STM-D-0936Paper1989Published and peer-reviewed

Gravity as a zero-point-fluctuation force

Harold E. Puthoff

Abstract and summary · read the original at the source

In one page

In 1967 Andrei Sakharov floated a startling idea: gravity may not be a fundamental force at all, but a leftover effect of the vacuum’s own jitter, in the same family as the Casimir force and the van der Waals attraction between neutral atoms. Sakharov gave the idea and a rough formula. Puthoff’s 1989 paper is the first attempt to carry it all the way through with numbers. He models matter as charged point particles that are constantly shaken by the vacuum’s zero-point electromagnetic field. That shaking — physicists call it Zitterbewegung, German for trembling motion — carries kinetic energy, and Puthoff identifies that hidden internal energy as the particle’s mass. Each trembling particle also radiates, and two such particles feel a long-range attraction through their correlated radiation. Puthoff computes it and gets Newton’s inverse-square law, with the gravitational constant fixed by the vacuum’s cutoff frequency and no free parameters left to tune. Gravity, in this picture, is electromagnetism already unified with itself.

Why it matters hereThis is the paper chapter 3 is built around: the fully worked version of Sakharov’s proposal that gravity is induced by the zero-point field rather than standing apart from it, and the one that derives mass, the gravitational constant and Newton’s law from a single vacuum interaction. It also gives chapter 2 its sharpest statement of what a structured vacuum buys you — change the field and you are changing gravity, because in this model gravity is the field.

What it claims

01Gravitation is treated not as a separately existing fundamental force but as an induced residual effect of zero-point fluctuations of the vacuum electromagnetic field, in the same family as the van der Waals and Casimir forces rather than the fundamental Coulomb force — the proposal Sakharov made in 1967 and the one this paper carries through quantitatively.Section I, Introduction; restated at the head of Section VI, Discussion
What to watch
02Particle mass is derived rather than assumed: it is the expectation value of the kinetic energy of the vacuum-driven trembling motion of charged point particles, an internal and therefore unobserved energy, whose magnitude is set by the particle’s radiation damping constant together with the vacuum spectrum’s high-frequency cutoff. Puthoff calls this the first of the model’s three results.Section III into Section IV, the passage defining rest-mass energy from the trembling kinetic energy
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03The cutoff frequency of the zero-point spectrum is fixed by the principle of equivalence, not chosen to fit: an accelerated observer sees the background spectrum augmented by a term proportional to the square of the acceleration, equivalence requires the same augmentation near a gravitating mass, and matching the two yields Sakharov’s relation between the gravitational constant and a cutoff on the order of the Planck frequency. This is the second result.Section II, the leading terms of the accelerated-frame spectrum; Section IV, equations 39 and 40
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04The force between two such particles is computed as a retarded van der Waals force between their correlated radiation fields, following Boyer’s method, and the leading non-oscillatory term is Newton’s inverse-square law of gravitation with no adjustable parameters required. This is the third and final result of the model.Section V, equations 56 through 62
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05Familiar puzzles about gravity become consequences of the model rather than brute facts: its extreme weakness is the inverse square of a very high cutoff frequency, its attractive character is what van der Waals forces do generally, its single-signed charge follows from mass being a strictly positive kinetic energy, and gravity cannot be shielded because vacuum noise cannot be shielded, matter being a dilute particle gas inside a high-frequency cavity rather than a dense boundary.Section VI, Discussion, second and third paragraphs
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06Because the whole construction rests on the zero-point field of the vacuum electromagnetic field alone, gravitational theory in this form is what Puthoff calls an already unified theory, and he notes that if the model is a proper representation of the interaction it argues against treating gravity as a separate force to be unified, or as a separate field to be quantised.Section VI, Discussion, fourth and fifth paragraphs; and the abstract
What to watch

Read it · abstract

Abstract

Sakharov has proposed a suggestive model in which gravity is not a separately existing fundamental force, but rather an induced effect associated with zero-point fluctuations (ZPF’s) of the vacuum, in much the same manner as the van der Waals and Casimir forces. In the spirit of this proposal we develop a point-particle–ZPF interaction model that accords with and fulfills this hypothesis. In the model gravitational mass and its associated gravitational effects are shown to derive in a fully self-consistent way from electromagnetic-ZPF-induced particle motion (Zitterbewegung). Because of its electromagnetic-ZPF underpinning, gravitational theory in this form constitutes an “already unified” theory.

H. E. Puthoff, Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin. Physical Review A 39, number 5, pages 2333 to 2342, 1 March 1989. Received 14 March 1988; revised manuscript received 15 August 1988.

(Abstract only. The complete article was read for this page from the APS full-text service — see the rights note above — but is not reproduced here. On this site, the zero-point-field account of inertia that grew out of this line of work is at /library/stm-7be6973b35, with its later advances at /library/stm-0a34c0c732, the short statement of the inertia result at /library/stm-0b5eaf66a8, and the combined inertia-and-gravitation treatment at /library/stm-93cf38cc58. Puthoff’s companion argument that atomic ground states are themselves an equilibrium with the zero-point field is at /library/stm-c7c1082f9b, and an astrophysical application of zero-point pressure is at /library/stm-edaf616bc9.)

The way in

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.39.2333PUBLICATION. Physical Review A, third series, volume 39, number 5, pages 2333 to 2342, 1 March 1989. Received 14 March 1988, revised manuscript received 15 August 1988. Copyright 1989 The American Physical Society, published under the APS default licence, with no Creative Commons statement anywhere in the article, so only the abstract is reproduced here. SOURCE READ. The complete ten-page article was retrieved as a PDF from the APS harvest service at harvest.aps.org, path /v2/journals/articles/10.1103/PhysRevA.39.2333/fulltext, and read in full; the abstract below is the article’s own printed abstract, and the summary, claims and locators were written from the complete text, not from a database record. AUTHOR AFFILIATION as printed: H. E. Puthoff, Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, Austin, Texas 78746. The given name Harold is expanded here from the author’s other publications of the same period; the article itself prints the initials H. E. Puthoff. NOTATION. The paper’s equations use characters this site cannot render safely, so relations are written out in words. The paper writes the Zitterbewegung jitter motion in italics throughout, and the scan of the running text renders that word inconsistently; it is given in its correct spelling here. LATER EXCHANGE. The paper drew a published comment and reply four years on, both confirmed in Crossref: S. Carlip, Comment on ‘Gravity as a zero-point-fluctuation force’, Physical Review A 47, pages 3452 to 3453 (DOI 10.1103/PhysRevA.47.3452), and H. E. Puthoff, Reply to ‘Comment on “Gravity as a zero-point-fluctuation force”’, Physical Review A 47, pages 3454 to 3455 (DOI 10.1103/PhysRevA.47.3454). Neither the comment nor the reply was read for this page; they are recorded here so a reader following the argument knows the exchange exists and where to find it.

How to cite it

Harold E. Puthoff (1989) Gravity as a zero-point-fluctuation force. doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.39.2333

Where it sits in the curriculum

Inertia and gravity from the vacuum