The History of Physics in 1,000 Words

And Steps toward Adding Consciousness to the Physical Sciences

(I’ve been working this year on three original pieces about the Zero Point Field. I’ve been interested in “Field Science” since I was 17, back in 1983, and I began writing professionally from the beginning of my career, at age 22 in 1988, when I was a science and psychology journalist. I hope that you find both interesting and relevant what I’ll be writing about the Field. I thought I’d start by sharing again my two short posts on the history of science.)

Here are, in my view and in 1,000 words, the most meaningful milestones in the history of the physical sciences:

In the 1500s and 1600s, Nicholas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Johannes Kepler laid the foundations of modern astronomy.

In the late 1600s, Isaac Newton established classical physics, including key ideas about light, time, gravity, motion, and orbits.

In 1803, the chemist John Dalton showed that all chemical compounds result from atoms grouping together to form molecules.

In 1849, Michael Faraday first proposed the electric and magnetic fields.  Then Faraday connected them to light.

In 1864, James Clerk Maxwell proposed the unified electromagnetic field (including light).  (While it wasn’t proven until more than a century later, in his theory, Maxwell included magnetic vector potentials and electrostatic scalar potentials, both physically effective.) 

In 1900, Max Planck founded quantum physics when he showed that light and other e-m waves are emitted in chunks or packets – quanta – including quanta of light called photons.  In 1911, Planck proved that “empty” space is bursting with activity.

In 1904, Hantaro Nagaoka proposed a model of the atom with electrons and a nucleus, which Ernest Rutherford proved experimentally in 1911.  In 1932, James Chadwick added protons.

In his relativity theories of 1905 and 1916, Albert Einstein gave us three major ideas still valid today:  

1.       There is a lot of energy in matter.

2.       The speed of light is constant.  And

3.       Time and space have no sharp distinction and are dynamic and relative to the observer.

In 1929, Edwin Hubble showed that the universe is expanding.  In 1948, George Ganow proposed that the universe began with a singularity: “the Big Bang”.

In the 1920s, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrodinger, Werner Heisenberg, and Wolfgang Pauli established quantum mechanical field theory.  Quantum calculations showed that we and the physical universe are embedded in a moving “sea” of quantum-level energy.

Heisenberg proposed that every particle has a wave.  Schrodinger’s model replaced orbiting electrons with vibrating frequencies of electron-waves.

In the 1940s, physicist David Bohm established that in plasma the electrons act as a whole with organic qualities.  Then Bohm observed that electrons in metals behave in an organized way, as if each “electron” is “mind-like” and knows what untold trillions of other electrons are doing.  Later Bohm proved that under the right circumstances an electron is able to “feel’ the presence of a magnetic field.  This has since been proven in many experiments. 

In 1952, Bohm proposed a field that pervades all space and acts as a primary organizing reality.

In 1969, physicist Timothy Boyer proposed the Zero Point Field. 

By 1980, David Bohm had proposed that all particles are unfolded and sustained by a constant influx from an implicate order, until they enfold back into it.  Moment by moment, these dynamic enfoldings and unfoldings create our universe. 

In Bohm’s paradigm, no electron or particle is ever separate from the implicate order, which fundamentally affects it.  Each electron and particle acts like a radio, translating (from its wave) information (that each wave carries about the surround environment) into movement. 

And waves?  They flow out of the implicate order.  The universe as a whole organizes its sub-wholes and gives structure and form to each sub-structure and each particle.

By the time he died in 1992, Bohm had shown how the universe can enfold information and meaning into each part of the universe. 

From the 1960s to the 1990s, quantum physicists proved that each neutron or proton is made up of three quarks, which come in six “flavors” and three “colors”.

In 1975, Tai Tsun Wu, Chen Ning Yang, and Terence W. Barrett showed that the two potentials proposed a century earlier by James Clerk Maxwell are real.  In what is called the Aharanov-Bohm effect (posited in 1959), these potentials (1) control the phase of e-m fields and (2) mediate between e-m fields and the Zero Point Field.

[That’s Tai Tsun Wu.]

In 1982, Alain Aspect, Jean Dalibard, and Gerard Roger proved that photons communicate without any known physical process.  There is an intrinsic connection between particles in a quantum system, and John A. Wheeler has shown that in photons this connection lasts billions of years.

[That’s Alain Aspect.]

In the 1980s and 1990s, physicist Hal Puthoff perfected and powerfully advanced Timothy Boyer’s initial findings and theory, including showing mathematically that via waves, electrons constantly lose and gain energy from the Zero Point Field.  In Puthoff’s framework: 

1.       All matter is surrounded with zero-point energy, and electrons “refuel” from the Field. 

2.       All the energy in the Field exceeds all the energy in matter by 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times.

3.       Zero-point energy generates the world of matter that fills space-time.

4.       Gravity is an after-effect from the presence of matter in the Zero Point Field. 

In 1994, Puthoff, Bernard Haisch, and Alfonso Rueda showed that inertia is resistance to being accelerated by the Zero Point Field, which grips onto subatomic particles every time an object is pushed.  Inertia gives substance to matter. 

In 1995, Haisch, Rueda, and Daniel Cole showed that “the universe owes its very structure to the Zero Point Field”.  The Field causes energy particles to accelerate and thus concentrate into matter.

[That’s Bernard Haisch, who’s written a whole book about how the Zero Point Field and God are the same thing — a topic we’ll get back to.]

In 2004, physicist Shahriar Afshar proved that even individual particles continue to act as waves.  Afshar proposes that it is waves that are fundamental.

In 2005, experimenters at the Brookhaven National Laboratory showed that the Field constitutes an extremely dense gluon field.  Gluons are the particles binding (or gluing) quarks – the fundamental units of protons and neutrons.  The Field’s gluon field is responsible for 95 percent of visible matter and most of its mass.

So by the dawn of the 21^st Century we knew that the Field stabilizes every “holon” in the natural universe, including every atom and every solar system.  Interacting with particles – crystallized points of Field energy – and with systems of particles, the Field determines mass and all other physical properties of nature.

And we know that everything we see or hold in our hands is grouped charges of energy (and information) interacting with the ceaseless waves of this plenum, this matrix – made of a special kind of quantum light – that we call the Zero Point Field.