ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

100 The Hunt for Zero Point
"This is it," he told me, gesturing to the modest office he shared with
another NASA official whose head was just visible on the other side of the
screen that set the boundaries of Millis' work space. It had taken some
hard negotiating after Huntsville, but I had managed to secure a visit to
the Glenn Research Center, NASA's "center of excellence for aeropropulsion
research and technology," on my way to Washington, where
I was due to conduct some interviews for the magazine before heading on
down to Puthoff's place in Austin, Texas.
With his half a million dollars, Millis had awarded five contracts, any
one of which might lead to the breakthrough that gave BPP its name.
The first contract, placed with the University of Washington, Seattle,
was designed to test theory which maintained that a change in inertia was
possible with a sudden energy-density change, induced, say, by a massive
jolt of electricity. Manipulate inertia—an object's innate resistance to
acceleration—and apply it to a spacecraft and you had the ability to
reduce, if not negate altogether, its need for propellant. If the sums were
right, it would continue to accelerate until it reached light-speed.
The second experiment was tasked with examining the reality of the
so-called zero-point energy field and whether it existed at anything like
the magnitudes that had been postulated by some scientists. If these
people were even half right, Millis said, zero-point energy held enormous
significance for space travel and offered entirely new sources of nonpolluting
energy on Earth.
What, I asked, was zero-point energy?
For some years, Millis replied, there had been a developing understanding
that space was not the empty vacuum of traditional theory, but
a seething mass of energy, with particles flashing in and out of existence
about their "zero-point" baselines. Tests indicated that even in the
depths of a vacuum chilled to absolute zero (minus 273.15°C)—the zero
point of existence—this energy would not go away. The trouble was, no
one knew quite where it was coming from. It was just there, a background
radiation source that no one could adequately explain. With millions,
perhaps billions, of fluctuations occurring in any given second, it was
theoretically possible to draw some—perhaps a lot—of that energy from
our everyday surroundings and get it to do useful work. If it could be
"mined"—both on Earth and in space—it offered an infinite and
potentially limitless energy source.
The third experiment, he continued, would set out to examine the
unproven link between electromagnetism and gravity and its possible
impact on space-time. Perturbations of space-time not only promised a