Can We Actually Use It?

The honest scorecard on extracting energy from the vacuum. Who's tried, what worked, what didn't, and what an independent researcher can actually do.

The Fundamental Problem

The vacuum is the ground state — the lowest energy level of the universe. To extract energy from a system, you need a gradient. Water flows downhill. Heat flows from hot to cold. Batteries discharge from high potential to low. Energy extraction always requires a "somewhere lower" for the energy to go.

The vacuum, by definition, is already as low as it gets. There's no "downhill" from the ground state.

This is the argument that kills most vacuum energy harvesting proposals before they start. It's the same reason you can't extract energy from a room-temperature object without a colder reservoir. The second law of thermodynamics doesn't just make it hard. It makes it, in the general case, impossible.

But "in the general case" isn't the whole story. The vacuum is the ground state of free space. Introduce boundaries — plates, cavities, material surfaces — and you create a different vacuum state with a different energy. The energy difference between two vacuum configurations is, in principle, available. The Casimir effect already proves this: energy is released when two plates come together.

The real question isn't whether any energy can ever be released. The Casimir effect already does that. The question is whether the process can be made cyclical — whether you can extract energy, reset the system, and extract again, without putting in more energy than you get out.

Robert Forward's Battery (1984)

The first serious proposal for converting vacuum energy to electricity came from Robert Forward — a physicist at Hughes Aircraft Research Labs who held 18 patents and, in a parallel career, published eleven science fiction novels. Forward was the rare physicist equally comfortable with equations and imagination.

In 1984, he published "Extracting electrical energy from the vacuum by cohesion of charged foliated conductors" in Physical Review B. The concept was ingenious: a stack of thin conducting plates, all charged with the same polarity. The electrostatic repulsion pushes them apart. The Casimir force pulls them together. If you tune the charge so the electrostatic force is always slightly weaker than the Casimir attraction, the plates collapse inward, and the Casimir force does work against the electric field, adding energy to the system.

Forward was honest about the limitation: this is a one-shot device. Once the plates have collapsed, pulling them apart again requires at least as much energy as was released. It's not a perpetual motion machine. It's more like a very exotic spring that converts vacuum fluctuation potential energy into electrical energy — once.

The real value of Forward's paper was conceptual. It proved that part of the van der Waals potential energy between conductors could be converted to electrical form. It didn't solve the energy problem, but it moved the question from "is this possible in principle?" to "can this be made practical?"

The Puthoff Controversy

Any honest discussion of vacuum energy extraction has to address Harold Puthoff, because his name dominates the field — for better and worse.

Puthoff earned a PhD from Stanford in electrical engineering in 1967 and co-authored a respected textbook on quantum electronics. His early career was legitimate and productive. Then things got complicated.

From 1972 to 1985, Puthoff directed the Stargate Project at Stanford Research Institute — a CIA-funded program investigating remote viewing and psychic phenomena, testing claims from Uri Geller and others. The scientific community was, to put it mildly, skeptical.

In the late 1980s, Puthoff turned to zero-point energy. His 1989 paper in Physical Review A proposed that gravity itself could be explained as a zero-point fluctuation force. In 1994, with Bernhard Haisch and Alfonso Rueda, he published a more ambitious paper — also in Physical Review A — arguing that inertia arises from the interaction of matter with the electromagnetic zero-point field.

The Haisch-Rueda-Puthoff model was provocative and got real attention, including coverage in Science magazine. If correct, it would mean that both inertia and gravity are vacuum phenomena — and potentially modifiable.

But the work drew serious technical criticism. Steve Carlip, a well-regarded gravitational physicist at UC Davis, identified a significant computational error in Puthoff's 1989 paper that rendered the claimed effects negligible. In 2009, Yefim Levin raised questions about the mathematical foundations of the full HRP model. Massimo Pigliucci characterized the energy extraction claims as pseudoscience.

In 2017, Puthoff co-founded To the Stars Academy with Tom DeLonge — a company focused on UFO research — further eroding his standing in mainstream physics.

The honest assessment: Puthoff is a real physicist with real publications in real journals. The SED (Stochastic Electrodynamics) framework he uses is a legitimate alternative formulation of quantum electrodynamics, used by other researchers for other purposes. But his specific conclusions about energy extraction remain unverified and his credibility has been weakened by his associations with fringe research. The ideas are worth knowing about. They are not worth betting on.

Moddel's Experiments at Colorado

If you want to see vacuum energy extraction taken seriously by mainstream academia, Garret Moddel at the University of Colorado Boulder is the person to watch.

Moddel is a Professor Emeritus of Photonics and Quantum Engineering — not a fringe figure. His approach is experimental, not just theoretical, and his results are published in peer-reviewed journals.

The setup: Casimir cavities on one side of a metal-insulator-metal (MIM) tunneling device. The cavity modifies the local vacuum state, creating an asymmetry in the zero-point fluctuation spectrum. This asymmetry induces a measurable electrical current between the two metal layers — with no applied voltage.

Over more than a thousand experiments, Moddel has consistently measured small but real currents from these devices. The results have been published in Physical Review Research (2021), Symmetry (2021), and Atoms (2019).

The critical question is interpretation. Something is producing current. But is it really vacuum energy, or a conventional effect — thermal gradients, chemical reactions at the interfaces, charge trapping? Moddel and his team have controlled for the obvious alternatives, but the extraordinary nature of the claim means the bar for proof is very high.

In a 2019 review paper co-authored with Puthoff and others, three categories of vacuum energy extraction were evaluated:

Nonlinear processing of the zero-point field — violates thermodynamics. Doesn't work.
Mechanical extraction using Casimir cavities — also violates thermodynamics. Doesn't work.
Pumping atoms through Casimir cavities — doesn't obviously violate thermodynamics, but may face other obstacles. Inconclusive.

Moddel's MIM devices fall closest to the third category. The experiments are real. The interpretation remains open.

DARPA Takes an Interest

When the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency spends money on something, it means at least one program manager thinks the potential payoff justifies the risk. DARPA has run two programs specifically targeting vacuum energy physics.

QUEST (Quest for Undiscovered Energy Storage and Thrust) sought rigorous models leading to testable experiments on whether energy or momentum transfer from the quantum vacuum is possible. It focused on the Casimir force, the dynamic Casimir effect, and quantum decoherence.

ARRIVE (Applications Resulting from Recent Insights in Vacuum Engineering) was the follow-on. It awarded at least $2.2 million to Jeremy Munday at UC Davis alone. The program investigated three applications:

Casimir force engineering — using the force for nanoscale actuators and switches
Dynamic Casimir effect — as a source of entangled photon pairs for quantum technologies
Spin qubit decoherence — understanding how vacuum fluctuations limit quantum computing

Notice that DARPA's focus was primarily on engineering applications of the Casimir effect, not on energy harvesting. The most practical near-term use of vacuum physics isn't generating power — it's controlling forces at the nanoscale and generating quantum states.

An important caveat: DARPA funding does not validate the claims. DARPA funds high-risk research precisely because most of it won't pan out. Having a DARPA program means the question is worth asking, not that the answer is yes.

Quantum Energy Teleportation: Real But Not What You Think

In 2008, Masahiro Hotta at Tohoku University proposed something called quantum energy teleportation (QET). The name sounds like science fiction. The physics is rigorous.

Here's how it works. Alice performs a measurement on the quantum vacuum at her location. This measurement injects energy into the vacuum (the act of measurement is never free). She sends the measurement result to Bob via a classical channel — a phone call, an email, a written note. Bob uses this information to perform a specific operation on the vacuum at his location that extracts energy — up to, but never more than, the amount Alice injected.

The key insight: the vacuum state has quantum entanglement between distant points. Alice's measurement collapses the entanglement in a way that creates an extractable energy imbalance at Bob's location, but only if Bob knows Alice's result.

In 2023, physicists demonstrated QET on IBM quantum computers. In September 2024, a team at Purdue University published an enhanced protocol that stores the extracted energy in a quantum register rather than losing it to classical dissipation.

This is real, demonstrated quantum physics. But it is emphatically not free energy. Alice always puts in at least as much energy as Bob extracts. No thermodynamic laws are violated. The total energy budget is always zero or negative. What's remarkable is the teleportation aspect — energy extracted at a distance using only classical communication and pre-existing vacuum entanglement.

QET matters not because it solves the energy problem, but because it shows vacuum energy can be meaningfully manipulated using quantum information protocols. It's a tool, not a power source.

The Startup Claims

Casimir Space, founded by Harold "Sonny" White — formerly of NASA's Eagleworks laboratory — claims to be building commercial vacuum energy devices. Their reported specs: proprietary Casimir cavity chips etched on silicon substrates, currently achieving 3.5V capacitive discharges, with some chips showing steady-state current. Target: 5mm x 5mm chips generating 1.5V and 25 microamps, for powering IoT sensors and devices like AirTags.

White's previous lab was involved in the EM Drive controversy — claims of propellantless thrust that were later attributed to thermal effects by independent researchers. That track record warrants caution.

The Casimir Space claims have not been independently replicated or published in peer-reviewed journals. They may be genuine. They may be measurement artifacts. Without independent verification, the honest position is: interesting if true, unverified, approach with skepticism.

What You Can Actually Do

If you're an independent researcher with real curiosity and a modest budget, the most accessible entry point is Casimir force measurement.

A 2019 paper in Microsystems & Nanoengineering showed how to build a Casimir force measurement platform using a commercial MEMS accelerometer. The sensor itself costs tens of dollars. It has force sensitivity comparable to an atomic force microscope, all on a single millimeter-scale chip.

A realistic setup would need:

A commercial MEMS accelerometer chip ($10-50)
Micron-scale gold or silver-coated microspheres
Micromanipulation tools for assembly
An optical breadboard for mounting
Vibration isolation (the expensive part — a few thousand dollars for a proper table, or improvise with bungee cord suspension)
Electronics for readout

Cost range: $1,000-5,000 for a minimal ambient-conditions setup. $10,000-30,000 for a proper vacuum-enclosed system. $50,000+ for lab-quality precision.

Open questions you could explore:

Geometry dependence. The 2021 result showing 500x deviation from standard approximations in complex geometries means there's a frontier of unexplored shapes. Fabricate unusual boundary configurations and measure.
Material dependence. How do different coatings, nanostructures, or metamaterials change the Casimir force? Chiral materials that might produce repulsive forces are particularly interesting.
Casimir forces in liquids. The repulsive effect demonstrated in 2009 used one specific liquid-material combination. Many more combinations are unexplored.
Replicating Moddel's MIM devices. If you have access to thin-film deposition equipment, his experiments could be independently tested.

None of these will produce a vacuum energy generator. But they will produce real measurements of real physics at the frontier of what's known. That's how science actually advances — not through breakthroughs announced on YouTube, but through careful measurements that narrow the gap between what we predict and what we observe.

The Honest Scorecard

Let me be direct about where things stand.

Established and real: - Vacuum energy exists and has physical effects (Casimir force, Lamb shift, spontaneous emission) - The Casimir force can be attractive or repulsive depending on materials and geometry - Real photons can be created from vacuum fluctuations (dynamic Casimir effect) - Vacuum energy can be manipulated via quantum information protocols (QET)

Promising but unproven: - Moddel's MIM device experiments show real currents, but the vacuum-energy interpretation is debated - DARPA-funded Casimir engineering for nanotechnology applications - Casimir cavities as entangled photon sources for quantum computing

Speculative: - Puthoff's SED-based extraction proposals (published but technically criticized) - Casimir Space's commercial claims (unverified) - Quantized inertia and vacuum-mediated propulsion

Not going to happen: - Free, unlimited energy from the quantum vacuum - Devices that violate conservation of energy or the second law of thermodynamics - Anything sold online as a "zero-point energy generator"

The vacuum is not a free lunch. It's a physical system with real properties, real forces, and genuine open questions. The path forward is through careful science — precise measurements, honest error bars, reproducible results — not through hype.

But here's what keeps the field alive: the cosmological constant problem. The 120-order-of-magnitude discrepancy between predicted and observed vacuum energy means we fundamentally do not understand the relationship between quantum fields and gravity. Whatever resolves that problem will change physics at its foundations. And it might — might — reveal something about vacuum energy that nobody has imagined yet.

The biggest discoveries in physics have always come from resolving exactly these kinds of contradictions. Quantum mechanics came from the ultraviolet catastrophe. Relativity came from the constancy of the speed of light. The next revolution might come from the vacuum catastrophe.

We don't know yet. That's what makes it worth working on.

This concludes the Vacuum Energy series. For the companion series on gravity modification, see the Anti-Gravity series starting with "What Gravity Really Is."