Your periodic reminder: "Zero-point energy" is not a thing

Just because you heard something in pop culture doesn't make it a part of physics.

Syndrome captures Mr. Incredible using zero-point energy. (The Incredibles, 2004)

Every physicist who’s ever been asked has repeated it until they’re blue in the face: zero-point energy is not a thing.

I wish I could go back in time and find the first incidence of this phrase leaking out of the physics textbooks and into pop culture, and strangle the person responsible. Ever since it did, alternative wooists of every variety have claimed it as some mysterious source of power from which they can draw, or from which the aliens draw, or the ghosts, or the psychics, or whoever. The result is that a general belief persists that zero-point energy is some kind of source or type of energy — and it’s not.

I talked about this just last month in a Skeptoid episode (“Testing the Rossi E-Cat,” episode 1030). And that very same day I got an email from a crank who believes he has solved the world’s energy crisis with zero-point energy, and that I should do an episode promoting his discovery. I declined.

Here is what I said in the episode, by way of definition:

Hearing someone talk about “using” or “extracting” zero-point energy is always a cause for concern. This means the same thing as pouring water out of an empty bucket, or taking an elevator down from the ground floor. When all the extractable energy is removed from a system, it is left in its ground state, or its zero-point energy. A system still has energy in that state, but no lower‑energy state exists to drop into.

Consider the analogy of a brick sitting on the ground. That brick is sitting at its lowest possible height — its “zero-point height” if you will. One might hear that phrase and say “Ah! So it’s at some height; that’s the height I’m going to drop it from.” But it can’t drop, it’s already on the ground. There is nothing lower. In the same way, a system’s zero-point energy is its lowest possible energy state; that’s literally how the term is defined. You can no more extract energy from a system that is already at its minimum than you can drop a brick that’s already on the ground.

Why this gets confusing is because it involves quantum mechanics. At the quantum level, no particle has both a defined location and momentum; if either is established, the other is changed. This is the core of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and it is a fundamental law of nature. This constant flux is why the minimum energy is not zero.

A couple weeks ago, Joe Rogan had on career bullshitter Bob Lazar, the guy who has convinced one extreme fringe of the UFO community that, despite no education, he was the world’s most in-demand physicist and was put in charge of reverse engineering captured alien flying saucers at Area 51. Of course they talked about how AI will soon “gain access to zero-point energy.” It’s how you know he’s such a great physicist. He doesn’t understand energy levels.

And as is the case with so many basics in science, anyone can just go to Wikipedia and learn this in two minutes. Its very first sentence says:

Zero-point energy (ZPE) is the lowest possible energy that a quantum mechanical system may have.

Yet, I have no illusions that the purveyors of bullshit will ever stop purveying zero-point energy. We’re not going to stop that, but at least we can use it as one more way to spot unequivocal bullshit.

So there’s that.