Physicists Extract Energy from Empty Space Using Quantum Trickery

For years, physicists have said it's impossible to get something from nothing. But new experiments have challenged this notion by extracting usable energy from the vacuum of empty space, taking advantage of a loophole in quantum physics.

The vacuum is not completely empty - it buzzes with random energy fluctuations allowed by the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. Physicist Masahiro Hotta realized in 2008 that these fluctuations could potentially be tapped by taking advantage of quantum entanglement.

Here's how it works: Two experimenters, Alice and Bob, are in two different locations. Alice performs a measurement that injects energy into the fluctuating vacuum field around her. She sends the details to Bob, who can then use that information to extract the same amount of energy from the vacuum in his location.

This energy wasn't free - Alice supplied it originally. And Bob couldn't access the energy until he got Alice's message, so faster-than-light travel is avoided. Still, many researchers dismissed the idea as implausible when Hotta first proposed it.

Now two teams have proven it works. One used magnetic fields to demonstrate energy teleportation between entangled atoms. The other harnessed IBM's quantum computer. In both cases, they showed energy could be extracted from below the "ground state" at Bob's location.

This vindicates Hotta's theory and opens doors for applications like powering quantum computers. Some theorists even suggest negative energy densities like this could manipulate the fabric of spacetime. Hotta plans to demonstrate his protocol using systems whose ground state naturally contains quantum entanglement.

While more research is needed, these experiments prove that energy can be conjured up in one place based on actions at a distant location, at least on the quantum scale. It seems that useful energy can indeed be extracted from what appears to be nothing, thanks to the weirdness of quantum physics.