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Harold E. Puthoff | |
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| Born | 1936 (age 87–88) Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
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| Occupation(s) | Engineer and parapsychologist |
| Known for | Paranormal research |
Harold Edward "Hal" Puthoff (born 1936) is an American physicist and parapsychologist. [1] In the 2010s, he co-founded the UFO-dedicated company To the Stars with Tom DeLonge.
Puthoff was born in Chicago, Illinois. He received his BA and MSc in electrical engineering from the University of Florida. [2] In 1967, Puthoff earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University with a thesis on the topic of the stimulated Raman effect in lasers. [3] [4] He then worked on tunable lasers and electron beam devices, and co-authored (with R. Pantell) Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics (Wiley, 1969), published in English, French, Russian and Chinese. Puthoff published papers on polarizable vacuum (PV) and stochastic electrodynamics.
He took an interest in the Church of Scientology in the late 1960s and reached what was then the top OT VII level by 1971. [4] Puthoff wrote up his "wins" for a Scientology publication, claiming to have achieved "remote viewing" abilities. [5] In 1974, Puthoff also wrote a piece for Scientology's Celebrity magazine, stating that Scientology had given him "a feeling of absolute fearlessness". [6] Puthoff severed all connection with Scientology in the late 1970s. [7]
In 1985, Puthoff founded a for-profit company, EarthTech International in Austin, Texas. At about the same time, he founded an organization, Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin (IASA), which he directed. [8] IASA, funded by anonymous donors, pursues ideas Puthoff finds interesting related to energy generation and propulsion.
Puthoff and EarthTech were granted a US Patent [9] in 1998, with claims that information could be transmitted through a distance using a modulated potential with no electric or magnetic field components. While "the invention does appear to rest on solid, albeit somewhat obscure, physics principles", the case is used for educational purposes in patent law where "the examiner failed to make a prima facie case for inoperability or lack of enablement". [10] According to the Wisconsin Law School case study, "The lesson of the Puthoff patent is that in a world where both types of patents are more and more common, even a competent examiner may fail to distinguish innovation from pseudoscience."
In the 1970s and 1980s Puthoff directed a program at SRI International to investigate paranormal abilities, collaborating with Russell Targ in a study of the purported psychic abilities of Uri Geller, Ingo Swann, Pat Price, Joseph McMoneagle and others, as part of what they called the Stargate Project. Both Puthoff and Targ became convinced Geller and Swann had genuine psychic powers, [11] [12] however Geller had employed sleight of hand tricks. [13]
Uri Geller was studied by Russell Targ and Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Targ and Puthoff declared to have demonstrated that Geller had genuine psychic powers, though it was reported that there were flaws with the controls in the experiments and Geller was caught using sleight of hand on many other occasions. [14] [15] According to Terence Hines:
Geller turned out to be nothing more than a magician using sleight of hand and considerable personal charm to fool his admirers. The tests at SRI turned out to have been run under conditions that can best be described as chaotic. Few limits were placed on Geller's behavior, and he was more or less in control of the procedures used to test him. Further, the results of the tests were incorrectly reported in Targ and Puthoff's Nature paper. [16]
Psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann attempted to replicate Targ and Puthoff's remote viewing experiments. In a series of thirty-five studies, they were unable to replicate the results. While investigating the procedure of the original experiments, Marks and Kammann discovered that the notes given to the judges in Targ and Puthoff's experiments contained clues as to which order they were carried out. Examples included referring to yesterday's two targets, or the inclusion of the date of the session written at the top of the page. They concluded that these clues were the reason for the experiment's high hit rates. [17] [18] Terence Hines has written:
Examination of the few actual transcripts published by Targ and Puthoff show that just such clues were present. To find out if the unpublished transcripts contained cues, Marks and Kammann wrote to Targ and Puthoff requesting copies. It is almost unheard of for a scientist to refuse to provide his data for independent examination when asked, but Targ and Puthoff consistently refused to allow Marks and Kammann to see copies of the transcripts. Marks and Kammann were, however, able to obtain copies of the transcripts from the judge who used them. The transcripts were found to contain a wealth of cues. [19]
Marks noted that when the cues were eliminated the results fell to a chance level. [20] James Randi noted that controlled tests by several other researchers, eliminating several sources of cuing and extraneous evidence present in the original tests, produced negative results. Students were also able to solve Puthoff and Targ's locations from the clues that had inadvertently been included in the transcripts. [21] Marks and Kamman concluded: "Until remote viewing can be confirmed in conditions which prevent sensory cueing the conclusions of Targ and Puthoff remain an unsubstantiated hypothesis." [22] According to Martin Gardner, Puthoff (and Targ) "imagined they could do research in parapsychology but instead dealt with 'psychics' who were cleverer than they were". [23]
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Puthoff co-authored papers [24] [25] using the model of stochastic electrodynamics that leads to a model of inertia as an electromagnetic drag force on accelerating particles, produced by interaction with the zero-point field. [26] This concept built on Andrei Sakharov's proposal in 1968 that the gravitational constant was a consequence of zero-point fluctuations in the vacuum. [27] : 162 One of his 1989 papers was disputed by S. Carlip for containing a serious computational error which makes the effect negligible; [28] Puthoff responded that a different parameter value in the model would restore its usefulness. [27] The 1994 paper was the subject of a news article in Science . [29] Subsequent analysis by Yefim S. Levin raising numerous questions concerning the mathematical correctness of the formula and the use of non-relativistic treatments of magnetic effects, concluding that model does not show inertia as a result of zero-point-field effects. [30] The cosmological implications of a different 1989 paper by Puthoff [31] on the origin electromagnetic zero point energy was examined by Paul S. Wesson [32] Among numerous difficulties, general relativity requires that such energy not gravitate, so it cannot be similar to electromagnetic radiation.
Building on earlier theoretical work by Robert L. Forward leveraging the Casimir force to extract electrical energy, [33] Daniel Cole and Puthoff analyzed the thermodynamics of a simple hypothetical Casimir force device. [34] The hypothetical devices discussed in these articles are capacitors, multiple layers of charged conductors sufficiently close for the short range Casimir force to compress the structure. This work against the mutual repulsion of the conductors stores electrical energy; external electricity would be needed to recharge the device. Mechanical and thermal devices based on Casimir forces have been studied by other authors. [35]
Massimo Pigliucci called Puthoff's hopes to extract zero-point energy as running contrary to the laws of physics: "a proposition... that violates basic principles of thermodynamics and that is considered pseudoscience by credentialed physicists." [36]
In quantum field theory, the Casimir effect is a physical force acting on the macroscopic boundaries of a confined space which arises from the quantum fluctuations of a field. It is named after the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir, who predicted the effect for electromagnetic systems in 1948.
Clairvoyance is the claimed ability to acquire information that would be considered impossible to get through scientifically proven sensations, thus classified as extrasensory perception, or "sixth sense". Any person who is claimed to have such ability is said to be a clairvoyant.
A wormhole is a hypothetical structure connecting disparate points in spacetime, and is based on a special solution of the Einstein field equations.
Zero-point energy (ZPE) is the lowest possible energy that a quantum mechanical system may have. Unlike in classical mechanics, quantum systems constantly fluctuate in their lowest energy state as described by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Therefore, even at absolute zero, atoms and molecules retain some vibrational motion. Apart from atoms and molecules, the empty space of the vacuum also has these properties. According to quantum field theory, the universe can be thought of not as isolated particles but continuous fluctuating fields: matter fields, whose quanta are fermions, and force fields, whose quanta are bosons. All these fields have zero-point energy. These fluctuating zero-point fields lead to a kind of reintroduction of an aether in physics since some systems can detect the existence of this energy. However, this aether cannot be thought of as a physical medium if it is to be Lorentz invariant such that there is no contradiction with Einstein's theory of special relativity.
Robert Lull Forward was an American physicist and science fiction writer. His literary work was noted for its scientific credibility and use of ideas developed from his career as an aerospace engineer. He also made important contributions to gravitational wave detection research.
Remote viewing (RV) is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen subject, purportedly sensing with the mind. Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information about an object, event, person or location that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance. Physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, parapsychology researchers at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), are generally credited with coining the term "remote viewing" to distinguish it from the closely related concept of clairvoyance. According to Targ, the term was first suggested by Ingo Swann in December 1971 during an experiment at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York City.
The no-hair theorem states that all stationary black hole solutions of the Einstein–Maxwell equations of gravitation and electromagnetism in general relativity can be completely characterized by only three independent externally observable classical parameters: mass, electric charge, and angular momentum. Other characteristics are uniquely determined by these three parameters, and all other information about the matter that formed a black hole or is falling into it "disappears" behind the black-hole event horizon and is therefore permanently inaccessible to external observers after the black hole "settles down". Physicist John Archibald Wheeler expressed this idea with the phrase "black holes have no hair", which was the origin of the name.
The Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project (BPP) was a research project funded by NASA from 1996 to 2002 to study various proposals for revolutionary methods of spacecraft propulsion that would require breakthroughs in physics before they could be realized. The project ended in 2002, when the Advanced Space Transportation Program was reorganized and all speculative research was cancelled. During its six years of operational funding, this program received a total investment of $1.2 million.
In quantum field theory, the quantum vacuum state is the quantum state with the lowest possible energy. Generally, it contains no physical particles. The term zero-point field is sometimes used as a synonym for the vacuum state of a quantized field which is completely individual.
The Abraham–Minkowski controversy is a physics debate concerning electromagnetic momentum within dielectric media. Two equations were first suggested by Hermann Minkowski (1908) and Max Abraham (1909) for this momentum. They predict different values, from which the name of the controversy derives. Experimental support has been claimed for both.
Stochastic electrodynamics (SED) is extends classical electrodynamics (CED) of theoretical physics by adding the hypothesis of a classical Lorentz invariant radiation field having statistical properties similar to that of the electromagnetic zero-point field (ZPF) of quantum electrodynamics (QED).
Russell Targ is an American physicist, parapsychologist, and author who is best known for his work on remote viewing.
In theoretical physics, particularly fringe physics, polarizable vacuum (PV) and its associated theory refers to proposals by Harold Puthoff, Robert H. Dicke, and others to develop an analogue of general relativity to describe gravity and its relationship to electromagnetism.
Bernard Michael Haisch is a German-born American astrophysicistwho has done research in solar-stellar astrophysics and stochastic electrodynamics. He has developed with Alfonso Rueda a speculative theory that the non-zero lowest energy state of the vacuum, as predicted by quantum mechanics, might provide a physical explanation for the origin of inertia, and might someday be used for spacecraft propulsion. Haisch has advocated the serious scientific study of phenomena outside the traditional scope of science and is known for his interest in the UFO phenomenon as well as a variety of other unorthodox topics.
Sensory leakage is a term used to refer to information that transferred to a person by conventional means during an experiment into ESP.
PVLAS aims to carry out a test of quantum electrodynamics and possibly detect dark matter at the Department of Physics and National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Ferrara, Italy. It searches for vacuum polarization causing nonlinear optical behavior in magnetic fields. Experiments began in 2001 at the INFN Laboratory in Legnaro and continue today with new equipment.
Modern searches for Lorentz violation are scientific studies that look for deviations from Lorentz invariance or symmetry, a set of fundamental frameworks that underpin modern science and fundamental physics in particular. These studies try to determine whether violations or exceptions might exist for well-known physical laws such as special relativity and CPT symmetry, as predicted by some variations of quantum gravity, string theory, and some alternatives to general relativity.
In quantum electrodynamics (QED), the Schwinger limit is a scale above which the electromagnetic field is expected to become nonlinear. The limit was first derived in one of QED's earliest theoretical successes by Fritz Sauter in 1931 and discussed further by Werner Heisenberg and his student Hans Heinrich Euler. The limit, however, is commonly named in the literature for Julian Schwinger, who derived the leading nonlinear corrections to the fields and calculated the rate of electron–positron pair production in a strong electric field. The limit is typically reported as a maximum electric field or magnetic field before nonlinearity for the vacuum of
Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California carried out research on various phenomena characterized by the term parapsychology from 1972 until 1991. Early studies indicating that phenomena such as remote viewing and psychokinesis could be scientifically studied were published in such mainstream journals as Proceedings of the IEEE and Nature. This attracted the sponsorship of such groups as NASA and The Central Intelligence Agency.
Corinne Alison Manogue is an American physicist who has worked in general relativity, mathematical physics, and physics education. She was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2005, and was an inaugural Fellow of the American Association of Physics Teachers in 2014.
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