A Sea of Infinite Energy (ERI Pt. 7)
A Sea of Infinite Energy (ERI Pt. 7)
This is part 7 of my series covering the Eyring Research Institute, BYU’s Cold War weapons and computer technology research arm. I have written these so they can be read independently, but check out the new “ERI Index” link on the header bar for past installments if you want to catch up.
Space is not as empty as is popularly believed. True, the matter that we interact with on the day-to-day makes up a small portion of the cosmos. But the vacuum separating planets and stars is not truly empty. Our sun, other stars, and galaxies constantly flood the cosmos with radiation. Gamma rays, the most potent of this radiation, travel nearly unimpeded through space. The most powerful are called cosmic rays, beams of pure radiation emitted by highly energetic galaxies separated from our own by impossibly large distances of space and time.
Most cosmic rays are deflected by our atmosphere, but a few manage to penetrate through and are detected by ground-based observatories. Astronauts, however, are unprotected in orbit and report flashes of light from inside their retinas as these rays interact with the interiors of their eyes.
Even the blackness of space is not that black. Had evolution shifted the human visual range down hundreds of nanometers, we would see the night sky subtly glowing — an all-sky isotropic remnant of the heat from the birth of the universe.
At an even more fundamental level of reality, the vacuum of space pulses with energy. Quantum field theory, the current best physical model for the nature of subatomic particles, tells us that space is permeated with energy fields stretching from one end of our infinite universe to the other. Subtle energy increases within these fields give rise to the quarks, electrons, and other particles that make familiar matter. On this level, the universe gets weird. The fields constantly oscillate between energy levels, imbuing empty space with energy. This is the zero-point energy, the lowest amount of energy a quantum system can have. Despite the name, the energy density is not zero, but for entropic reasons remains untappable.
In a sense, these universal fields are reminiscent of the old aether theory. Until the 20th century it was assumed that light needed a medium to travel through. Joseph Smith, writing about 30 years before Maxwell discovered his equations and set physics on the course that would dispel the aether, included this all-space medium in the Book of Abraham’s model of the cosmos.
This book is considered one of the fundamental Mormon scriptures. Based on Smith’s alleged translations of Egyptian funerary texts purchased from a mummy collector, the Book of Abraham includes quite a bit of speculative astronomy supposedly revealed by God. It is printed with facsimiles of the original Egyptian texts along with Joseph Smith’s annotations. Facsimile 2 focuses on astronomical objects and their Egyptian names. Figure 5 is revealed as thus:
Is called in Egyptian Enish-go-on-dosh; this is one of the governing planets also, and is said by the Egyptians to be the Sun, and to borrow its light from Kolob through the medium of Kae-e-vanrash, which is the grand Key, or, in other words, the governing power…
In other words, according to Mormon theology, the sun gets its light and energy from Kolob (the planet nearest the throne of God) through Kae-e-vanrash, a luminiferous aether. Or, to finagle modern physics into 1830s theology: the energy comes from cosmic rays and the quantum fields.
Mormon theology can then be seen to dovetail with quackery surrounding zero-point energy. The idea that space itself has an untapped reservoir of energy has attracted the attention of many would-be scientific revolutionaries in their quest to create free energy. Among these misguided mavericks are T. Henry Moray and Moray B. King, two Mormon inventors of the 20th century. The latter got a job at the Eyring Research Institute based on his free energy claims. Knowing that Mormon theology specifically supports the idea of tappable energy in space, these two deserve our specific attention. They are not just attempting to tap into quantum fluctuations — they are trying to tap into energy from the throne of God.
Radiant Energy
T. Henry Moray’s story is told in The Sea of Energy in Which the Earth Floats, written by his son John. This is the best source for Moray’s adventures and includes some of Moray’s writings from the early 20th century. It should go without saying that this source is very obviously biased. John Moray believes that his father’s invention was covered up by the US government and is writing to prove that his father held the power to revolutionize the world. He starts his book with an affidavit verifying that he saw his father’s Radiant Energy generator work with his own eyes. Readers of the Book of Mormon will notice a similarity to how that book starts with affidavits from witnesses of the Golden Plates. While John does his best to keep the book relatively secular, you can find Mormon theology creeping between the lines.
T. Henry Moray was born of pioneer stock that migrated from Sweden over to the Utah Valley. In 1912 he was called as a missionary for the church and was sent back to the land of his ancestors. Back in the day, LDS missions were less regulated than they are today. Modern missionaries have their day micromanaged down to the half hour and follow strict rules prohibiting any activity that does not directly contribute to the missionary effort. Serving in this earlier era, Moray was allowed to work on a PhD at the University of Uppsala while trying to win converts. He spent his time at the university constantly tinkering with electrical components and eventually convinced himself that he had accidentally discovered a way to generate electricity out of thin air. While he did not quite understand how his device worked (and this will become a problem for him later on) he believed he had stumbled upon a source of infinite energy. Unsurprisingly, though he finished a dissertation on the topic, the university did not grant him a degree. When Moray’s mission ended in 1914 he returned home to Utah, but the experience in Sweden sent him on the paranoid spiral common to many free-energy inventors. He believed he had found something special but that the scientific consensus worked to cut the legs out from under his invention. Instead of taking his academic failure as a sign to keep working and discover how exactly his device was working, he dug in his heels and concluded that the Establishment was suppressing his work for reasons unknown.
On returning to Utah, Moray continued to tinker, becoming competent enough to land a job as an electrical engineer working to design the Terminal substation. However, bad luck befell him. In 1920, he was injured on the job and was forced to resign his position. Now with ample free time, he devoted himself completely to the Radiant Energy device, a free-energy electrical generator operating off the principles he had supposedly discovered in Sweden.
Moray never quite figured out how his device worked, a problem that would vex him for his whole free energy career. All he knew how to do was wire together electrical components. Together, the components seemed to generate electricity, but it was not immediately apparent where the energy was coming from. Due to this strange design process, Moray was forced to work backward and theorize the fundamental principles based on the success of the device.
The device had three components. At one end was an antenna. The antenna wires ran into a box of electrical components — transmitters, oscillators, etc. At the heart of it all was the mysterious Swedish Stone. As the name suggests, Moray discovered the stone while on his mission. It was composed mostly of germanium, but Moray was very careful to protect the exact chemical composition. The Stone was said to act as a pump. The antenna allegedly grabbed the energy from the air, the Stone pumped this energy through the device, and electricity came out the other side. Usually, Moray demonstrated the device by powering an array of lightbulbs. According to John Moray:
When his device was set up, he could connect it to an antenna and a ground, and by priming it first and then tuning it as he primed it, the device would draw electrical energy. This high frequency electrical energy produced up to 250,000 volts and it lighted a brighter light than witnesses had ever seen before. Heavy loads could be connected to the device without dimming the lights that were already connected to it. This device worked many miles from any known source of electrical energy, such as transmission lines or radio. The device produced up to 50,000 watts of power and worked for long periods.
But where was the energy coming from? Initially, Moray assumed it was coming from the Earth itself, but after some thought settled on two more exotic theories. He presents both in his writings. They aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but Moray seems to have not been able to decide on which theory he liked the most.
The first was that the antenna was picking up cosmic rays and turning them into useful electricity. At the time cosmic rays were the cutting edge of science, having been discovered only a few years prior during high-altitude balloon experiments. While it is true that the Earth is constantly being bombarded with cosmic rays, the majority of them are deflected off the atmosphere. Still, some make it through. Notable cases include the Oh-My-God particle, the highest energy cosmic ray detected. Incidentally, it was detected in Utah. In another case, a cosmic ray blasted the computer on an Airbus A330, causing the autopilot to nose-dive twice before the pilots regained control. As exciting as these cases may be, random cosmic ray impacts are certainly not a usable energy source.
Moray’s second theory was the one he seems to have gravitated towards. According to him the fabric of spacetime is eternally vibrating, sending oscillations back and forth throughout the cosmos. The Radiant Energy device, when tuned properly, would resonate with the vibrations of space and in turn generate usable electricity.
This is an interesting idea because it looks like quantum field theory but predates QFT. A close examination, however, reveals that he may have had Mormon theology in mind. The second half of The Sea of Energy in Which the Earth Floats is Moray’s original writings, included in the book by his son. In Chapter 8, we find this enigmatic statement:
Our experiments have proved that there is an energy that exists in the universe which, by proper development of equipment, can be made available for commercial use. One may say all energy comes from the sun. Can one prove that the sun is the foundation of all energy? Or is the sun a re-transmitter of energy?
I believe this is an oblique reference to Kae-e-vanrash, Joseph Smith’s transmitting medium that powers the sun with light from Kolob. It’s hard to imagine what else this could be — the idea of the sun as some sort of retransmitter is not a common one. While couched in the language of 1920s science, Moray may have thought he was tapping power from Kolob and the throne of God.
Moray vs. The World
Having completed his device, it was now time for Moray to take it on the road. Moray contacted officials throughout the Salt Lake area, promising to demonstrate his free energy device to anybody interested on the condition that they would not attempt to look inside the electrical box. They would just have to take his word on what was inside, including the mysterious Stone that made the whole device work.
Fortunately, Utah was a great place to get people interested in mysterious stones and magical devices that you aren’t actually allowed to see. Quickly, Salt Lake’s best and brightest clustered around Moray, eager to see this device illuminate his light-up array.
Senator Reed Smoot took an early interest but concluded that the United States government was not interested in the device because it was not eager to compete with public utilities. You see, despite Moray’s lofty claims of revolutionizing the human race, he was not going to do it without making a buck. Moray carefully guarded his device, ensuring that nobody would be able to recreate it before he figured out a way to effectively market it.
With the US government uninterested (for now,) Moray relied on his road show to garner support. Attorney R. L. Judd — a Moray family friend — provided legal counsel for the inventor and promised that he would protect the device’s secrets.
In 1925, the device attracted the attention of the leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We don’t know exactly why they were interested in the device, although I suspect that Moray sold them on the theory that dovetailed with Joseph Smith’s writings in the Book of Abraham. Whatever the case (and maybe he just had a personal interest) the prophet of the church, Heber J. Grant, got a personal demonstration along with his second-in-command Anthony W. Ivins. Future prophet David O. McKay witnessed a show as did C.W. Nibley, the grandfather of famous Mormon apologist Hugh Nibley.
Critically, the demonstrations caught the attention of Brigham Young University. President Franklin S. Harris watched Moray illuminate his lights as did BYU’s most important scientists: Carl Eyring and Harvey Fletcher. The former is the uncle of Henry Eyring (the namesake of the Eyring Research Institute) and the great uncle of current Mormon second-in-command Henry B. Eyring. The latter is the famous inventor of stereophonic sound, collaborator with Robert Millikin, and father of NASA administrator James Fletcher. And, because this is Utah, all these people were relatives. Carl Eyring’s wife was the sister of Harvey Fletcher's wife. Moray’s wife was Carl Eyring’s wife’s cousin.
Carl Eyring and Harvey Fletcher were very interested in the Radiant Energy device. If it really worked as advertised, it would be one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind. “Worked as advertised” was the problem though. Sure, it lit up lightbulbs, but nobody could explain why it did that. The principle was also undiscoverable, for Moray protected the inside of his box with paranoid zeal. Fletcher constantly begged Moray to let him examine the guts of the device while in operation, but Moray always refused.
Being actual scientists, Eyring and Fletcher were perplexed by this behavior. The two constantly wrote R.L. Judd, trying to convince the attorney to allow them the access to the device they needed. Fletcher began to suspect that the device was generating power through more pedestrian yet scientifically verifiable electrical means. In a letter he wrote:
The evidence as presented seems to favor Mr. Moray’s explanation of where the energy came from. However, because it is so contrary to all previous notions about electrical sources and also because Mr. Moray was unable or unwilling to state how the various parts functioned, I am still of the opinion that all of us, including probably Mr. Moray, have overlooked something, which will explain the lighting of the light in an orthodox way.
’
Increasingly frustrated, Carl Eyring invited Moray to demonstrate the device at BYU. During the demonstration Eyring and Moray got into an argument about electrical mathematics in front of the audience. Years later, Moray would speculate that the argument caused Carl Eyring to lose his chance at becoming the BYU president and ruined the whole Eyring family’s opinion of the Radiant Energy device.
But Moray wasn’t making any other friends. The lone-wolf, mad inventor schtick was grating on the real scientists. In the same letter as above Fletcher wrote:
Assuming Mr. Moray is correct in his explanation, in my opinion it would be many years before he would be able to perfect his device by working all alone by the cut-and-try methods that he must necessarily use. Progress is not made in these days by lone workers. There are so many phases to such a problem that it requires the cooperation of specialists to answer satisfactorily the different phases of the problems. Unless Mr. Moray changes his attitude it seems to be hopeless to expect any progress whether he is right or wrong. He expects everybody to trust him and give him support but still he will trust nobody.
The fix was in. Eyring and Fletcher stopped talking with Moray. R. L. Judd decided to no longer offer legal counsel. When Moray approached Henry Eyring, the chemist immediately declined to take interest. Sidestepping Fletcher, Moray wrote directly to Robert Millikin. The Nobel laureate replied that he trusted Fletcher’s scientific instincts. Even BYU stepped away. After years of pestering the college, Moray received a reply from Ernest Wilkinson:
...until you’re willing to have your ideas tested and verified in an acceptable manner I fear there is nothing we can do to assist you.
Everybody had turned against Moray, and when everybody turns against you there is only one possible explanation: conspiracy! Specifically, Moray claimed that the Eyrings were working behind his back to poison the scientific establishment. This became the de facto explanation for all the Moray woes, from his patents being denied to NASA declining to research the Radiant Energy device.
The conspiracy (allegedly) took a violent turn in 1940. An increasingly paranoid Moray had started packing pistols, convinced that the Rural Electrification Administration was out to kill him. On March 2, John and his friends were playing outside their home while his cousin worked on his car. Suddenly a sedan pulled up in front of the house and men emerged, pistols pointed at John’s cousin’s car. Seeing that this was not the Moray they wanted, the man holstered their weapons and drove away. John told his father and the elder Moray ordered his kids to go to the local movie theater for the next few hours.
After the kids left Moray drove to his laboratory. The sun had set and as Moray fumbled with his keys in the dark he felt somebody approach from behind. Suddenly Moray was hit with a solid object in the arm. He spun around and saw a gun pointed in his face. With split second reflexes Moray used his good arm to tangle up the gun with his coat.
One gunman was down, but Moray spotted another approaching with a pistol raised. Releasing the first gunman, Moray charged forward and kicked the gun from the second man’s hand. However, the first gunman was now free and with a pistol-crack loosed a round that grazed Moray’s leg. Ignoring the bleeding, Moray pulled his own gun which, I guess, scared the two assailants so much that they allowed themselves to be escorted off the property. Scarcely had Moray gained control of the situation when a shot rang out from yet another gunman. Moray returned fire, hitting the third man. A fourth man appeared from the shadows of the street and rushed over to help his injured comrade. To Moray’s shock, this fourth assailant was one Felix Frazer, an REA employee that had worked briefly in Moray’s shop! With their cover blown, the four gunmen slunk away into the night. From that point on Moray refused any cooperation with the REA or what he termed the “liberal government.” Apparently he changed his mind when he tried to contact NASA years later.
According to Moray the Soviet government was also trying to get the device. While the US government used a stick, the Soviet government preferred a carrot approach. Somehow Moray had made friends with two American communists who put him in touch with one A. A. Yakovlev in 1929. The Soviet authorities promised to fund the Radiant Energy device if Moray would defect to the Soviet Union. I am skeptical of this claim. A. A. Yakovlev was the alias of Anatoli Yatskov, a Soviet spy tasked with uncovering the secrets of the Manhattan Project. I think that John Moray is trying to show that the Radiant Energy device was so important that the Soviets viewed it as equivalent to nuclear energy. The only problem is that Yatskov would have been 16 at the time, a little young for a NKVD agent. Maybe it was just somebody with the same name. Or probably it’s a lie.
That’s the problem with this whole tale. It starts relatively believable if you think about it objectively — an early 20th century inventor thinks he discovers free energy and is proven wrong. But gunfights and Soviet spies? Color me skeptical.
Somebody did believe Moray though. From the book:
An engineer who signed confidential disclosure agreements with Cosray Research Institute before Henry Moray died, is working with the Eyring Research Institute—which has shown great interest in Henry Moray’s work in what is now called “Direct Energy Conversion.” This involves using radioactive material in conjunction with the quartz junction. Originally, the engineer I mentioned agreed that the Eyring Institute would give credit to Dr. Moray for his work in this area. However, from the information I have been able to obtain, the Institute is not giving him credit.
I can’t verify the paranoid coverup angle, but there was one ERI engineer who did look up to T. Henry Moray and got his job at the institute based on a similar free energy idea.
Radiant Energy Redux
We’ve met Moray B. King before. He worked on the ELPA-300 low profile antenna, a covert military communications system invented by the Eyring Research Institute and used in Desert Storm. He worked on the device with David Faust, an engineer who also studied psychokinesis at the ERI and claimed to be able to bend laser beams with his mind.
However, King’s interests were grander than developing military technology. In 1974 he was living in Pennsylvania as the energy crisis gripped the nation. One day he found himself in his apartment watching a seemingly infinite line of cars snaking through the roads, waiting to get what little gas was available. His roomate snapped him out of his reverie by asking if he had read Gravitation, a massive textbook on general relativity. Specifically, King’s roommate was fascinated by two chapters describing the zero-point energy.
By this time quantum field theory (QFT) was well-established and physicists were plumbing the depths of what would turn out to be the most accurate mathematical model for the underlying structure of reality. Space was understood to consist of fields constantly vibrating with little quantum fluctuations. In QFT the fundamental particles were described as energy peaks within these fields. Most importantly to King, QFT showed that space itself has a base level of energy. This was the zero-point energy (ZPE.)
Every physicist worth their salt when hearing about ZPE starts to wonder how they could use this energy. Unfortunately, the laws of thermodynamics keeps the energy locked within the vacuum. Usable energy requires a disturbance in the equilibrium of a system and ZPE was — by definition — the same everywhere throughout space.
That did not stop King from exploring ways to utilize the ZPE. Something appearing impossible has never stopped scientists from sticking their fingers in the cracks and seeing if they could pry something loose. King finished his PhD with infinite energy on his mind, looking into fringe thermodynamic cases where usable energy can spontaneously emerge from an apparent state of equilibrium. Through his research he came across T. Henry Moray’s work. It occurred to King, as it occurred to us, that Moray seemed to be describing a limited version of quantum field theory. King also took it as a sign that he had a similar name to the earlier inventor:
When given his book… I was stunned to see his last name; it was identical to my first name. The synchronicity of that moment made me realize that my life’s purpose was to explain clearly the science of zero-point energy so that mankind could engineer technology to tap it as an energy source.
King wrote a paper explaining his ideas for liberating the zero-point energy and began distributing it on his own, printing copies and handing them out to other scientists. Being an active Latter-day Saint, copies of his paper made their way to BYU and caught the attention of the Eyring Research Institute. The center contacted him and offered him a research position to continue developing his theories. King accepted.
Considering that the ERI was already studying (alleged) psychokinetic phenomena it’s unsurprising that they were interested in another pseudoscientific research tract. While there might, at some point in the far future, be a way to liberate the ZPE both our physical theories and engineering prowess are nowhere near developed enough.
It is not unreasonable then to wonder if the ERI was interested in King’s research because they had already been primed to accept the idea of an universal energy field due to Joseph Smith’s writing in the Book of Abraham. Maybe that’s how they sold the funding request to the BYU administrators — it’s really impossible to know.
What is known is that the United States military has been interested in ZPE since the 70s. Pseudoscientific though ZPE usage may be, the US military wouldn’t be what it is if it didn’t dive down every potential rabbit hole to gain an upper hand over its adversaries.
Zero point energy claims have a variety of military applications, most notably in transportation systems. Under certain conditions the ZPE can generate an anti-gravity field, potentially allowing a vehicle to float on nothing more than the fabric of spacetime. ZPE effects also can create negative energy, a strange yet experimentally validated physical phenomenon that often plays a key part in speculative advanced space transportation concepts. Most famously, the Alcubierre Drive theory relies on using negative energy to bend space in front of a starship, accelerating it to superluminal speeds like a Star Trek warp drive.
Here’s a little cross section of some US government projects to investigate these effects. King himself does not mention any of the weapon applications for his work in his books. They focus on the free energy angle. Nor is there much information from the ERI about their ZPE research. Presumably much of it remains classified or is lost to time. Other ZPE research tracts have been reported on, and we can guess that they were working on a project like one of these:
In 2002 Jane's Defence Weekly reported that Boeing’s Phantom Works, the company's cutting-edge research arm, was investigating anti-gravity effects for propellantless aircraft and space launch systems. They were concerned that the Russians had already achieved this capability and the US was falling behind.
A 1992 declassified Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) paper on the CIA’s reading room lists various spooky research fields the agency was interested in. Zero point energy is mentioned in connection to the DIA’s investigation into remote viewing and psychokinesis.
A 2010 paper from the DIA published a paper describing the agency’s studies of concepts to extract zero-point energy, including speculative physics beyond the standard model.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded a research program to harness the zero-point energy through the Casimir effect.
NASA looked into zero-point energy and other speculative space transportation proposals in the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program. When the program closed they found that some of these concepts were not physically impossible, but the technologies lay far beyond our current engineering capabilities.
We know the ERI was on the bleeding edge of military technology, so one of these concepts was most likely what they were researching. King never tells us.
After his ERI stint he stayed in the free energy circles. He continues to write books, attend lectures, and even make YouTube videos. At this point he seems to be focused on water as the potential key to unlocking the zero-point energy. But his interests are wide — he has presented alongside members of APEC, an advanced propulsion think tank researching faster-than-light travel and interstellar exploration.
None of this has played out though, since we are still burning fossil fuels and making our small steps into the cosmos with chemical rockets. The zero-point energy is not even fully understood by physicists. Calculations for the energy density of space show large discrepancies depending on which physical theory you use. General relativity gives one answer, quantum field theory another. Nobody quite knows why. The vacuum may not hold the key to our energy woes, but it contains signs that we do not yet understand the structure of our universe at the very base level of Reality.