270
PHVSICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
vacuum, a claim that unfortunately he did not prove in his notes. At
first, "zero-point energy" (or the energy contained in a vacuum) seems
to violate the First Law of Thermodynamics. Although zero-point energy defies the laws of Newtonian mechanics, the notion of zero-point
energy has reemerged recently from a novel direction.
When scientists analyze the data from satellites currently orbiting
the Earth, such as the WMAP satellite, they have come to the astounding conclusion that fully 73 percent of the universe is made of "dark
energy," the energy of a pure vacuum. This means that the greatest
reservoir of energy in the entire universe is the vacuum that separates
the galaxies in the universe. (This dark energy is so colossal that it is
pushing the galaxies away from each other, and may eventually rip the
universe apart in a Big Freeze.)
Dark energy is everywhere in the universe, even in your living
room and inside your body. The amount of dark energy in outer space
is truly astronomical, outweighing all the energy of the stars and
galaxies put together. We can also calculate the amount of dark energy
on the Earth, and it is quite small, too small to be used to power a perpetual motion machine. Tesla was right about dark energy but wrong
about the amount of dark energy on the Earth.
Or was he?
One of the most embarrassing gaps in modern physics is that no
one can calculate the amount of dark energy that we can measure via
our satellites. If we use the latest theory of atomic physics to calculate
the amount of dark energy in the universe, we arrive at a number that
is wrong by a factor of 10
120 ! That is "one" followed by 120 zeros! This
is by far the largest mismatch between theory and experiment in all of
physics.
The point is that no one knows how to calculate the "energy of
nothing." This is one of the most important questions in physics (because it will eventually determine the fate of the universe), but at the
present time we are clueless as to how to calculate it. No theory can explain dark energy, although experimental evidence for its existence is
staring us in the face.
So the vacuum does have energy, as Tesla suspected. But the
PHVSICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
vacuum, a claim that unfortunately he did not prove in his notes. At
first, "zero-point energy" (or the energy contained in a vacuum) seems
to violate the First Law of Thermodynamics. Although zero-point energy defies the laws of Newtonian mechanics, the notion of zero-point
energy has reemerged recently from a novel direction.
When scientists analyze the data from satellites currently orbiting
the Earth, such as the WMAP satellite, they have come to the astounding conclusion that fully 73 percent of the universe is made of "dark
energy," the energy of a pure vacuum. This means that the greatest
reservoir of energy in the entire universe is the vacuum that separates
the galaxies in the universe. (This dark energy is so colossal that it is
pushing the galaxies away from each other, and may eventually rip the
universe apart in a Big Freeze.)
Dark energy is everywhere in the universe, even in your living
room and inside your body. The amount of dark energy in outer space
is truly astronomical, outweighing all the energy of the stars and
galaxies put together. We can also calculate the amount of dark energy
on the Earth, and it is quite small, too small to be used to power a perpetual motion machine. Tesla was right about dark energy but wrong
about the amount of dark energy on the Earth.
Or was he?
One of the most embarrassing gaps in modern physics is that no
one can calculate the amount of dark energy that we can measure via
our satellites. If we use the latest theory of atomic physics to calculate
the amount of dark energy in the universe, we arrive at a number that
is wrong by a factor of 10
120 ! That is "one" followed by 120 zeros! This
is by far the largest mismatch between theory and experiment in all of
physics.
The point is that no one knows how to calculate the "energy of
nothing." This is one of the most important questions in physics (because it will eventually determine the fate of the universe), but at the
present time we are clueless as to how to calculate it. No theory can explain dark energy, although experimental evidence for its existence is
staring us in the face.
So the vacuum does have energy, as Tesla suspected. But the