The Zero Point Field
The use of the word Akasha has lingered around the fringes of physics for at least a century. The reason for this is that an ancient and supposedly outmoded belief refuses to die the belief that empty space is not empty at all.
Akasha, the Sanskrit word for space, has an English equivalent: the ether. An invisible ether that cant be seen or measured allows light to travel from the stars, as water allows ripples to spread when a rock is thrown into a pond. Without a medium to pass through, light waves have no way to move from point A to point B.
The ether suffered a decisive setback in the 1880s when two scientists proved that light traveled at the same speed no matter what direction it moved in. This was important because the so-called ether wind that was thought to sweep energy through the universe should have made light travel slower going upstream than downstream.
When it was proved that this wasnt true, even Einstein became convinced that space was a void without activity, a belief that was also wrong, as it turns out. Physicists now believe that space is full of activity in the form of invisible fluctuations in the quantum field. These so-called virtual fluctuations account for matter and energy and also for distortions in time and space.
To find out where matter and energy come from, physics wound up positing a universal field that envelops not just what we observe but everything that could possibly exist.
Theoretically, to reach the zero point in Nature one could cool empty space down to absolute zero, and instantly everything would cease to vibrate. Yet the zero point exists here and now it provides the starting point from which everything in the universe springs.
Since matter and energy are constantly emerging and then vanishing back into the void, the zero point serves as the switching station between existence and nothingness.
Adapted from Life After Death: The Burden of Proof, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2006).
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