Every science student learns that the total amount of matter and energy is always the same. Matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed. The law of conservation of matter and energy is simple and reassuring: it guarantees fundamental permanence in an ever-changing world.
This law usually goes unquestioned. But it faces unprecedented challenges. As I discuss in this chapter, most physicists now believe that the universe contains large amounts of “dark matter,” whose nature and properties are literally obscure. Dark matter is currently thought to make up about 23 percent of the mass and energy of the universe, whereas normal matter and energy make up only about 4 percent. Worse still, most contemporary cosmologists think that the continuing expansion of the universe is driven by “dark energy,” whose nature is again obscure. According to the Standard Model of cosmology, dark energy currently accounts for about 73 percent of the matter and energy of the universe.
How do dark matter and energy relate to regular matter and energy? And what is the zero-point energy field, also known as the quantum vacuum? Can any of this zero-point energy be tapped?
The law of conservation of matter and energy was formulated before these questions arose, and has no ready answer for them. It is based on philosophical and theological theories. Historically, it is rooted in the atomistic school of philosophy in ancient Greece. From the outset it was an assumption. In its modern form, it combines a series of “laws” that have developed since the seventeenth century—the laws of conservation of matter, mass, motion, force and energy. In this chapter I look at the history of these ideas, and show how modern physics throws up questions that the old theories cannot answer. As faith in conservation comes into question, astonishing new possibilities open up in realms ranging from the generation of energy to human nutrition.
Classical Newtonian physics was based on a fundamental distinction between matter and force. Matter was passive. Forces acted on matter causing changes. Material bodies either continued to exist in the same place forever, or continued to move in a straight line perpetually, until they were acted on by forces that caused them to accelerate, or change direction or decelerate. Force was the active principle that caused change. Indeed, force or energy was causation. And because the cause must equal the effect, the total amount of force or energy must remain the same for logical reasons.
As the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) made explicit, matter was inert and could only be experienced through its effects, and force was the cause of all these effects. In contrast with matter or bodies, forces and energies are not things: they are to do with processes in time. They are elusive. They breathe life, we might say poetically, into material nature and underlie all changes.
I begin with the history of the belief in the conservation of matter, which arose more than 2,500 years ago.
In ancient Greece, philosophers were preoccupied with the idea that behind the changing world of experience there was a changeless eternal reality, or an original unity. This conviction probably originated in mystical experiences, which appeared to reveal the existence of an ultimate reality or truth beyond space and time. The philosopher Parmenides tried to form an intellectual conception of an ultimate changeless being, and concluded that that being must be a changeless, undifferentiated sphere. There could be only one changeless thing, not many different things that change. But the world we experience contains many different things that change. Parmenides could only regard this as the result of illusion.
This conclusion was unacceptable to philosophers who came after him, for obvious reasons. They looked for more plausible theories of Absolute Being. Philosophers in the tradition of Pythagoras (c. 570–c. 495 BC) believed that eternal reality was made up of changeless mathematical truths. Plato and his followers thought in terms of transcendent Ideas or Forms beyond space and time. The atomist philosophers found another answer: Absolute Being is not a vast, undifferentiated, changeless sphere, but rather consists of many tiny, undifferentiated, changeless things—material atoms moving in the void. Thus the permanent atoms were the changeless basis of the changing phenomena of the world: matter was Absolute Being.1 This philosophy of atomism or materialism, first propounded in the fifth century before Christ by Leucippus and Democritus,2 was based on impressive feats of logical deduction. No one could see atoms or provide evidence for their existence, but it was a remarkably fruitful idea, and still exerts an enormous influence. Implicitly, the total amount of matter was always the same because the atoms were indestructible, by definition.
The atomists proposed that the movements and combinations of the atoms were governed by natural laws. There was no need for gods; neither were there any divine purposes in the universe. The human soul itself depended on combinations of atoms, and was extinguished at death; the atoms themselves continued forever, entering into new permutations and combinations.
The main appeal of the atomist or materialist philosophy in pre-Christian Greece and Rome was its skepticism about the pantheon of gods and goddesses. Epicurus (341–270 BC), one of the most influential atomist philosophers, preached that materialism could liberate human beings from the fear of fickle gods and of divine retribution after death. He advocated a moderate form of hedonism, freed from these fears, teaching that happiness could best be achieved through simple pleasures and the company of friends.3
The Roman philosopher Lucretius (99–55 BC) popularized the Epicurean philosophy in his poem De Rerum Natura, “On the Nature of Things.” He began by portraying Epicurus as the hero who crushed the monster of superstition and religion. He then explained everything mechanistically in terms of the purposeless motions and interactions of eternal atoms.
Atomistic materialism reentered European thought from the late sixteenth century onward largely through Lucretius’s poem. It appealed to the founders of mechanistic science because it was mechanistic, not because it was anti-religious. The leading popularizer of atomism was a French Roman Catholic priest, Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), who tried to make the atomist doctrine compatible with Christianity. The founding fathers of mechanistic science followed his example by accepting God, the divine creation of the universe and the immortality of the soul as well as atoms of matter.
In effect, the seventeenth-century mechanistic theory of nature combined two Greek philosophies of eternity to produce a cosmic dualism: nature was made up of changeless atoms of matter in motion governed by immutable mathematical laws of nature that transcend space and time. But whereas for pre-Christian Greeks, like Democritus and Epicurus, atoms could be thought of as eternal, for the Christian founders of mechanistic science, they had to have been made by God in the first place.
Robert Boyle preferred to use the word “corpuscle” because he wanted to avoid the atheistic implications of atomism and materialism. Boyle thought that in the creation of the universe God divided matter into a large number of small particles of different sizes and shapes, and isolated them from each other by setting them in motion in different ways.4 After God had created them, the atoms just stayed the same. Isaac Newton agreed, and summarized his own views as follows:
It seems probable to me, that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles … and that these primitive particles being solids, are incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them; even so very hard as to never wear or break in pieces; no ordinary power being able to divide what God himself made one in the first creation.5
In the late eighteenth century, atoms took on a more definite identity as the atoms of chemical elements. The pioneer of chemistry, Antoine Lavoisier (1743–94), took the law of conservation of mass or matter to mean that the total mass of all the products of a chemical reaction equaled the total mass of all the reactants. He defined an element as a basic substance that could not be further broken down by chemical methods, and was the first to recognize and name oxygen and hydrogen. Unfortunately Lavoisier was a tax collector as well as a chemist, and was guillotined at the height of the French Revolution. Soon afterward, John Dalton (1766–1844) discovered that elements combine together in ratios of whole numbers, and he suggested that they involved combinations of chemical atoms, such as CO2 and H2O. The subsequent growth and enormous success of chemistry made atomism into an extremely fruitful theory.
The more that atoms were investigated, the more apparent it became that they were not ultimate units of matter, made up of “solid, massy, hard, impenetrable” particles, as Newton had imagined. Instead, they were structures of activity. From the 1920s onward, quantum theory portrayed the constituent parts of atoms—electrons, nuclei and nuclear particles—as vibratory patterns of activity within fields. Like photons of light, they behave both as waves and as particles. As the philosopher of science Karl Popper expressed it, through modern physics, “materialism transcended itself”:6
Matter turns out to be highly packed energy, transformable into other forms of energy; and therefore something in the nature of a process, since it can be converted into other processes, such as light and, of course, motion and heat. Thus one may say that the results of modern physics suggest that we should give up the idea of a substance or essence. They suggest that there is no self-identical entity persisting during all changes in time … The universe now appears to be not a collection of things, but an interacting set of events or processes (as stressed especially by A. N. Whitehead).7
Meanwhile, according to the theory of quantum electrodynamics, brilliantly expounded by the physicist Richard Feynman, virtual particles, such as electrons and photons, appear and disappear from the quantum vacuum field, also known as the zero-point field, that pervades the universe. Feynman called this theory the “jewel of physics” because of its extremely accurate predictions, correct to many decimal places.
The price that is paid for this accuracy is the acceptance of invisible, unobservable particles and interactions, and of the mysterious quantum vacuum field. According to quantum electrodynamics, all electrical and magnetic forces are mediated by virtual photons that appear from the quantum vacuum field and then disappear into it again. When you look at a compass to find out where north is, the compass needle interacts with the earth’s magnetic field through virtual photons. When you switch on a fan, its electric motor makes it go round because it is suddenly filled with virtual photons that exert forces. When you sit down, the chair supports your bottom because the chair and your bottom repel each other through a dense creation and destruction of virtual photons between them. When you get up, much of this activity in the vacuum field stops, and now great clouds of virtual photons appear between your feet and the floor, wherever you put your feet. All the molecules within your body, all your cell membranes, all your nerve impulses depend on virtual photons appearing and disappearing within the all-pervading vacuum field of nature. As the physicist Paul Davies put it, “A vacuum is not inert and featureless, but alive with throbbing energy and vitality.”8
We have come a long way from a simple belief in atoms of matter as tiny solid objects that persist unchanged through time. According to current theories, matter itself is an energetic process, and mass depends on interactions with fields that pervade the vacuum.
Even mass, the quantitative measure of matter, turns out to be deeply mysterious. According to the Standard Model of particle physics, the mass of a particle like an electron or a proton is not inherent in the particle itself but depends on its interaction with a field called a Higgs field, named after one of the theoretical physicists who proposed it in 1964, Peter Higgs. Physicists think of this field as being like a universal pool of treacle that “sticks” to otherwise massless particles travelling through it, conferring mass upon them.9 Thus the mass of an electron, for example, arises through its interaction with the Higgs field, and this interaction depends on special Higgs particles, called Higgs bosons, which are hypothetical. There is no agreed prediction about their mass, and no Higgs boson has so far been detected, despite the expenditure of billions of euros to look for them in a gigantic particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva. Writers of popular science often refer to the Higgs boson as “the God particle.” These elusive particles and fields have taken physics a long way from the Newtonian conception of matter as made up of “solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles.”
What we now know as the law of conservation of energy did not emerge until the 1850s; indeed, the word “energy” itself, though it came from a Greek root, was not in general use among scientists until the mid-nineteenth century. But right from the beginning of mechanistic science, there was a precursor of this law in the idea of conservation of motion or force. Like the conservation of matter, the conservation of motion or force was based on philosophical and theological arguments rather than on experimental observations.
For Descartes the original source of all matter and motion was God, and because God and his creation were immutable, the total quantity of matter and motion could not change. Individual particles could acquire or lose motion by colliding with other particles, but the total amount of motion was unaffected.10 In the early nineteenth century, James Joule, who established the mechanical equivalent of heat, likewise made God the guarantor: “[T]he grand agents of nature are, by the Creator’s fiat, indestructible; … wherever mechanical force is expended, an exact equivalent of heat is always obtained.”11 Michael Faraday was also convinced that God’s powers could not be created or destroyed without some compensatory balance. He wrote, “The highest law in physical science which our faculties permit us to perceive [is] the Conservation of Force.”12
In the first half of the nineteenth century, several different investigators arrived more or less independently at this conservation principle,13 which became one of the great unifying principles of physics, combining ideas about kinetic energy, potential energy, heat, mechanical energy, chemical energy, light, electromagnetic energy and the energy of living organisms.14 The forms of energy could change, but the total amount remained the same. The principle of conservation of energy was embodied in the first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy can be transformed from one form to another but cannot be created or destroyed.
As William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, saw it, energy’s fundamental status derived from its immutability and convertibility, and also from its unifying role in linking all physical phenomena in a web of energy transformations. He gave energy a theological sanction, and declared in 1852 that energy cannot be destroyed but only transformed “as it is most certain that Creative Power alone can either call into existence or annihilate mechanical energy.”15
The ideas of conservation of matter and energy played an essential role in the development of the equations of physics. By definition, an equation demands that the total quantity of matter and energy before a change is equal to the total amount afterward. In the 1960s, Richard Feynman expressed it as follows:
There is a fact, or if you wish, a law, governing all natural phenomena that are known to date. There is no known exception to this law; it is exact, so far as we know. The law is called the conservation of energy; it states that there is a certain quantity, which we call energy, that does not change in manifold changes which nature undergoes. That is a most abstract idea, because it is a mathematical principle; it says that there is a numerical quantity, which does not change when something happens. It is not a description of a mechanism, or anything concrete; it is just a strange fact that we can calculate some number, and when we finish watching nature go through her tricks and calculate the number again, it is the same.16
The principles of conservation of matter and energy were brought together by Albert Einstein in his famous equation E=mc2, which shows the equivalence between mass (m), energy (E) and the velocity of light (c). For example, the amount of energy released as radiation in the explosion of an atomic bomb equals the amount of mass lost by the bomb, times the square of the velocity of light. However, the mass is not destroyed by being converted to radiant energy: the energy released by the bomb still has mass, and this mass is transferred to bodies that absorb the radiation. If the bomb loses one gram, and all its radiation is absorbed by other bodies, they collectively gain one gram. In effect, Einstein’s equation meant that the conservation of matter became an aspect of the conservation of energy.
The equations of physics imply that satisfyingly precise relationships underlie all the transformations of nature. The conservation of matter and energy seems like a mathematical truth, even though matter is no longer solid, and mass depends on undetected Higgs particles. But the idea that the total amount of matter and energy is the same forever runs into big problems in cosmology.
The Big Bang theory, originally called the theory of the primeval atom, was first proposed in 1927 by Father Georges Lemaître. This theory became orthodox in the late 1960s.
The Big Bang theory means that all equations were violated in the primal singularity of the Big Bang. There was no conservation of matter and energy if the universe arose from nothing. As Terence McKenna expressed it, “What orthodoxy teaches about time is that the universe sprang from utter nothingness in a single moment … It’s almost as if science said, ‘Give me one free miracle, and from there the entire thing will proceed with a seamless, causal explanation.’ ”17 The one free miracle was the sudden appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe, with all the laws that govern it.
The creation of all matter and energy in the Beginning is presupposed by the Big Bang creation story, just as it was by René Descartes, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton and other scientists who wanted to make physics compatible with an initial act of creation by God. Indeed in 1951, more than fifteen years before physicists generally accepted the Big Bang theory, Pope Pius XII welcomed it in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences:
Thus everything seems to indicate that the material universe had a mighty beginning in time, endowed as it was with vast reserves of energy, in virtue of which at first rapidly, and then ever more slowly, it evolved into its present state … In fact, it would seem that present-day science, with one sweeping step back across millions of centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to that primordial Fiat lux uttered at the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation.18
The Big Bang theory was initially controversial because some astronomers were suspicious of its theological implications; indeed, some opposed it precisely because the Pope approved of it. One British physicist suggested that the Big Bang theory was part of a conspiracy to shore up Christianity: “The underlying motive is, of course, to bring in God as creator. It seems like the opportunity Christian theology has been waiting for ever since science began to depose religion from the minds of rational men in the seventeenth century.”19 The astronomer Fred Hoyle condemned the Big Bang theory as a model built on Judaeo-Christian foundations,20 and proposed an alternative. He argued that there was a process of continuous creation through which new matter and energy appeared within the universe as it expanded. The universe was eternal and infinite, and as the galaxies moved apart, new galaxies were created in the gaps between them. The universe was expanding yet remained in a steady state because of continuous creation, which took place as a result of the activity of a hypothetical C-field, or creation field, which both drove the steady expansion of the cosmos and generated new matter.
The original version of the steady state theory had to be abandoned because it predicted that new galaxies would be formed within the gaps between old ones, and hence young galaxies should be scattered all over the universe. By contrast, the Big Bang theory predicted that young galaxies would be formed relatively early in the history of the universe, and would therefore be found only far away, billions of light years in the past. In the early 1960s, evidence gathered by the British radio astronomer Martin Ryle showed that young galaxies were indeed distant, favoring the Big Bang theory. One of the theory’s proponents, George Gamow, wrote a poem to celebrate:
“Your years of toil”
Said Ryle to Hoyle
“Are wasted years, believe me,
The Steady State
Is out of date
Unless my eyes deceive me.”21
Another discovery by a radio astronomer in 1963 seemed to provide further evidence for the Big Bang. Maartin Schmidt, a Dutch astronomer, was studying an extremely energetic radio source that he thought at first was a star in our own galaxy. But it turned out to have a high redshift: the radiation from it was much redder than would be expected if it were nearby. Objects far away have larger redshifts or, in other words, longer wavelengths of light than nearby objects because of the expansion of the universe. Redshifts are produced by the Doppler effect: waves are stretched when their source is moving away, just as the sound waves from a siren get longer when a police car moves past; the tone drops. The farther away galaxies are, the faster they are receding, and the redder they look. The high redshift of Schmidt’s radio source suggested that this object was receding from us very fast. In fact it had the highest redshift ever detected, suggesting that it was over a billion light years away. This quasi-stellar radio object, or quasar, would therefore have to be an unprecedentedly brilliant galaxy, hundreds of times brighter than any yet known.
More quasars were soon discovered, and all of them had high redshifts and hence seemed very distant. If the universe were in a steady state, there should have been nearer quasars too, intense radio sources with small redshifts. But quasars seemed to lie in the most distant reaches of the universe.
The discovery in 1965 of the cosmic microwave background radiation, thought to be a kind of echo or afterglow of the Big Bang, seemed to settle the matter. Stephen Hawking described this discovery as “the final nail in the coffin of the steady-state theory.” The Big Bang theory became the new orthodoxy. In the simplistic style of history favored by many scientists, the Big Bang theory was the victor; the steady state was vanquished.
In the 1930s, Fritz Zwicky, a Swiss astrophysicist, studied the movements of galaxies within galactic clusters and realized that the clusters could not be held together by normal gravitation. Galaxies were attracting each other too strongly. The force holding them together seemed to be hundreds of times greater than a gravitational pull by visible matter could explain.22
Zwicky’s results were ignored for decades, but were again taken seriously when it became apparent that the orbits of stars within galaxies could not be explained by the gravitational attraction of known kinds of matter. Too much force was acting upon the stars. Astronomers mapped the gravitational influences and found that apparent sources of gravitation did not correspond to the familiar disc-shaped structure of galaxies. Instead, there was a roughly spherical distribution of matter, which they called dark matter, stretching far beyond the fringes of the luminous galaxies, forming vast haloes extending into intergalactic space.23
Dark matter helps to explain the structures of galaxies and the relations between galaxies within clusters, but it does so at a heavy price: nobody knows what it is. Theories to explain it include vast numbers of unobserved black holes or other massive objects, or enormous quantities of undetected particles called WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles).
A few physicists believe they can get rid of dark matter altogether by modifying the laws of gravitation instead.24 If they are right, then the total amount of matter recognized by physics will drop dramatically.
In the mid-1990s, the problems for cosmologists worsened. Detailed observations of distant supernovas—exploding stars in faraway galaxies—showed that the expansion of the universe was speeding up. Gravitation ought to be slowing it down. So something else must account for accelerating growth. Physicists were forced to conclude that there must be an antigravity force, called dark energy, which they thought of in terms of a “negative pressure” of empty space, or as an invisible field permeating the universe.
In 2010, only about 4 percent of the universe was believed to be made up of familiar matter and energy such as atoms, stars, galaxies, gas clouds, planets and electromagnetic radiation.25 Far from providing a satisfyingly complete explanation of the universe, modern physics suggests that we understand less than one twentieth of it. Moreover, some of the dark matter may be convertible into regular forms of energy. In 2010, observations of the center of our galaxy showed that more gamma rays were being emitted than could be accounted for by known sources, leading some physicists to suggest that dark matter was being annihilated, giving rise to regular kinds of energy.26
In the light of modern cosmology, how can anyone be sure that the total amount of matter and energy has always been the same? As we have just seen, the standard kinds of matter and energy to which the conservation laws are supposed to apply are only a small fraction of the total amount of matter and energy. Most of the universe is composed of hypothetical dark matter and dark energy whose relationship to each other and to known kinds of matter and energy is mysterious. But the story becomes even more complicated. The amount of dark energy may be increasing.
From the very beginning of modern science, there has been a denial of perpetual-motion machines as a matter of principle. Galileo proclaimed such machines could not exist, and so did most of the other founders of physics.27 In the nineteenth century, Rudolf Clausius reformulated this prohibition in the second law of thermodynamics, which states that heat cannot flow spontaneously from a lower temperature to a higher temperature. In other words, heat does not flow “uphill” unless aided by the expenditure of energy.28
Thermodynamics arose through the study of steam engines and was primarily concerned with heat, as the name “thermodynamics” tells us. But the second law was soon generalized to cover other forms of energy as well. In general terms, this law gives a picture of energy flowing “downhill,” from a higher to a lower temperature, just as water powering a waterwheel flows downhill. In a watermill, the total amount of water remains the same although its ability to power the wheel is lost as it falls. Moreover, only some of the energy lost by the falling water as it powers the wheel is converted into useful work. Some is lost in friction and as heat; no machine is 100 percent efficient.
From a thermodynamic point of view, machines are energy-conversion devices, and only some of the energy can be converted into work. The rest is lost; it is dissipated into the surroundings as heat. This lost energy that cannot do work is measured in terms of entropy. In other words, entropy is a measure of the amount of energy that is not available for doing useful work in a machine or in any other thermodynamic process. More abstractly, the second law of thermodynamics states that spontaneous natural processes lead to an increase in entropy. Or, again, the entropy of a closed system always increases or remains constant: it does not decrease. This increase of entropy gives an arrow to time, and means that spontaneous processes are always running “downhill” from a thermodynamic point of view.
When the second law of thermodynamics was generalized to the entire universe, it implied that the universe was like a machine running out of steam. Entropy would go on increasing until the universe froze forever, the state described by William Thomson in 1852 as “a state of universal rest and death.”29 The ultimate heat death of the universe was the concept that underpinned Bertrand Russell’s vision of “the debris of a universe in ruins.”30
By contrast, evolutionary biology showed life evolving toward greater and greater complexity. The arrows of time in biology and physics were pointing in opposite directions. At first, this seeming disagreement was explained in terms of different time scales. Biological evolution was a temporary phenomenon on earth, but like the earth itself, it was ultimately doomed. But speculation about an ultimate heat death faded away when the Big Bang theory became orthodox in the 1960s. Cosmology itself became evolutionary: the universe began very small and very hot with little or no structure. As it grew and cooled, ever more complex forms of organization came into being. Nevertheless some cosmological models suggested that this expanding, evolving universe would still come to an end: the gravity of the universe, magnified by the presence of dark matter, would make the universal expansion slow down, stop and then give way to an ever-accelerating cosmic contraction, ending in a reverse of the Big Bang, the Big Crunch. Old-style cosmic pessimism based on the heat-death theory was replaced by a new kind.
In the late 1990s, the Big Crunch theory was replaced by a new vision of continued cosmic expansion powered by dark energy. In the current consensus, dark energy provides the motive force for the expansion of the universe, counteracting the gravitational pull that would otherwise cause it to contract. In most theoretical models, the density of dark energy in the universe is assumed to be constant; in other words, the amount of dark energy in a fixed physical volume remains the same. But the universe is expanding; its volume is increasing. Hence the total amount of dark energy in the universe is increasing.31 The total amount of energy is not always the same. Far from running out of steam, the universe is now like a perpetual-motion machine, expanding because of dark energy, and creating more dark energy by expanding.
In the model currently favored by most cosmologists, dark energy is uniform throughout the cosmos, but some models of dark energy propose that it arises from a “quintessence” field that varies from place to place and time to time. The term “quintessence,” meaning “fifth element,” was borrowed from the ancient Greek term for the ether, which was thought to fill the universe. Quintessence interacts with matter and changes as the universe grows. It can also transform itself into new forms of hot matter or radiation, giving rise to new matter and energy.32 Although the details differ, the creation of new matter and energy from the quintessence field recalls Hoyle’s theory of the continuous creation of new matter and energy from a “creation field.”
In this context, the laws of conservation of matter and energy seem less like ultimate cosmic principles and more like rules of accountancy that work reasonably well for most practical purposes in the realms of terrestrial physics and chemistry, where exotic possibilities like quintessence and the creation of dark energy can be ignored. In biology, the principle of conservation of energy is also a useful working assumption, but it may turn out to have papered over some fundamental cracks, as discussed below. Even in physical systems on earth, there may be energy-conversion processes that have so far remained outside the scope of science, but which could be of practical importance in new technologies.
Scientific dogmas create taboos, with the result that entire areas of research and inquiry are excluded from mainstream science and from regular sources of funding. The result is “fringe” science, kept beyond the pale of orthodoxy by automatic skepticism. As we have seen, one of the oldest and strongest taboos in science is against perpetual-motion machines, and this taboo extends to almost any kind of unconventional energy-generating device.
Many people claim to have made devices that produce “free” energy using unconventional means. But they do not usually claim to have invented perpetual-motion machines. Instead they suggest that their devices are drawing on sources of energy that are usually untapped. Just as wind- and solar-powered devices use freely available forms of energy, so some people claim to have made devices that tap into the zero-point energy or quantum-vacuum field, drawing on unlimited reserves of free power, while some claim to have found new ways of using electrical and magnetic forces. A search on the Internet for “free energy devices” leads to a bewildering variety of claims and procedures. So does a search for “over unity devices.” The term “over unity” refers to the ability of a machine to produce more energy than is put into it. Skeptics claim that all these devices are impossible and/or fraudulent, and some promoters of “free energy” devices may indeed be fraudulent. But can we be sure that they all are?
Do any of these devices really work? And if they do, why have they not already been taken up by entrepreneurs and marketed? One answer is that it is difficult to promote a device that appears to break the perpetual-motion taboo. As soon as a potential investor asks a scientific adviser, he is likely to be told that the device is impossible and would be a waste of money. But perhaps some of these devices really do work, and really can tap into new sources of energy.
This is an area in which offering a prize might provide the best way forward. In the history of science and technology, prizes have spurred several important innovations and also enabled inventors to attract publicity for their achievements. One of the first examples was the Longitude Prize, set up by the British government in 1714 for finding an accurate method to determine longitude at sea.33 Another example is the Gossamer Condor, the first human-powered aircraft capable of sustained flight, which won the Kremer Prize in 1977. This prize was set up by a British industrialist, Harry Kremer, who offered £50,000 for the first group to fly a human-powered aircraft over a figure-of-eight course a mile long. The Gossamer Condor design was inspired by hang-gliders made of new lightweight materials and powered by an amateur cyclist. Its inventors went on to build the Gossamer Albatross, which flew twenty-two miles across the English Channel, winning the second Kremer Prize in 1979.
Current examples of incentivized challenges include the $10 million X Prizes, given by the X Prize Foundation “to create radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity thereby inspiring the formation of new industries, jobs and the revitalisation of markets.”34
A prize for the most effective “over unity” energy device might change the situation in energy research dramatically. In fair tests, conducted in an open-minded spirit of inquiry, some devices may indeed produce more energy than is put into them from conventional sources. Or perhaps the contest will reveal that no such devices exist, and no one will win the prize, giving scientific conservatives the pleasure of saying, “I told you so.”
Until some of the theories of modern cosmology came along, energy conservation was uncontroversial in physics. But in biology, the situation was—and still is—less clear.
From the seventeenth century onward, believers in the mechanistic philosophy asserted that living organisms were machines. Vitalists disagreed. This debate played an important part in the emergence of the idea of conservation of energy, especially in the work of Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94). Although he is usually remembered as a leading German physicist, he was a medical doctor in the Prussian Army as a young man; his first researches were in physiology. When he was studying in Berlin, the vitalist doctrine held sway, teaching that living organisms depended on a “life force” in addition to food, air and water. Helmholtz was an ardent believer in the mechanistic theory of life, and he made it his mission to rid biology of vitalism. At first he tried to refute the existence of vital force experimentally by studying the heat generated in the muscles of frogs’ legs when they were stimulated to contract by electrical impulses. But it was hard to get clear-cut results so, having failed to prove it experimentally, he adopted a theoretical approach. He argued on philosophical grounds that perpetual-motion machines were impossible. Then, assuming that living organisms were indeed machines, he concluded that “vital forces” did not exist. In 1847, when he was still only twenty-six, he published a memoir entitled “On the Conservation of Force” that unified ideas about the conservation of force in living organisms, in physics and in machinery.35
Helmholtz’s ideas were a major ingredient in the consensus on energy conservation that emerged in the 1850s. Living organisms were machines like everything else and obeyed the same laws, to which was now added the law of conservation of energy. From then onward, this assumption was treated as an established fact. Indeed, as the mathematician Henri Poincaré pointed out, the very generality of the laws of conservation of matter and energy meant “they are no longer capable of verification.”36 Any evidence that went against them could be dismissed as flawed or fraudulent, or explained by invoking new forms of matter or energy hitherto unobserved.
Helmholtz soon abandoned his attempts to prove the conservation of energy in frogs’ legs. Other early attempts to measure the heat output compared with the energy released by respiration showed serious discrepancies, with 20 percent more heat being produced than expected,37 but the methods were crude and inaccurate. It was not until the 1890s that the energy balance of an animal was measured rigorously, long after the conservation laws had been assumed to apply to living organisms.
Max Rubner, working in Berlin, kept a dog in a specially constructed chamber, called a respiration calorimeter, for five weeks. The substance and energy content of its food were measured and its urine, faeces, carbon dioxide output and heat production were analyzed. He found that the heat loss from the body agreed well with calculations of the amount of food material that was oxidized, with 99.7 percent accuracy.38 This was exactly what materialists wanted to hear, and the result was proclaimed to be the “death knell of vitalism.”39
In the United States, in the early twentieth century, Wilbur Atwater and Francis Benedict carried out similar studies with human subjects using respiration calorimeters in order to “demonstrate that man operated under the same laws that govern inanimate reactions.”40 Like Rubner, the American researchers calculated the amount of energy that should have been released by the amount of food oxidized, and compared it with the energy output in terms of heat production plus work. The average for all their experiments gave a near-perfect agreement between measurements and calculations, just as they had expected.41 This result was so convincing that it was unchallenged for more than seventy-five years.42
However, several other investigators were unable to replicate the expected results, and in a symposium on clinical calorimetry sponsored by the American Medical Association in 1921, a common complaint was that “inexperienced operators were using the devices and obtaining inaccurate results.”43 This comment highlights a general problem in scientific research. Results that agree with expectations are readily accepted, while those that do not are dismissed as flawed. And some experiments really are flawed—including some that give the expected results. Scientists, like most other people, accept evidence that agrees with their beliefs much more readily than evidence that contradicts them. This is one reason why established orthodoxies in science remain established.
In the late 1970s, Paul Webb reinvestigated human energy balances in his laboratory in Ohio, with surprising results. The figures simply did not add up, especially when subjects were overeating or undereating. He looked again at the data from Atwater and Benedict’s research, and found that some of their experiments showed serious discrepancies under conditions of vigorous exercise or undereating. Atwater and Benedict’s near-perfect results were arrived at by averaging data where too much or too little energy was consumed. Webb also found puzzling discrepancies in other previous studies. He concluded, “The more careful the study, the more clearly there is evidence of energy not accounted for.”44
In Webb’s own experiments, he took a careful tally of the food eaten over a three-week period, changes in body weight, heat and other forms of energy output, as well as measuring rates of oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production. He found that more energy was being used than he could explain. He did not question the law of conservation of energy, but instead suggested that there was an as yet unrecognized and unmeasured kind of energy, which he called x. Taking all the studies together, x was on average 27 percent of the total metabolic expenditure; in other words, more than a quarter of the energy was unaccounted for. Subsequent studies revealed further discrepancies in the energy balances of people who were gaining or losing weight, in pregnant women and in growing children.45
No one seemed worried about the problems revealed by Webb’s research. The conservation of energy was not a question of evidence but an article of faith.
However, a modern-day vitalist could assert that there is a vital force at work in living organisms, over and above the standard forms of energy known to physics. A yogi could speak in terms of prana, or an acupuncturist in terms of chi. Do the available data rule out any kind of energy not yet known to physics? Is present-day nutrition science so precise that it can explain every detail of energetic activity in animals and people? The answer is no. Careful, precise research might ultimately support the orthodox dogma, but at present it is an assumption, not a fact. Although most people do not realize it, there is a shocking possibility that living organisms draw upon forms of energy over and above those recognized by standard physics and chemistry.
One easy starting point for research would be to find out how some people and other animals seem to survive even though they eat very little food. It is well established that eating much less than usual can have beneficial effects. A reduced intake of calories, or “caloric restriction,” improves health, slows the ageing process and increases lifespan in a wide variety of species, including yeast, nematode worms, fruit flies, fish, rodents, dogs and people.
A far greater challenge is presented by recurrent stories of people who seem to be able to live for months or years without eating. This phenomenon is known as inedia (Latin for “fasting”). Of course such stories violate common sense: everybody knows that people, and animals, need food in order to stay alive.
I first heard of this phenomenon when my wife and I visited Jodhpur, in Rajasthan, India, in 1984. An Indian friend took us to visit a local holy woman called Satimata in the nearby village of Bala. We were told that when her husband died in 1943, when she was about forty years old, she wanted to immolate herself on his funeral pyre in the tradition of suttee, but she was prevented from doing so. Instead, she vowed never to eat again. When we met her, she was supposed to have lived for forty-three years without food or drink, and without producing feces or urine. Yet she looked like a normal elderly village woman, apart from the fact that she was surrounded by devotees. While we were there she had a cold and had to blow her nose several times. So she seemed to be defying not only the law of conservation of energy but also the law of conservation of matter, generating mucus but taking in no food or water.
Of course I assumed that she must have been eating and drinking secretly. Yet her devotees were adamant that she was genuine. Some had known her for years, even lived with her, so had had the opportunity to see if she was eating behind the scenes. Either they were part of a conspiracy, or she was a very skilled deceiver. My skepticism was an immediate mental reflex. But when I met her, and talked to people who knew her, she did not strike me as a charlatan, but as a woman of sincere religious faith. I later found that she was not unique: other holy men and women in India were supposed to have lived without food for years. Some had been exposed as frauds, but others had been investigated by medical teams who found no evidence of secret eating.
In India, the explanation most commonly advanced for the ability to live without food is that the energy is derived from sunlight or from the breath, and in particular from prana, a life force in the breath. This is why some people who claim to live with little or no food call themselves “breatharians.” Interestingly, the prana theory does not in itself challenge the principle of conservation of energy: it suggests that some people can derive all their energy from a source other than food.
In 2010, a team from the Indian Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences (DIPAS) investigated an eighty-three-year-old yogi called Prahlad Jani, who lived in the temple town of Anbaji in Gujarat. His devotees claimed that he had not eaten for seventy years. In the DIPAS study, he was kept for two weeks in a hospital under continuous observation and filmed on CCTV cameras. He had several baths and gargled, but the medical team confirmed that he ate and drank nothing, and passed no urine or feces. A previous medical investigation in 2003 had given similar results. The director of DIPAS said, “If a person starts fasting, there will be some changes in his metabolism but in his case we did not find any.”46 This is an important point, because surviving a two-week fast is in itself not particularly impressive. Most people could do that, but there would be very noticeable physiological changes while they did so.
In the West, there have also been many claims that people can live for long periods without eating, including holy men and women like St. Catherine of Siena (died 1380); St. Lidwina (died 1433), who was said to have eaten nothing for twenty-eight years; the Blessed Nicholas von Flüe (died 1487), nineteen years; and the Venerable Domenica dal Paradiso (died 1553), twenty years. In the nineteenth century, two saintly women were said to have eaten nothing for twelve years except consecrated wafers in holy communion: Domenica Lazzari (died 1848) and Louise Lateau (died 1883).47 In the nineteenth century there was also a widespread “fasting girl” phenomenon in Europe and the United States. Some may have been anorexic, others were exposed as frauds; but there are some well-documented cases where girls lived for years without eating.
Herbert Thurston, a Jesuit scholar, documented this fascinating phenomenon in his classic study The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism (1952). He pointed out that not all cases of inedia occurred in particularly spiritual people. For example, a Scottish girl, Janet McLeod, seemed to survive without food for four years. She was investigated quite thoroughly and the case was reported in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1767. This young woman was seriously sick rather than saintly.
In the eighteenth century, Pope Benedict XIV asked the medical faculty of the University of Bologna to investigate cases of inedia. In their report, while fully recognizing the likelihood of imposture, credulity and malobservation, the doctors upheld “the genuineness of certain well-attested examples of long abstinence from food though no supernatural causation could reasonably be supposed.”48 As in the case of Janet McLeod, some of these cases seemed to result from illnesses.
The best-documented example in the twentieth century was the Bavarian mystic Therese Neumann (1898–1962). In 1922 she stopped eating solid food. On Fridays she had visions of the passion of Christ and, like some other Roman Catholic mystics, bled profusely from wounds on her hands and feet, known as stigmata. The astonishing nature of her prolonged fast as well as the stigmata attracted much public attention, and the Bishop of Regensburg appointed a commission to investigate the case, headed by a distinguished doctor. Therese was closely observed for two weeks by a team of nursing sisters. Relieving each other by pairs, two of the four were continually on duty, never letting the girl out of their sight. Observation of her over a fortnight proved to the satisfaction of all unprejudiced persons that she did not during that period take either food or drink. What is even more striking, a pronounced loss of weight that occurred during the Friday ecstasies (owing to bleeding from her stigmata) was in each case made good during the two or three days that followed.49
But, as Thurston recognized, no amount of evidence would alter the opinions of committed skeptics, who declared her “a vulgar imposter.” After considering many religious and non-religious cases, he concluded,
We are forced to admit that quite a number of people, in whose case no miraculous intervention can be supposed, have lived for years upon a pittance of nourishing food which can be measured only by ounces; and upon this evidence we shall be forced to admit the justness of the conclusion of Pope Benedict XIV that mere continuation of life, while food and drink are withheld, cannot be safely assumed to be due to supernatural causes.50
If a pope and a leading Jesuit scholar favor a natural rather than supernatural explanation, what might it be? We will never find out by adopting a position of dogmatic skepticism and pretending that the phenomenon does not exist.
One starting point for research would be to find out where else in the world inedia occurs: it seems unlikely to be confined to India and the West. And if it occurs elsewhere, is it more common among females than males, as it seems to be in Europe?
What relationship does it bear to the physiology of hibernation in animals?
How is inedia related to “caloric restriction”?
All these questions would greatly widen the scope of the science of nutrition, which is of increasing practical importance. About a billion people are classified as undernourished, while more than a billion are overweight or obese. There is a wide variety of dieting methods and no clear scientific consensus on what works best.
Including inedia within the field of science rather than keeping it beyond the pale might enable us to learn something important. By treating the laws of conservation and matter and energy as testable hypotheses rather than revealed truths, physiology and nutrition science would become more scientific, not less so.
Many people will confidently predict that all cases of inedia will be found to be fraudulent or to have some other conventional explanation. They may turn out to be right. If they are, the conventional assumptions will be strengthened by new evidence. But if they are wrong, we will learn something new that may raise bigger questions that go beyond the biological sciences. Are there new forms of energy that are not at present recognized by science? Or can the energy in the zero-point field, which is recognized by science, be tapped by living organisms?
The idea of matter as passive, and energy or force as the active principle of nature, is fundamental to science. It is also an ancient conception in religious traditions. The active principle is breath or spirit. Maybe there really is a free, creative spirit flowing through all nature, including the dark energy or quintessence through which the cosmos is growing. Our breath is part of this universal flow. We have mechanized the flow of energy through windmills, waterwheels, steam engines, motors and electric circuits, but outside man-made machines the flow is freer. Maybe the energy balances in galaxies, stars, planets, animals and plants are not always exact. Energy may not always be exactly conserved. And new matter and energy may arise from quintessence, more at some times and in some places than at others.
The flow of energy through living organisms may not depend only on the caloric content of food and the physiology of digestion and respiration. It may also depend on the way the organism is linked to a larger flow of energy in all nature. Terms like spirit, prana and chi may refer to a kind of energy that mechanistic science has missed out but which would show up quantitatively through discrepancies in calorimeter studies. If such a form of energy exists, how is it related to the principles of physics, including the zero-point field? Physiology may be seriously incomplete, and may have a lot to learn from non-mechanistic systems of healing, such as those of shamans, healers and practitioners of yoga, ayurveda and acupuncture.
Meanwhile, modern physics reveals vast invisible reservoirs of dark matter and dark energy, and the quantum-vacuum field is full of energy, interacting with everything that happens. Maybe some of this energy can be tapped by new energy technologies, with huge economic and social consequences.
Is your belief in the conservation of matter and energy an assumption, or is it based on evidence? If so, what is the evidence?
Do you think that dark matter is conserved?
Can you accept that there may be a continuous creation of dark energy as the universe expands?
If there is a vast amount of energy in the quantum-vacuum field, do you think that we might be able to tap it?
SUMMARY
In the Big Bang all the matter and energy in the universe suddenly appeared from nowhere. Modern cosmology supposes that dark matter and dark energy now make up 96 percent of reality. No one knows what dark matter and energy are, how they work or how they interact with familiar forms of matter and energy. The amount of dark energy seems to be increasing as the universe expands, and the “quintessence field” may give rise to new matter and energy, more in some places than others. The evidence for energy conservation in living organisms is weak, and there are several anomalies, like the apparent ability of some people to live without food for long periods, that suggest the existence of new forms of energy. All quantum processes are supposed to be mediated through the quantum-vacuum field, also known as the zero-point field, which is not empty but full of energy and continually gives rise to virtual photons and particles of matter. Could this energy be tapped in new technologies?