"A beneficent fluid bathes us, whence we draw the very force to labor and to live. From this ocean of life, in which we are immersed, we are continually drawing something, and we feel that our being, or at least the intellect that guides it, has been formed therein by a kind of local concentration. Philosophy can only be an effort to dissolve again into the Whole."
     - Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution

In 1916 "the great physical chemist Walther Nernst suggested that even in the vacuum the electromagnetic field was in a state of ceaseless activity. Nernst took his cue from Max Planck, who had suggested in 1911 that a harmonic oscillator, say a charged particle, in its lowest or ground states has not zero energy but the energy 1/2 hv...This so called 'zero point energy' was not made respectable until 1923, when Heisenberg showed that it followed from his Uncertainty Principle."
"We may, if we wish, regard these fluctuations as a kind of ether, a quantum ether of course. they have the property, which a material system would not, of being unable to define a rest frame."
     - Dr. Dennis Sciama, 'The Ether Transmogrified', New Scientist (3 Feb. '78)

"Dirac discovered that all particles of matter move at the speed of light following jagged paths through space. This 'jitterbugging' motion produces the illusion that matter is moving slower than light. He also showed that every subatomic particle is capable of existing below the threshold of any perception and that an infinite number of like particles must exist at that level. When certain energies are created, one of these particles can be made to manifest out of nothing, leaving behind a hole. This hole also has physical properties and appears as the antiparticle of the particle that manifests."
     - Fred Allen Wolf, Parallel Universes

"At the level of quantum gravity (constantly appearing and disappearing wormholes) there is no time or distance separating points... All things are interconnected in the microcosmos."
"The microstructure of 3-dimensional space resembles a constantly fluctuating Swiss cheese" with patterns that self-organize.
     - Jack Sarfatti

"...What we perceive through the senses as empty space is actually the plenum, which is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves."
     - Ken Wilber, The Holographic Paradigm

"In one cubic centimeter of empty space, the amount of energy is much greater than the total amount of energy of all the matter in the known universe. The entire universe of matter as we generally observe it is to be treated as a comparatively small pattern of excitation on the virtual sea of implicate order. The order of enfoldment is fundamental while abstraction is secondary - i.e. discontinuity or sudden jumps at the quantum level may be considered as a shadow crossing the wall. Like a heated crystal the universe's 'flaws' are the matter of galaxies, planets, our selves."
     - David Bohm

"John Wheeler imagines an ensemble of universes with different physical laws and different values of the fundamental constants, all 'laid down' at the initial singularity, the moment of creation. A kind of evolution by natural selection operates on these universe. Most of them are 'stillborn', in the sense that the prevailing laws do not permit anything interesting to happen in them. But maybe in some of them complex structures can evolve."
"Quantum cosmology allows the possibility of creating not just one universe but an infinite number of universe out of nothing at all. The universe may be interconnected, in some complex way, as new universes are born within, but then pinch off from, the vacuum of old universes, producing a complex, multidimensional foam. Our Universe may simply be a region of space-time that has pinched of from another bubble. But the bubbles can never communicate with one another and might have very different properties from one another."

"It is somewhat inappropriate to call the origin of a bubble universe in a fluctuation of the vacuum 'creation ex nihilo', for the quantum mechanical vacuum is not truly 'nothing'; rather, the vacuum state has a rich structure which resides in a previously existing substratum of space-time, either Minkowski or de Sitter space-time. Clearly, a true 'creation ex nihilo' would be the spontaneous generation of everything- space-time, the quantum mechanical vacuum, matter- at some time in the past."
     - Barrow and Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle

"Many and strange are the universes that drift like bubbles in the foam upon the River of Time."
     - Arthur C. Clarke

"The fleeting bubble universes coming out of the timeless pool of the void, and bursting; lives by the multitude all suffering - the children of the transitory yet inexhaustibly long world dream of the All-regarding."
     - Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Vacuum Space Engineering

"A new technology could await us by combing two heretofore separate but will documented, areas of modern theoretical physics:
1) The theories of the zero point energy show there are tremendous fluctuations of electrical field energy imbedded within the fabric of space
2) The theories of system self-organization might allow this energy to be co-hered by technological means."
     - Moray B King, Tapping The Zero Point Energy

"Can the vacuum fluctuations cohere in a region of space? Unstable particles or resonances may result from the temporary local coherence of the vacuum fluctuations. This model implies the existence of a whole spectrum of very small subnuclear particles that our science has not yet detected. The charge of a particle depends on a predominant flux from one type of mini hole.
"The stable particles may likewise be a coherent alignment of these holes. This model begets an interesting interpretation of the electron cloud around the nucleus of an atom. The electron literally is a cloud of negatively biased vacuum energy that maintains itself by a cohering self-connectivity through wormholes."
     - Mary B. King," Is Artificial Gravity Possible?" in Anti-Gravity and the Unified Field

Casimir effect:
"An imbalance in the quantum fluctuations of empty space can push two metal plates together... The number of modes outside the plates, all of which carry energy and momentum, is greater than those inside."
"Zero point fields observed at any given point are due to random radiation arriving from particles throughout the universe that are themselves undergoing zero point motions (zitterbenegung)... The coupling between particles due to these fields produces the attractive gravitational force. Gravity can, therefore, be understood as a sort of long-range Casimir force."
This theory explains "why gravity is so weak; why positive but not negative mass exists; and the fact that gravity cannot be shielded because zero-point fluctuations pervade space so cannot be shielded."
     - Harold Putoff

"The problem with trying to extract energy from the vacuum ala perpetual motion is that the vacuum is everywhere. You have no differential to exploit for free. (Exploiting the Casimir force is more akin to a battery - you gotta charge it up to use it, no free energy). And given that you are talking about theoretically infinite amounts of energy - perhaps it is just as well. I don't fancy the possibility of something resembling the big bang in my backyard."
     - Peter C Olsen

"...Puthoff has shown that one possible source of the vacuum energy is due to the motion of all the charge carriers of the universe. Thus, we can speculate, if Puthoff is correct, that we might be able to use the zero-point energy [ZPE] of the vacuum as a conduit by which we can tap into the motion of matter in the universe. Since we know that the motion of matter is still quite non-random (this is our energy source!), it may be possible to extract useful work from it. The dissipation of this useful work will end up back in the universe as electromagnetic radiation and in a more randomized motion of matter. The net effect of extracting this useful work is that the entropy of the universe will increase and the energy of the universe is conserved! (Thus the laws of thermodynamics are maintained by this speculation -- this is not a perpetual motion machine!). We can half-jokingly say that we converted some of the non-random kinetic energy of earth's orbit around the sun into more random thermal energy, and in that process obtained some usefulness out of this conversion! And the zero-point energy was the conduit, and not the source, by which we tapped this non-random motion (though to an observer on earth it would seem like the ZPE is the source!).
"[The analogy to this speculative power source is solar energy. Solar energy happens to be the conduit by which we tap the nuclear fusion process in the Sun, yet we view solar energy as a source, which it is not in the strictest sense!]"
     - Jon Noring (noring@netcom.com)

"Every ponderable atom is differentiated from a tenuous fluid, filling all space merely by spinning motion, as a whirl of water in a clam lake. by being set in movement this fluid, the ether, becomes gross matter. Its movement arrested, the primary substance reverts to its normal state."
"It appears, then possible for man through harnessed energy of the medium and suitable agencies for starting and stopping ether whirls to cause matter to form and disappear. At his command, almost without effort on his part, old worlds would vanish and new ones would spring into being. He could alter the size of this planet, control its seasons, adjust its distance form the sun, guide it on its eternal journey along any path he might choose, through the depths of the universe. He could make planets collide and produce his suns and stars, his heat and light, he could originate life in all its infinite forms. To cause at will the birth and death of matter would be man's grandest deed, which would make him the master of physical creation, make him fulfill his ultimate destiny."
     - Nikola Tesla in The New York Times, April 21, 1908

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