Zero Point Energy, Light and Time

Scientific Paper
Title	Zero Point Energy, Light and Time
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Barry John Setterfield
Keywords	Zero Point Energy, time, speed of light, electromagnetic waves, Planck's constant
Published	2012
Journal	Proceedings of the NPA
Volume	9
No. of pages	15
Pages	549-563

Read the full paper here

Abstract

In 1911, Planck's equations indicated the presence of an energy intrinsic to the vacuum of space. Called the Zero Point Energy (ZPE), it was discovered to control the properties of the vacuum, including the electric permittivity and magnetic permeability. The ZPE consists of electromagnetic waves of all wavelengths. The initial purpose of this study was to explore the effects of a varying ZPE on atoms and atomic constants, such as Planck's constant, h, the speed of light, c , and the rest masses of atomic particles, m. The rate of ticking of atomic clocks, including radiometric clocks, can also be shown to be affected, whereas orbital clocks (gravity-based) are not. The ZPE has been shown by Haisch, Puthoff and others to maintain atomic orbits throughout the cosmos. Therefore, an increasing ZPE may mean more energetic orbits, resulting in bluer emitted light through time. This gives an alternate explanation to the increasing red shifts which are seen in progressively more distant galaxies. Alteration of electric and magnetic properties of the vacuum would also affect the speed of plasma interactions. Since the universe is usually considered to have begun as plasma, the rates of galaxy, star and planet formation using plasma physics can be shown to have been more rapid than models based on gravity. This may resolve some astronomical anomalies at the frontiers of the universe. An increasing ZPE also has implications for planetary geology, as well as giving a reason for gigantism in Earth's fossil record. Finally, many of relativity's predictions follow logically from the presence of a real ZPE and can be formulated with simple mathematics and intuitive concepts.

Overview

This 2012 conference paper is a compact statement of the variable-zero-point-energy cosmology Setterfield has developed since his 1987 report on the speed of light. Its single organising hypothesis is that the energy density of the vacuum is not a fixed background but has grown over cosmic history, and that because the vacuum's electric permittivity ε and magnetic permeability μ are both proportional to that energy density U, a whole family of "constants" must have drifted together in a way that leaves certain products invariant.

The departure from the mainstream account is total rather than local. Where standard cosmology explains the redshift by metric expansion, Setterfield holds that the universe expanded only until a redshift of about z = 2.6, ceased expanding by z = 1.6, and has been static since — the redshift being instead an artefact of atoms in the past emitting intrinsically bluer light because their orbits were larger when the ZPE was weaker. Where the standard account treats special and general relativity as fundamental, he treats their confirmed predictions as consequences of a real, Lorentz-invariant vacuum energy that plays the role once assigned to the aether. And where quantum mechanics is taken as irreducible, he follows the Stochastic Electrodynamics (SED) programme in regarding it as classical physics plus a real zero-point field.

The argument

The physical vacuum and the evidence for a real ZPE

Setterfield distinguishes the seventeenth-century "bare vacuum" from the "physical vacuum" that both theory and experiment now support: energy remains in a sealed, evacuated, absolute-zero container. He dates the ZPE's discovery to Planck's second theory of 1911, with Einstein and Stern (1913) and Nernst (1916) following, and describes it as composed of electromagnetic waves down to about 10^-35 m with a frequency-cubed spectrum. The evidence he adduces is standard: helium will not solidify by cooling alone without applied pressure; irreducible noise in microwave receivers; the Lamb shift of spectral lines; and the Casimir effect, which he explains classically as long ZPE wavelengths being excluded from between the plates so that external radiation pressure is unbalanced, citing Mohideen and Roy's 1998 verification to within 1%.

His route from ZPE waves to vacuum properties runs through virtual particle pairs, of which he cites an estimate of about 10⁴² per cubic metre at any instant. A polarisable vacuum, demonstrated by the displacement current that flows between charged plates even with the dielectric removed, means ε and μ track the number of pairs and hence the ZPE strength:

ε ~ μ ~ U

Since c² = 1/εμ, it follows that c ~ 1/U. And because Planck's constant appears in the 1911 blackbody expression only as a scale factor on the temperature-independent hf/2 term, h ~ U. The two results combine into the paper's keystone: hc is invariant.

Invariant products, variable components

Setterfield leans heavily on the observational evidence that hc is cosmologically constant to parts per million (Bahcall and Salpeter; Baum and Florentin-Nielsen; Solheim et al.), and that the fine structure constant α = e²/(2ε₀hc) is stable to about one part in a million. His reply to the obvious objection is that an invariant dimensionless product does not constrain its factors individually — quoting Wesson's remark, traced back to Dirac, that "the dimensionless numbers ... could be absolute constants, while the component parameters comprising them are variable." His illustration is that 12 is reached equally by 1 x 12, 2 x 6 or 3 x 4.

The empirical case for the variation itself is historical measurement. He cites Dorsey's admission that reported values of c "decreased monotonously" from Cornu's 300.4 Mm/s in 1874 to Anderson's 299.776 in 1940, and de Bray's 1931 protest that "there are twenty-two coincidences in favour of a decrease of the velocity of light, while there is not a single one against it." His 1987 report catalogued 163 determinations of c by 16 methods over 330 years. He argues the pattern is one-sided rather than a scatter converging on a true value, and that recommended values of h, h/e and the electron rest mass show the same trend with a "flat point" around 1970 — which he attributes to a change in the oscillation mode of a static cosmos, following Narlikar and Arp (1993).

Mass, clocks and the redshift

Mass, on the SED account he adopts from Haisch, Rueda and Puthoff, is not intrinsic: massless charged partons are jittered by the ZPE (the Zitterbewegung, demonstrated experimentally with calcium ions in 2010), and the resulting kinetic energy appears as rest mass, with m ~ h² ~ 1/c². Energy is then conserved, since E = mc² is unchanged. Conservation of orbital kinetic energy ½mv² forces v ~ c, so atomic frequencies and hence atomic clock rates go as c, while gravitational (orbital) clocks do not. Setterfield quotes Birge's own concession that if c varied while standard wavelengths did not, "the value of every atomic frequency ... must be changing", and points to the reported negative drift of atomic time before 1960 and positive drift after.

The redshift follows from orbit size. A stronger ZPE means more impacts per second on the orbiting electron — he gives a figure of over 18,700 hits per orbit — more recoil radiation, and a smaller equilibrium radius. Since emitted wavelength W ~ r, a rising ZPE makes atoms emit progressively bluer light, so older light looks redder. Because orbits must accommodate a whole de Broglie wavelength, the redshift comes in steps, which he offers as an explanation of the quantisation reported by Tifft, Arp and Guthrie and Napier (multiples of 37.5 km/s). He supports the static-universe premise with Ashmore's analysis of Lyman-alpha forest cloud spacing, and argues against Doppler expansion on the grounds that spectral lines are not broadened and redshifts do not increase smoothly with distance.

Extensions and the relativity chapter

A lower past ZPE, he argues, meant higher voltages and currents and lower capacitances, speeding plasma-filament interactions and hence galaxy, star and planet formation — Marklund convection then sorting elements to give layered planetary structures. The same capacitance argument is carried into biology: axon signal velocity is inversely proportional to capacitance, so a ZPE at one tenth its present value would have given nerve signals ten times the speed, which he offers as a partial explanation of gigantism in the fossil record, alongside more efficient photosynthesis from a higher photon arrival rate at unchanged photon energy.

Finally, he argues that relativity's successes are recoverable. Boyer's result that the frequency-cubed zero-point spectrum is the only one invariant for all unaccelerated observers makes the ZPE undetectable by drift experiments, which he offers as the explanation of the Michelson–Morley null result. Increased Zitterbewegung at speed accounts for relativistic mass increase and clock slowing; a locally boosted ZPE around matter acts as Eddington's "equivalent refracting medium" and bends light; the cosmic microwave background supplies the absolute rest frame Einstein denied, quoting Harwit; and gravity is identified with the always-attractive secondary fields radiated by jittering charges, in the Haisch–Rueda–Puthoff proposal, with Van Flandern's rubber-sheet critique cited to argue that geometrodynamics supplies no causal mechanism.

Assessment

The paper's real strength is its economy of hypothesis. One postulated variation — in U — is propagated consistently through permittivity, permeability, c, h, m, atomic clock rate, orbit radius and emitted wavelength, and the resulting proportionalities are internally coherent: the invariance of hc and of α is not patched on afterwards but drops out of the scheme, which is precisely what a variable-constants theory most needs and most often lacks. The reply to the α-constancy objection is genuinely sharp, and correct as far as it goes: dimensionless invariants do constrain only combinations. The SED material is drawn from a real, published research programme rather than invented, and the observation that the geometric interpretation of gravity describes geodesics without supplying a force mechanism is a fair philosophical point that many relativists would concede as a matter of interpretation.

The difficulties are correspondingly large. The empirical foundation — the declining historical c values — is the weakest link, and the paper does not confront the standard rebuttal seriously. That successive determinations fell monotonically is agreed; what is disputed is whether the fall exceeds the quoted systematic uncertainties of nineteenth-century rotating-mirror and toothed-wheel methods, which were far larger than the differences at issue. Setterfield's argument that a one-sided approach cannot come from improving apparatus is not sound: correlated systematic bias in a dominant method, and the well-documented tendency of experimenters to cluster near the previously accepted value, produce exactly one-sided drift. Nor is a "flat point around 1970" strong evidence of a cosmic oscillation when 1970 is also when c ceased to be measured at all and became defined.

Second, several steps are asserted rather than derived. The proportionality m ~ h²/c² depends on the numerator terms "remaining constant in a changing ZPE scenario", which is referred to another report rather than shown. The redshift–time function of Eqs. (15)–(17), with its constant 4.745 x 10⁹, is presented as the output of an analysis performed elsewhere; the reader cannot check it here. The biological section is the most speculative in the paper: the inference from axon capacitance to organism size passes over respiratory, skeletal and atmospheric-oxygen explanations of Palaeozoic gigantism without mentioning them, and treats one term in a conduction-velocity formula as if it were the sole determinant of body plan.

Third, the model conflicts with measurements it does not address. Type Ia supernova light curves are observed to be stretched by a factor (1+z), the time dilation expected of an expanding metric; a static cosmos with an intrinsic emission shift predicts no such stretching and must explain it away. The blackbody spectrum and dipole-corrected isotropy of the CMB are used here only as a rest frame, never as a constraint on a cosmos that stopped expanding at z = 1.6. Redshift quantisation, on which the orbit-step argument leans, has not survived in the large modern surveys that were unavailable when Tifft and Guthrie and Napier worked. And the treatment of the CMB as establishing an absolute frame conflates a preferred cosmological frame — which standard cosmology freely admits — with the violation of local Lorentz invariance that would actually be required to refute special relativity. Harwit's quoted qualification says as much, though the paper reads it as a concession.

Read charitably, this is an ambitious and unusually self-consistent alternative framework whose weight rests almost entirely on one contested historical dataset. Its testable core — that atomic and gravitational clocks drift against each other — is the right kind of claim, and the honest verdict is that modern pulsar timing and lunar laser ranging bound any such drift far more tightly than the observatory data quoted here.