Thoughts & Insights

Nullfeld – Zero Field

Ever since OUBEYs painting Nullfeld was presented in the last newsletter and since its recent appearance in the gallery on OUBEYs website, I’ve received a lot of enquiries wondering just what this Zero Point Field actually refers to.

2013-08-25_nullfeld

This is why I’m using this blogpost to outline some of the tracks I’ve come across so far in my exploration of what the Zero Point Field might mean. These are tracks that do not converge to give one clear and unambiguous meaning. And certainly not a definite explanation or extrapolation. The field for further discoveries is huge and wide open.

Track 1
“The beam’s soft light illuminates that far-off layer
And slow as honey flows the quantum stream”

Lines from OUBEYs 1979 poem “Nullfeld”

Track 2
“You can sense infinity in it”

From the unfiltered encounter of the whale filmmaker and ocean diver Daniel Opitz with OUBEYs painting Nullfeld in May 2013 on Maui/Hawaii.

Track 3
“A Zero Field is a closed modified hyperfield from the spectrum above hypergravitation. (…) The fundamental principles of the Absolute Zero Field were developed by the Terrans in collaboration with the Haluterns who even as far back as the 25th century had learned to recognize and harness its capabilities.”

From the Perrypedia, the encyclopedic reference work on Perry Rhodan in the internet.

Zero Point Fields are often encountered in the Perry Rhodan series of science fiction novellas that OUBEY first read as a boy. Take Volume 264, for instance where the Terran spaceship CREST III flies into the Absolute Zero Field of the planet Vario on 26 April 2404 and travels back 52,392 years in time. A Zero Time Deformer can generate an Absolute Zero Field which envelops an object and enables it to travel in time.

Track 4
“What we tend to think of as a sheer void if all of space were emptied of all matter and energy and you examined even the space between stars is, in subatomic terms, a hive of activity … This subatomic tango (…) when added across the universe, gives rise to enormous energy, more than is contained in all matter in the entire world. Also referred to by physicists as ‘the vacuum’, the Zero Point Field was called ‘zero’ because fluctuations in the field are still detectable in temperatures of absolute zero, the lowest possible energy state where all matter has been removed and nothing is supposedly left to make any motion.”

Lynn McTaggert, The Field: The Quest For The Secret Force Of The Universe, 2003, p. 31

Track 5
According to speculative interpretations of the findings of quantum research, the Zero Field or Zero Point Field is an all encompassing field of energy connecting everything. Sometimes this is referred to as the collective memory of the universe. Such views are based on the observation that when two interconnected elementary particles are separated from one another, they continue to behave in exactly the same manner without the slightest time difference even over the most extreme distances.

Track 6
Since Einstein we know that space and time are not absolute but relative. A great deal is possible that we can only “picture” today with the help of our imagination.

“The universal constant of the speed of light separates us humans from a physical experience of the universe. This constant puts us in a kind of quarantine which we can only leave through the power of our imagination.”

OUBEY in conversation 1992

This is a quarantine in which we find ourselves for as long as we live on this earth. And this is why our ideas of what the Zero Point Field might be must remain purely speculative.

Possibly it is death which will liberate us one day from this quarantine and let us experience what now in the midst of life we call the Zero Point Field. This would be something like the solution to a paradox.

More

Newsletter