Harold Edward Puthoff (born June 20, 1936), often known as Hal Puthoff, is an American
electrical engineer
Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...
and
parapsychologist known for his work in laser physics, remote viewing research, and theories on zero-point energy.
Early life and career
Puthoff was born in
Chicago
Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of Unite ...
,
Illinois
Illinois ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern United States. It borders on Lake Michigan to its northeast, the Mississippi River to its west, and the Wabash River, Wabash and Ohio River, Ohio rivers to its ...
. He received a BA and an MSc in
electrical engineering
Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...
from
University of Florida
The University of Florida (Florida or UF) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Gainesville, Florida, United States. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida and a preem ...
. In 1967, Puthoff earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from
Stanford University
Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...
with a thesis, "The
stimulated Raman effect and its application as a tunable laser".
[Hugh Urban. (2013). ''The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion''. Princeton University Press. p. 113. "A physicist with a PhD from Stanford University, Harold Puthoff joined Scientology in the late 1960s and quickly advanced to the OT VII level by 1971."] Puthoff then worked on tunable lasers and electron beam devices and co-authored (with R. Pantell) ''Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics'' (Wiley, 1969). Puthoff also published papers on
polarizable vacuum (PV) and
stochastic electrodynamics.
Parapsychology and pseudoscience
Puthoff took an interest in the
Church of Scientology
The Church of Scientology is a group of interconnected corporate entities and other organizations devoted to the practice, administration and dissemination of Scientology, which is variously defined as a cult, a business, or a new religiou ...
in the late 1960s and reached what was then the top
OT VII level by 1971.
Puthoff wrote up his "wins" for a Scientology publication, claiming to have achieved "remote viewing" abilities (called
exteriorization in Scientology). In 1974, Puthoff also wrote a piece for Scientology's ''Celebrity'' magazine, stating that Scientology had given him "a feeling of absolute fearlessness". Puthoff severed all connection with Scientology in the late 1970s.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Puthoff directed a program at the
Stanford Research Institute
SRI International (SRI) is a nonprofit organization, nonprofit scientific research, scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California, United States. It was established in 1946 by trustees of Stanford Univer ...
(SRI) to investigate
paranormal
Paranormal events are purported phenomena described in popular culture, folk, and other non-scientific bodies of knowledge, whose existence within these contexts is described as being beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding. Not ...
abilities, collaborating with
Russell Targ in a study of the purported
psychic abilities of
Uri Geller
Uri Geller ( ; ; born 20 December 1946) is an Israeli-British illusionist, magician, television personality, and self-proclaimed psychic. He is known for his trademark television performances of spoon bending and other illusions. Geller use ...
,
Ingo Swann,
Pat Price,
Joseph McMoneagle and others, as part of what they called the
Stargate Project. Both Geller and Swann convinced Puthoff and Targ that they possessed psychic powers, though Geller employed
sleight of hand
Sleight of hand (also known as prestidigitation or ''legerdemain'' () comprises fine motor skills used by performing artists in different art forms to entertain or manipulate. It is closely associated with close-up magic, card magic, card fl ...
tricks.
Puthoff and Targ studied
Uri Geller
Uri Geller ( ; ; born 20 December 1946) is an Israeli-British illusionist, magician, television personality, and self-proclaimed psychic. He is known for his trademark television performances of spoon bending and other illusions. Geller use ...
at SRI, declaring that Geller had psychic powers, though there were flaws with the controls in the experiments, and Geller used
sleight of hand
Sleight of hand (also known as prestidigitation or ''legerdemain'' () comprises fine motor skills used by performing artists in different art forms to entertain or manipulate. It is closely associated with close-up magic, card magic, card fl ...
on many other occasions. According to
Terence Hines
Terence Michael Hines (born 22 March 1951) is an American academic and researcher. He is a professor of psychology at Pace University, New York, and adjunct professor of neurology at the New York Medical College; he is also a science writer. Hi ...
:
Psychologists
David Marks
David Lee Marks (born August 22, 1948) is an American guitarist who was an early member of the Beach Boys. While growing up in Hawthorne, California, Marks was a neighborhood friend of the original band members and was a frequent participant at t ...
and Richard Kammann attempted to replicate Puthoff and Targ's
remote viewing
Remote viewing (RV) is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen subject, purportedly sensing with the mind. There is no scientific evidence that remote viewing exists, and the topic of remote viewing is generally regarde ...
experiments. In a series of thirty-five studies, they could not replicate the results. While investigating the procedure of the original experiments, Marks and Kammann discovered that the notes given to the judges in Puthoff and Targ's experiments contained clues as to which order they were carried out. Examples included referring to yesterday's two targets or the inclusion of the date of the session written at the top of the page. They concluded that these clues were the reason for the experiment's high hit rates. Terence Hines has written:
Marks noted that when the cues were eliminated the results fell to a chance level.
James Randi
James Randi (born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge; August 7, 1928 – October 20, 2020) was a Canadian-American stage magician, author, and scientific skeptic who extensively challenged paranormal and pseudoscientific claims.#Rodrigues, Rodrig ...
noted that controlled tests by several other researchers, eliminating several sources of cueing and extraneous evidence present in the original tests, produced negative results. Students also solved Puthoff and Targ's locations from the clues that had inadvertently been included in the transcripts. Marks and Kamman concluded: "Until remote viewing can be confirmed in conditions which prevent sensory cueing the conclusions of Targ and Puthoff remain an unsubstantiated hypothesis." According to
Martin Gardner
Martin Gardner (October 21, 1914May 22, 2010) was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer with interests also encompassing magic, scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literatureespecially the writin ...
, Puthoff (and Targ) "imagined they could do research in parapsychology but instead dealt with 'psychics' who were cleverer than they were".
Business ventures
In 1985, Puthoff founded The Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin (IASA), later incorporated under EarthTech International, Inc., in 1991, which pursues energy generation and propulsion research.
Puthoff and EarthTech were granted a US Patent in 1998, with claims that information could be transmitted through a distance using a modulated potential with no electric or magnetic field components. While "the invention does appear to rest on solid, albeit somewhat obscure, physics principles", the case is used for educational purposes in patent law where "the examiner failed to make a prima facie case for inoperability or lack of enablement". According to the Wisconsin Law School case study, "The lesson of the Puthoff patent is that in a world where both types of patents are more and more common, even a competent examiner may fail to distinguish innovation from pseudoscience."
In 2017, he co-founded the
UFO-dedicated company
To the Stars with
Tom DeLonge.
Zero-point energy
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Puthoff co-authored papers
using the model of
stochastic electrodynamics that leads to a model of inertia as an ''electromagnetic drag force'' on accelerating particles produced by interaction with the
zero-point field.
This concept built on
Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov (; 21 May 192114 December 1989) was a Soviet Physics, physicist and a List of Nobel Peace Prize laureates, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, which he was awarded in 1975 for emphasizing human rights around the world.
Alt ...
's proposal in 1968 that the gravitational constant was a consequence of zero-point fluctuations in the vacuum.
Steve Carlip disputed one of Puthoff's 1989 papers for containing a serious computational error which makes the effect negligible; Puthoff responded that a different parameter value in the model would restore its usefulness.
[
The 1994 paper was the subject of a news article in '']Science
Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...
''. Subsequent analysis by Yefim S. Levin raising numerous questions concerning the mathematical correctness of the formula and the use of non-relativistic treatments of magnetic effects, concluding that model does not show inertia as a result of zero-point-field effects. The cosmological implications of a different 1989 paper by Puthoff on the origin electromagnetic zero point energy was examined by Paul S. Wesson Among numerous difficulties, general relativity
General relativity, also known as the general theory of relativity, and as Einstein's theory of gravity, is the differential geometry, geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915 and is the current description of grav ...
requires that such energy not gravitate, so it cannot be similar to electromagnetic radiation.
Building on earlier theoretical work by Robert L. Forward leveraging the Casimir force
In quantum field theory, the Casimir effect (or Casimir force) is a physical force acting on the macroscopic boundaries of a confined space which arises from the quantum fluctuations of a field. The term Casimir pressure is sometimes used whe ...
to extract electrical energy, Daniel Cole and Puthoff analyzed the thermodynamics of a simple hypothetical Casimir force device. The hypothetical devices discussed in these articles are capacitors
In electrical engineering, a capacitor is a device that stores electrical energy by accumulating electric charges on two closely spaced surfaces that are insulated from each other. The capacitor was originally known as the condenser, a term st ...
, multiple layers of charged conductors sufficiently close for the short-range Casimir force to compress the structure. This works against the mutual repulsion of the conductor's electrical energy stores; external electricity would be needed to recharge the device. Other authors have studied mechanical and thermal devices based on Casimir forces.[See references in: ]
Massimo Pigliucci
Massimo Pigliucci (; born January 16, 1964) is an American philosopher and biologist who is professor of philosophy at the City College of New York, former co-host of the '' Rationally Speaking Podcast'', and former editor in chief for the online ...
called Puthoff's hopes to extract zero-point energy as running contrary to the laws of physics
Scientific laws or laws of science are statements, based on repeated experiments or observations, that describe or predict a range of natural phenomena. The term ''law'' has diverse usage in many cases (approximate, accurate, broad, or narrow) ...
: "a proposition... that violates basic principles of thermodynamics and that is considered pseudoscience
Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method. Pseudoscience is often characterized by contradictory, exaggerated or unfalsifiable cl ...
by credentialed physicists."Massimo Pigliucci
Massimo Pigliucci (; born January 16, 1964) is an American philosopher and biologist who is professor of philosophy at the City College of New York, former co-host of the '' Rationally Speaking Podcast'', and former editor in chief for the online ...
. (2010). ''Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk''. University of Chicago Press. p. 90.
References
Further reading
* Henry Gordon (1988). ''Extrasensory Deception: ESP, Psychics, Shirley MacLaine, Ghosts, UFOs''. Macmillan of Canada.
*
External links
*
Profile at Earthtech International
{{DEFAULTSORT:Puthoff, Harold E.
1936 births
Living people
21st-century American physicists
United States Navy officers
American parapsychologists
Pseudoscientific physicists
Stanford University alumni
Remote viewers
American former Scientologists
University of Florida alumni
Place of birth missing (living people)
American electrical engineers
20th-century American engineers
People from Chicago