
Originally Posted by
Von Braun
This concept has appeared in science fiction novels involving interstellar propulsion. One of Poul Anderson's books comes to mind. Latent energy in the vacuum is "borrowed" and then "returned," as the universe is supposedly analagous to an atom in a metastable intermediate state (not in the ground state nor in the highest state, but somewhere inbetween, and its metastability means that it is being prevented from "falling" to the ground state, and if it were in the ground state, it would be normally stable) but somehow, the act of "borrowing" does useful work (acceleration), while the act of returning the energy does not decelerate the ship. The vacuum is locally manipulated (somehow) and allowed to return to its ground state (releasing energy), and then at some point elsewhere in space-time, the energy is "repaid."
I seriously doubt that the u.s. government could suppress this type of thing worldwide, if someone came up with it. In my opinion, it could have sound theoretical backing, but we are probably a long way from putting it into practice.
Try a google search on "zero point energy."
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