Historical research guide · 0496 · 1999

Energy and thermodynamic considerations involving electromagnetic zero-point radiation

Daniel C. Cole

In one minute

Daniel Cole of Boston University wrote this for the 1999 Space Technology and Applications International Forum, and his aim is to settle a question people were arguing about badly: can you get energy out of the vacuum? His answer is yes, and his argument is deliberately ordinary. He starts with a ball resting on a table between two low bumpers, everything in equilibrium, in principle even at absolute zero. Spend a little work lifting the ball over a bumper and it falls to the floor, giving back far more work than you spent; seal the chamber and that fall shows up as heat. Nothing there breaks energy conservation or the second law, because the state of the system changed permanently — the ball is not on the table any more. Casimir plates and van der Waals forces, Cole says, are the same story with harder mathematics. He then names the genuine restraints near absolute zero, and insists on the word: restraints, not barriers.

Connection

Chapter 6 is about getting energy out of the vacuum, and this is the paper that makes the accounting boring in the best way — no over-unity, no violated law, just a system driven out of equilibrium and an irreversible change that leaves the universe altered. Chapter 2 gets the correction that the site keeps having to make: zero-point means zero thermal temperature, and nothing else.

From the source

A rough estimate of the energy density associated with electromagnetic zero-point energy shows that, even on a very conservative estimate, the density must be incredibly large — equal to or greater than nuclear energy densities.Introduction, third paragraph, citing Feynman and Hibbs and Misner
Historically the term zero-point refers to the energy arising from fluctuating motion existing at the absolute zero of temperature, not to the lowest quantum energy level — the definition is thermodynamic. And the zero-point spectrum alone is Lorentz invariant, as Marshall in 1963 and Boyer in 1969 showed: observers in different inertial frames see the same zero-point spectrum, which a spectrum at any temperature above zero most definitely is not.General Discussion About Electromagnetic Zero-Point Energy, paragraphs 2 and 7
Work and heat can both be extracted from a system that began in thermodynamic equilibrium at absolute zero, provided the system is taken out of equilibrium and allowed to change irreversibly. In the ball example the activation energy needed is the small quantity mgh, the height of the bumper, while the work the system then does is the much larger mg(H+h) — the same relation as a hole made in a dam, or a spark in a keg of gunpowder.Examples of Energy and Heat Extraction, the ball-and-table example and the paragraph following it
The second law is not violated. The Kelvin-Planck statement forbids a process whose sole result is the absorption of heat and its conversion into work, and it applies to processes in which the state of the system does not change. Here the state did change — irreversibly and permanently — so the law is untouched, and the energy cannot be extracted from that configuration a second time.Examples of Energy and Heat Extraction, the paragraphs on the Kelvin-Planck statement
Two restraints operate near absolute zero: no heat flows during a reversible isothermal process at zero temperature, which follows from the second-law definition of the ratio of two Kelvin temperatures, and absolute zero cannot be reached by any finite series of processes, which is the third law. Cole is explicit that these are restricting conditions rather than an absolute barrier, and states that he is unaware of any hard analysis placing a limit on the fraction or the total amount of energy that may be extracted.Introduction, fourth paragraph, and Other Thermodynamic Points to Consider
Cole closes with the suggestion that much of the energy we already use — chemical combustion, electric batteries, perhaps even nuclear energy — may in part already be extraction of energy from zero-point fields, since vacuum fields are accepted contributors to atomic stability, spontaneous emission and laser behaviour. His own expectation is that new and novel ways of extracting this energy will be found, and he names cavity quantum electrodynamics as where to look next.Concluding Remarks, final three paragraphs

The way in

https://doi.org/10.1063/1.57675

Historical source-access record. This guide links to the original; it does not reproduce the paper text.

SOURCE READ IN FULL, TEXT NOT REPRODUCED. The AIP proceedings version is closed and carries no open licence, so this page holds no reproduced text. The summary and every claim below were written from the author’s own complete typescript, posted by the Calphysics Institute at calphysics.org/articles/cole_staif_99.pdf and retrieved through the Internet Archive on 2026-09-08 — eight pages, section headings Introduction, General Discussion About Electromagnetic Zero-Point Energy, Examples of Energy and Heat Extraction, Other Thermodynamic Points to Consider, and Concluding Remarks. Locators point to those headings. Bibliography confirmed from Crossref: AIP Conference Proceedings volume 458, pages 960 to 967, from the Space Technology and Applications International Forum STAIF-99 at Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1999; the author’s affiliation on the typescript is Boston University, Department of Manufacturing Engineering. Semantic Scholar carries a stray publication year of 2008 for this DOI; 1999 is the year of the forum and the year used here. REGISTRY NOTE: the record arrived with chapters ch02, ch03 and ch06; the article treats the thermodynamics of the field and energy extraction and does not treat inertia or gravitation, so the sheet carries chapters 2 and 6.

How to cite it

Daniel C. Cole (1999) Energy and thermodynamic considerations involving electromagnetic zero-point radiation doi:10.1063/1.57675

Where it sits in the curriculum

Energy from the vacuum