WE were talking about energy yesterday fossil fuels, global warming, nice nuclear power stations which go boom, depopulating the odd half continent or two. But surely the most oddly fascinating news about energy is that coming from Arthur C. Clarke, the pioneer of the communications satellite, who is the foremost proponent of `vacuum energy" which means, apparently, energy out of a vacuum. In other words, the philosopher's stone of the ancient alchemists, but this time joules instead of jewels, blowing hot rather than gold.
Vacuum energy I say again, apparently fills the entire universe. Subatomic particles pop in and out of existence within a vacuum, and apparently though to my mind it is not in the least apparent during the existential movement of these tiny little smithereens an energy is created. This let us say the word again apparently is the basis for the beginning of the universe, the Big Bang with the creation of something from nothing.
That same process continues throughout space, but in a rather more subdued fashion. It is that subdued matter creation, rather than the vulgar Big Bang which disturbs the neighbours, frightens the horses and causes solar systems to burst into life, that scientists hope to tap into to create vacuum energy.
Scientific Plaything
What makes this believable is simply that mankind has been here before. Nuclear power that is to say, power drawn from around the atom of the nucleus was discovered two centuries ago. It is called electricity, from the Greek for amber, the source of the first static electricity.
Two centuries ago, it would have been inconceivable to the scientists who were playing around with electricity that it would one day be the standard form of energy, and more importantly, of control, throughout the world. Of course those scientists did not know what electricity was. It was a mysterious quality of repulsion and at traction, first labelled to and by the greatest America not them all, Benjamin Franklin. But even he would have been astounded by the notion that this mysterious, magnetic thing could one day replace the candle the fire, the horse the carriage, the letter, the book the servant the factory hand, the sailing vessel, the new steam engine, and would enable man to speak across the world and to enter outer space.
It remained no more than an invisible, magic toy for scientists to play with until Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction. It was only one and a half centuries ago that the first battery was invented. The first telephone was invented in 1876, within the lifetime of Jeanne Calment, mentioned yesterday and still alive in Arles, and it is only a century since the first radio waves were transmitted by Rutherford.
Electrical Age
The history of the world has not seen anything like the electrical revolution, yet you will look in vain in history books for mention of something called the Electrical Age. Everything we do and say is influenced by the harnessing of the electron. When not electrical, all modern power, other than the hearth based steam engine and the wind driven sail, depends for control on electricity and even these only reach full efficiency when aided by the electron.
The internal combustion, diesel turbine and jet engines are all essentially electrical devices for exploiting the crude energetic potential of fossil fuels. Without electricity, with out the precise and regulated controls provided by the diligent squads of welt drilled, punctual stakhanovite electrons they are lumps of inert metal tubing containing dangerous and duty oils.
Communication Slaves
All on communications, our technology, our industry, our transport, our rockets, bombs and submarines, depend on our ability to suck elections out of their humdrum suburban orbit around nuclear and to send them hither and thither at our bidding, little invisible galley slaves which toil in transistors to turn radio waves into noise which scurry antlike through the city streets capes inscribed on each silicon chip enabling moon shot like calculations to be performed within a microsecond in your home computer which are poised in each cylinder bead to ignite each new surge of fossil fuel taking you to and from work or holiday or supermarket which rest in perpetual vigilance waiting for you to turn on the light or the television or the cooker or the central heating.
All this we take for granted, but all is made possible by the electron, enslaved, disciplined and directed. Can we be on the verge of a new order, to be conjured from the mysteries of the hitherto unpromising vacuum, as once the electron was lured from the unpromising heart of fossilised resin? Of course, we just cannot say. Benjamin Franklin, the greatest thinker of his age, could never have perceived that the mysterious sparkling entity he lured from the clouds in his kite could within two centuries be enabling machines to think and for man to speak to interplanetary spacecraft at the far end of the solar system.
That is the point about great revolutions you cannot foresee what will come out at the far end of them. Maybe the vacuum energy revolution is not, as it appears, energy out of no where maybe it will be sucked out of some poor, bewildered, parasitised universe which will wither and die as we prosper. Sad, sad.
Eclipse of the Sun
Now this modest columnist is not going to say that vacuum energy is here for certain and even if it is, we might still receive its beneficence in the form of electrons, so that we might never know the difference. But Arthur Clarke insists that the age of the fossil fuel is aver.
More than fossil fuel might be at an end. All our energy is solar stored in fuels which we burn, or winds that blow or waters that run, or atoms we split. Vacuum energy is not even that. It is the form of energy which existed before the sun was born. It is truly and uniquely per solar. One day we might light our rooms and warm our homes with the prime secret of existence, and the sovereignty of our sun will be ended.