This week I had a long chat with physicist Hal Puthoff, the hero of my book The Field, and main proponent of the idea that the Zero Point Field provides the essential underpinning of the entire universe. 

I always enjoy conversations with Hal because they always take an amazingly arcane turn.

Puthoff is one of those incredible frontier scientists – on the ‘frontier of the frontier’ he says, whose life is entirely shaped by the phrase ‘what if’.

Puthoff’s latest question is, essentially, nothing less than:  ‘What if Einstein’s general relativity theory is not the entire story? What if, in fact, gravity is not as we think we know it to be?’

A 96 per cent mystery

This question comes from genuine dissatisfaction by Puthoff and other scientists, that science cannot explain 96 per cent of the universe.  At the moment, believe it or not, all scientific equations deal with only 4 per cent of the universe.  Cosmologists lump at least three-quarters of the universe as consisting of ‘dark energy’.  Twenty percent more is considered so-called ‘dark matter’.

However, to a number of renegade scientists, the thought occurs that dark matter was only invented to explain the unknowable – say, why galaxies don’t spiral out into space.  If they cannot explain this type of gravitational attraction, why not just invent some unknown alternative? 

But to someone like Puthoff, the alternative is to question these unproven assumptions. Consequently, for two and a half years he and his team have been working on an experiment to see whether gravitation force is different from what conventional scientists say it is.  They are working on an experiment that amounts to a sophisticated version of a dumbbell on a string, measuring, via special high-tech microscopes and lasers, every hair’s breath of the device’s movement - down to the level of billionths of a meter. 

At the moment, the signal-to-noise problem is a nightmare.  With this kind of delicate operation, even the movement of a car on a highway miles away can disturb and invalidate the experiment. 

However, if Puthoff and his team can show a difference in our usual understanding of gravity and that it operates according to different laws, he may well do no less that dispel the idea that so-called ‘dark matter’ exists and demonstrate that gravity is associated with vacuum fluctuations – that is, with the Zero Point Field.

Was Einstein wrong?

In other words, he will demonstrate that our concept of gravity is wrong and that the equations for general relativity with their ideas of space-time curvature may not be the whole story.

There could be even a field underlying The Field. 

The point is that we often revere an expert – whether Einstein or Darwin, as we are especially doing this week – as having the final word.

Although we perceive of certain of these discoveries as ultimate truth, science is finally just a story, told in installments. We learn about our world in piecemeal fashion, a process of constant correction and revision.  New chapters refine — and often supplant — the chapters that have come before.

If Puthoff is right – and there is no such thing as dark matter, but only a different nature to gravity - clearly the story we’ve been told is about to be replaced by a drastically revised version.

The whole truth?

And so we must also consider the work of Charles Darwin in the same vein.  Darwin’s discovery of natural selection was no doubt brilliant.  However, as a student of population overrun, he was convinced that there were already too many people on the planet and that change occurred through a struggle to survive. 

It is likely that his theories only represent an approximation of the truth, and that his theory of evolution, with its suggestion that survival is available only to the ruggedly genetic individual, is superceded by increasing evidence that cooperation is the key to survival. 

Upcoming Intention Experiments

News on our Intention Experiments.  I am in the midst of discussions with materials scientists Rustum Roy about attempting to do another water experiment, this time with polluted water.  There is a great deal of evidence that intention can help to mutate bacteria.

Carroll Nash, the director of the parapsychology department at St Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, ran an experiment on Escherichia coli, showing that both positive and negative intention could be used to mutate the bacteria.  In our experiment, we want to see if we can mutate ‘bad’ bacteria into ‘good’ bacteria and so clean up polluted water.  It’s a big challenge – but one with big implications.  We’re looking at some time in April.  In the meantime, I will be announcing another experiment shortly.  Stay tuned.