Throughout history, “free energy” has been a scammer’s game, such as perpetual motion. But with zero-point energy, is it actually possible?
Here on planet Earth, humans have long sought to harness the power of nature to perform difficult tasks for them. Thousands of years ago, agriculture advanced greatly when the combination of domesticated animals and the plow allowed for non-human energy to be put to use in farming practices. The production of food from grain took a great leap forward when windmills were built and attached to millstones. Mastering processes like combustion allowed us to harness the controlled release of energy at will, and combining a variety of mechanical, chemical, and even nuclear power sources with the process of electrification helped lead to our modern world.
Sure, there are plenty of sources of clean, abundant energy out there for us to harness: wind, solar, flowing water, or even nuclear fission and fusion processes enabled by the power of the atomic nucleus. However, those all require leveraging the energy from particles, either macroscopically or on the quantum level, to power our energy needs. There’s another option that seeks to go beyond that: zero-point energy, or ZPE for short. Is that a real prospect…
