Exploiting Zero-Point Energy; December 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Yam; 4 Page(s)

Something for nothing. That¿s the reason for the gurgling water, ultrasonic transducers, heat-measuring calorimeters, data-plotting software and other technological trappings-- some seemingly of the backyard variety--inside the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin, Tex. One would not confuse this laboratory with the similarly named but far more renowned one in Princeton, N.J., where Albert Einstein and other physicists have probed fundamental secrets of space and time. The one in Austin is more modestly appointed, but its goals are no less revolutionary. The researchers here test machinery that, inventors assert, can extract energy from empty space.

Claims for perpetual-motion machines and other free-energy devices still persist, of course, even though they inevitably turn out to violate at least one law of thermodynamics. Energy in the vacuum, though, is very much real. According to modern physics, a vacuum isn¿t a pocket of nothingness. It churns with unseen activity even at absolute zero, the temperature defined as the point at which all molecular motion ceases.