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Volume 11: Number 4: Article 3
The Zero-Point Field and the NASA Challenge to Create the Space Drive
Bernhard Haisch, Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory, Lockheed Martin
3251 Hanover St., Palo Alto, CA 94304
Alfonso Rueda, Dept. of Electrical Engineering & Dept. of
Physics, California State University Long Beach, CA 90840
This NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Workshop seeks to explore
concepts that could someday enable interstellar travel. The effective
superluminal motion proposed by Alcubierre (1994) to be a possibility
owing to theoretically allowed space-time metric distortions within
general relativity has since been shown by Pfenning and Ford (1997)
to be physically unattainable. A number of other hypothetical possibilities
have been summarized by Millis (1997). We present herein an overview
of a concept that has implications for radically new propulsion possibilities
and has a basis in theoretical physics: the hypothesis that the inertia
and gravitation of matter originate in electromagetic interactions between
the zero-point field (ZPF) and the quarks and electrons constituting
atoms. A new derivation of the connection between the ZPF and inertia
has been carried through that is properly co-variant, yielding the relativistic
equation of motion from Maxwell's equations. This opens new possibilites,
but also rules out the basis of one hypothetical propulsion mechanism:
Bondi's "negative inertial mass" appears to be an impossibility.
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