there’s a person apparently floating, so you can’t say it’s not happening. So the next line of defense was to take very careful notes to show that there were certain subtleties and nuances that meant this was diabolically inspired, not God-inspired. And in those notes, a physicist recognizes descriptions of general relativistic kind of phenomena.
Alan Steinfeld
Like What?
Hal Puthoff
For example, the person might rise vertically and then swing horizontally. By the model of the day, which is some invisible demon had picked the person up, you’d still expect the hair to hang down and the dress to hang down. But in fact, the hair would hang down parallel to the body and the dress would hang down parallel to the body, as if they were in a space warp. And if somebody else got too close, they could get caught up in it.
Alan Steinfeld
Someone got too close to their field, they could get also levitated? And that’s in the literature as well. And you wouldn’t expect that.
Hal Puthoff
You wouldn’t expect that, especially by the priests.There are other more subtle things. For example, it was described that the people’s faces would glow like molten metal. And you say, well, that’s strange. But it turns out that, you’ve probably heard the term red shift. Heavy gravitational stars and so on, the light comes, it’s red shifted. Well, in an anti-gravity condition or a levitation condition, it would go the other way and you’d get a blue shift. So you could easily imagine that, okay, if somebody is in a levitated state, then the heat spectrum that you don’t ordinarily see might blue shift up into the lower part of the visible spectrum, and you would look like you were glowing. And so there are little subtleties like that. And I look at it and say, well they didn’t know about general relativity, so they didn’t know how to make this up.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. So what do you think they were doing to get to those states internally?
Hal Puthoff
Well, the only thing I could imagine is that they were affecting the space-time continuum. And that probably means, where’s the energy to do that with? Well, the vacuum fluctuation energy is there, so they must be cohering the vacuum fluctuation energy. And so actually, it was because of that that I started looking at a vacuum fluctuation model for gravity and then eventually inertia. So some of that was actually inspired by saying, okay, well they must have cohered the vacuum fluctuation energy, so it must be that gravity is somehow a redistribution of vacuum fluctuation energy. And then I found out that in fact Sakharov, famous Russian physicist, dissident and so on, was actually the first to come up with the idea that, okay, we’ve got general relativity, we’ve got Einstein’s equations, that’s all fine. But where do these equations come from? They just say if you have mass here or energy here, space gets warped here. But this is just a mathematical equivalence. Where does it come from? What’s it due to? And so he took it a level deeper, and he came to the conclusion that it was in fact a redistribution of vacuum energy.
Alan Steinfeld
So if someone has the ability to mentally cohere the vacuum fluctuations, then they could levitate.
Hal Puthoff
I would think that that would be the case. So I keep waiting for somebody to show up who can do that, because I have a whole list of experiments.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, you said Ingo Swann affected the quark-receptive…
Hal Puthoff
It’s hard to pin down exactly what mechanism was going on. He was affecting a very sensitive magnetic device. To test out the zero-point energy theory, I’d need something a little more robust, I think.
Alan Steinfeld
But have you been able to measure, I mean you said you couldn’t move these magnetometers, but has there been any measurements of the psychokinetic energy coming off of people?
Hal Puthoff
Not really. I mean people have claimed to make some measurements. Sometimes, I know in another laboratory where people would psychokinetically cause a magnetic needle to rotate. Then they would leave, and it was found that if you put a new compass in there, it would rotate. So the structure of the space was somehow restructured to some degree, and it only faded over hours. Now I’d like to get in there. If we had really good devices for measuring zero-point energy and had a long enough time, it’d be possible to make those measurements. But no one has done it.
Alan Steinfeld
But this whole idea of consciousness that somehow is beyond the zero-point energy field and also maybe beyond space and time like you’ve done in some of the remote viewing experiments, sort of implies that we have some key within us to controlling reality and the fluctuations.
Hal Puthoff
Certainly what we saw in the remote viewing was that people could do things that as physicists we couldn’t explain. Especially the future viewing, viewing of future events. I mean that really wipes out most theoretical modeling. Even models that involve the possibility of forward and backward propagation of light waves still can’t handle somebody describing an event that takes place in a week or something.
Alan Steinfeld
How would you, let’s say if you were to hypothesize, how would you in physics terms or maybe some far-out physics, explain it?
Hal Puthoff
Well, one depressing way to explain it is that it’s all cast in concrete from here to infinity or whatever. And we’re just marching through the slideshow frame by frame. Everything, there is no such thing as free will. It’s all cast, and somehow somebody finds some tricky way to jump ahead a few frames and see what’s happening. That would imply that we don’t have free will. You can get into sophisticated arguments where you can actually make all those things kind of work out, but it’s a tough row to hoe.
Alan Steinfeld
Well what about the idea, but they weren’t always right about forecasting the future. And this whole idea about parallel universes or each moment there’s a split in the possible futures that can happen from this moment on depends which path we take.
Hal Puthoff
In fact, to show how sci-fi physics has become, there is a serious theory, by serious I mean it’s published and no one can hit holes in it, called the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum theory, which says that at every instant, of all the quantum possibilities, everything that could happen does happen. And so there’s a you that just said this to me, but at some quantum level there was a you that decided not to say that, to say something else, and he’s going off. But it’s just so seemingly absurd from the usual viewpoint. I don’t think any physicist really believes that all possibilities are in fact unwinding into the future.
Alan Steinfeld
But they’ve been able to mathematically prove that that’s possible.
Hal Puthoff
Well, they’ve been able to mathematically prove that if you have that physics set up, with that understanding, it doesn’t violate anything we observe because it just turns out we’re following one of the tracks. So it’s like a theory you can’t disprove. I don’t think anybody has thought of a way of proving it unless you can actually get access to alternate realities, but I’d have to say no physicist really deeply believes that that’s what’s going on. They use it mathematically. Although, some advise it, but it’s in the books, and when anyone lists various approaches to quantum theory, that gets listed because it can’t be disproven.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, so you in your thinking though have been through many levels of openness. I mean you came to remote viewing thinking that it wasn’t possible and you expanded.
Hal Puthoff
Not only did I come to remote viewing thinking it wasn’t possible, 13 years into the program every time I went in to do a session with a remote viewer, I would ask myself, ‘How can I be doing this? Why am I here? This can’t possibly work.’ I had all the same resistances bubbling up, and then there’d be some spectacular result, and I’d say, ‘Well, I’ve got to face it.’
Alan Steinfeld
So we do have to re-evaluate our whole understanding of consciousness physics. I bet you yourself even remote viewed, right? I mean you were also a subject.
Hal Puthoff
No actually, one of the conditions of the program with the government funding, actually from people at CIA who started the program, was: ‘We learned from the LSD days, the experimenters should not get involved in their experiments. So we will let you have this remote viewing program on one condition, and that is you never, never, never yourself remote view.’ So looking forward to polygraphs and so on, we had to be careful. So we didn’t.
Alan Steinfeld
But now that you’re out of the program, have you tried it?
Hal Puthoff
Well occasionally for fun,
Alan Steinfeld
But there is something to it. I mean, I’ve tried it, and you do get images flooding into your mind, and it’s coming from somewhere.
Hal Puthoff
Well certainly as we saw, even when you’ve got a remote viewer, you’ve got an interviewer, and you have some target, you don’t know what it is. And the person comes up with something that he knows just can’t be right. They both try to get rid of this image, start from scratch. It still keeps coming in, so finally they give up and put it down. And it turns out to be correct. So obviously, the information is there and it has a certain robustness that you can’t just discount.
Alan Steinfeld
So taking it all together, the quantum fluctuations, the remote viewing, I mean there probably will be a place where they converge in the sense that consciousness is somehow a key element in all these phenomena, you know?
Hal Puthoff
Yeah, I mean, as I say, as a physics chauvinist, okay, I’ve got the physics I know, I’ve got some advanced physics that we’re pushing, I’ve got this island of remote viewing, I’ve got this island of consciousness. I know they all go together because they’re all pieces of the universe. And really if we had truly the physics of the universe, then everything would be in there. So the fact that everything isn’t in there, we know we’ve got a lot of work to do. But I make myself feel better by realizing that there’s going to be a 26th-century physics, and a 32nd-century physics. And whatever that physics is, they’re going to look back at 21st-century physics and say, ‘Oh, how could they believe that stuff? It was so limited, it was so primitive.’ So clearly as time goes on, we’re going to get there. We’re already getting little snippets of connections between these things, but we really have a lot of work to do. I have to say nothing makes you more humble than being a physicist facing the realities, and you realize you can’t stitch them all together yet.
Alan Steinfeld
But you have an open mind, which is the best thing about you in a sense to keep an open mind.
Hal Puthoff
Keep an open mind, but hope my brains don’t fall out.
Alan Steinfeld
It’s too open. No, but your work is connecting these dots in a particular direction.
Hal Puthoff
Yeah, that seems to be my destiny in life. On the physics stuff, I’m on the edge of it. Obviously in the remote viewing we’re on the edge of consciousness things. And some people just sort of have a makeup that if it isn’t out on the edge, it’s boring, and so I happen to be one of those people. But there are more and more these days.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, it’s great. It means we’re in a more open society where more breakthroughs will happen.
Hal Puthoff
That’s right. And also even just one thing that does feed it is our technological progress, which is opening up things faster than we can account for. I mean, if something comes down the pipe one day at a time, you can kind of incorporate it and say, okay, that’s fine. But now stuff, with our super telescopes, Hubble, whatever, that can let us look back in time and edge of the universe that we can see. And the microscopes they’re looking at the quantum phenomena where we can now make lasers out of single atoms. I mean this stuff just goes on and on. And so the stuff is coming in in such a firehose that any physicist realizes that, you know, we’re not able to integrate all this stuff. We really have a long way to go. There’s a lot of data, now we’re in data overload to try to pull it all together. But on the other hand, that’s the fun of it.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, that’s the exciting times we live in. So I mean thank you for all your hard work and intelligence and passion you’re bringing to the field of physics.
Hal Puthoff
Thank you. I actually get paid to do this for a living, so I’m a really lucky guy.
Alan Steinfeld
We need new ideas. It’ll be phenomenal the day you say, ‘Yes, we got the answer to how to tap into the zero-point energy field.’
Hal Puthoff
Yeah, recently I was on a DOD panel in January of this year where we were tasked with looking at how do we accelerate movement from a fossil fuel economy to a hydrogen economy. And so I got to spend one afternoon presenting what we call the wild card scenario. That is, suppose tomorrow we suddenly discovered zero-point energy as a source. And so we had to sort of wargame, well, how would we handle this? What would we do? How would we announce it? Who would be in charge? You know, would this be primarily government-driven? Would it be primarily corporate-driven? I mean, these are really complicated issues. And they had a magnificent computer integration system where all these ideas went into this elaborate expert system, and it was trying to come up with an optimum path for how you deal with this. So yeah, it could be a big event.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, it could be Nobel Prize material. But as a humanist you also have a perspective, it would probably do something to religion, I would think, the belief system in a God or these heavy belief systems.
Hal Puthoff
Well, certainly to find that we’re all interconnected, we’re all part of a fabric of space-time energy, it’d be harder and harder for an individual to maintain that he was an isolated unit. And so the more and more we find that we are connected into the cosmos as a whole, finally, in my way of thinking, it would finally come down that we would end up finally with a unified view in which energy and information and process and dynamics were all an integrated whole. So it would affect all our philosophical, religious views and our economic developments as well.
Alan Steinfeld
A whole new world. Did you have a question, John?
John
One question. String theory, I bring that up because underlining that, you’re assuming an 11-direction dimension based on a mathematical construct. Do you feel that’s a rational way to go, or is that artificial? Should we be searching for other dimensions? If so, how in the world can we deal with them?
Hal Puthoff
Well, string theory is an interesting challenge and it has made the headway it’s made because the mathematics that have been developed to look at, well what would it be like if we had an 11-dimensional universe or whatever, have predicted some unifying aspects of electromagnetism and gravity and so on, even accounting for particle structures and so on. So on the one hand, as a mathematical tool, it keeps kind of spitting out some things that we know are true and hadn’t really thought of how to account for before. So it’s like you can’t exactly say, well I’m just not going to bother thinking about that. On the other hand, it’s also, one of the disasters of string theory is that it doesn’t look like there’s any way to actually do an experiment to prove whether or not strings, the string theory way in 11 dimensions, is a way to go anytime soon. And so that means you can really run amok with mathematics and maybe not get anywhere, but it wouldn’t be possible to tell if you were getting somewhere, whereas most theory you can sort of go out and test it. On the other hand, there are certain implications of it that say, well there are some experiments that maybe we could accomplish something in the lab. So one specific prediction of some of these multidimensional theories is that Newton’s inverse square law… when you think about where does an inverse square law come from? It comes from the fact that if you got a sphere here, and you imagine lines of energy or gravitational field coming out, as you go to bigger and bigger and bigger spheres, the area grows as the square of the radius. And therefore the density of lines coming out through is going to drop as the square. Then you say, okay, but suppose I had not this two-dimensional sphere, suppose I had a three-dimensional sphere expanding in a four-dimensional space or whatever. Well then it turns out you wouldn’t get an inverse square law, you’d get something else, you’d get an inverse cube law, if you had access to another dimension. So people are actually going to the trouble to do experiments in laboratories. They’ll say, okay well, let’s measure Newton’s law at micron distances, millimeter distances, micron distances, and if in fact these other dimensions are there, when we get down to distances small enough, if they’re not too far away, or maybe they’re kind of big, we could actually see an experimental result where we have a deviation from the inverse square law at very tiny distances. So that’s how we approach checking some of this stuff. On string theory per se, I don’t know, it looks to me like a mathematics that yet hasn’t, you know, there’s always the hope that somebody’s going to find the real key so you can calculate, you know, we have these particles, electrons a certain size, a certain amount of charge, here’s a proton, here’s some quarks, they’ve got some different charges and masses, and you say okay, if you’re so smart, you’ve got a theory, why don’t you predict all these? Well, we can’t predict a single one. We don’t have a theory that yet necessarily looks like it’s going to be successful in predicting it. And now they’re into quantum theory where things are jiggling around anyway, you begin to worry whether it’s even possible in principle that could ever predict something very accurately.
Alan Steinfeld
Or whether there’s any mass at all but just charge. Isn’t there that whole theory there’s only charge and fields?
Hal Puthoff
In fact, my colleague at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Michael Ibison, is specifically working on a model of massless charge, where it’s just charge and fields. And then mass, the appearance of mass comes out at a higher level as just a consequence of the fact that mass does not exist as a fundamental thing, but only as kind of a byproduct.
Alan Steinfeld
Getting into the Hindu thing that this is all illusion, and this is just forces anyway. What they say.
Hal Puthoff
Well, even some of the so-called aether physicists of the 1800s had come to the conclusion that there is only one thing. It’s sort of like water in the bathtub. You’ve got waves that go back and forth, you’ve got vortexes that go down the drain, but it’s all made of water. And there’s nothing other than water. So…
Alan Steinfeld
Is that true? Is it in your research, is that possible that it’s all just made out of one thing?
Hal Puthoff
I wouldn’t reject it, and I tend to have a sort of subjective leaning in that direction. But whether it’s true or not, I don’t know. We have to get to that point and see. These days, almost no matter what you would say to a physicist, he’s got to say, it’s a possibility, because physics is just expanding like that.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, thank you so much, all the work and intelligence and passion you bring to the field of physics.
Hal Puthoff
Thank you. Thanks a lot.
Alan Steinfeld
I’ve been talking to Hal Puthoff, who was one of the founders of the remote viewing program that the CIA used. He’s investigating the access of zero-point energy and quantum fluctuations to power the planet, I would think.
Hal Puthoff
Hopefully, hopefully someday.
Alan Steinfeld
What’s your website, do you want to just give your website if you care to?
Hal Puthoff
www.earthtech.org, EarthTech is one word, e-a-r-t-h-t-e-c-h.
Alan Steinfeld
Thanks, did we cover everything?
Hal Puthoff
I think we did and even more.
Alan Steinfeld
This is New Realities, I’m Alan Steinfeld, thank you for watching and I’ll see you next time. I’m looking to get a new interview with Hal Puthoff this year, so stay tuned for that. Thanks for listening, goodnight.