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The
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promise of
nothing
Nassim Haramein
is putting both
physics and your
world on its head.
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WINTER 2015 VOL. 12, ISSUE 4
Life
5 4 T H EO PT IM I ST.COM WINTER 2015
NASSIM HARAMEIN HAS DEDICATED HIS LIFE TO
FINDING THE ORIGINS OF OUR EXISTENCE
The
amazing
promise of
nothing
Nassim Haramein turns the world of physics—and
your world—upside down. BY JURRIAAN KAMP
PHOTOGRAPHY PROVIDED BY THE RESONANCE PROJECT FOUNDATION;
MALCOM CARTER/CHRONOSPHOTOGRAPHY.COM
N
ASSIM HARAMEIN IS FASCIN-
ated by nothing.
And he believes that without
nothing, there wouldn’t be any-
thing.
This may sound like foolproof philosophy. However, the practical implications for
humanity and the future of the planet are immense.
Haramein, 52, has dedicated his life to
finding the origins of our existence. He’s
come a long way, and he may be about to
unlock an abundant source of energy that
will transform humanity and civilization as
we know it. If Haramein succeeds, issues
like climate change and global warming—
even wars fed by scarcity—may fade into
oblivion, and space travel will become like
your daily commute.
Hard to believe? Well, the story begins
with the vacuum … with nothing.
As a kid, Nassim Haramein wrestled with
the questions we all struggle with. Where do
we come from? Where do we go? The answer of mainstream physics is that our evo-
lution begins with the Big Bang and that our
universe has been expanding ever since. It’s
a very sophisticated theory that still doesn’t
answer this question: Where did the Big
Bang come from?
Haramein suggests that we may be too
obsessed with things, with matter. We have
studied the universe by way of the things we
could touch and see with ever more clever
microscopes and telescopes. That makes
sense. However, matter covers only an estimated 4 percent of the universe; 96 percent
is dark space, vacuum. And that fact applies
as much to galaxies as to the world of subatomic particles. All that space—the vast
majority of our reality—has been conveniently set aside in our scientific exploration
efforts.
There’s another problem: in our search to
understand matter, we have found the rules
for large objects (Einstein’s theory of general relativity) and we have gained insights
into the subatomic world of quantum physics, where only probability appears to rule.
Quantum physics and Einstein’s so-called
WINTER 2015 T H EO PT I M I ST. CO M 5 5
field equations are at odds. “Big things are
made of small things,” says Haramein.
The contradiction troubled Einstein
until his death. “God doesn’t play
dice with the universe,” he famously said.
It’s well accepted among
the most elite physicists that
the standard model of physics is not the final word on
the story of our existence.
Perhaps it’s time for a different approach? Haramein
says, “Stop looking for the
things—the galaxies and the
particles—and instead begin
trying to understand the patterns between the things. If we
find that pattern, we have the key to
creation.”
Rewind, now, to 10-year-old Nassim,
in his school in Montreal, Canada, where
he was living with his Iranian father and his
Italian mother. He was excited to attend his
first geometry class, hoping to get some answers to his “life questions.” He recalls that
his teacher put a dot on the drawing board
and said, “That’s dimension zero. It doesn’t
exist.”
Then he created a line of a few dots and
said, “That’s the first dimension. It doesn’t
exist.”
Then, with four lines, he created a plane:
“That’s the second dimension. It doesn’t
exist.”
Finally, he created a box with six planes:
“That’s the third dimension, which encloses
a volume that makes up reality. That’s where
you live.”
“I was puzzled and totally disappointed,”
Haramein recalls. “From the back of the
class, I could clearly see the dot ‘that didn’t
exist.’ It didn’t make sense to me that dots
and lines that didn’t exist created something
that did exist. I remember deciding then and
there that I needed to understand reality better.”
That quest was going to be outside the
conventional educational system—a possible precondition for the unconventional insights and “out of the box” suggestions that
Haramein has presented in the past 30 years.
He suffered from severe dyslexia and quit
high school as soon as Canadian law permitted him to pursue a career in sports. He
became a ski instructor and mountain guide.
“I wanted to be close to nature, as I loved
5 6 T H EO PT IM I ST.COM WINTER 2015
observing the natural world. I looked at the
shapes of snowflakes, leaves and trees. I saw
the same geometric patterns occurring again
and again, and I thought: This cannot be
random. The incredible complexity and codependency had to come from some mechanism that makes it possible for everything
to communicate with everything and to
self-organize. There had to be an underlying
structure that was highly coherent at the base
of the natural world—from the atomic level
to the biological and astronomical.”
In nature, Haramein went back to the
dot that his teacher had put on the drawing board. A thought experiment made him
conclude that—contrary to what his teacher
had said—the dot, the point, is the only thing
that exists. If he imagined hovering above
his house high enough, the house became a
point. Still higher, his city became a point.
Subsequently, the earth becomes a dot. And
if you could fly away far enough, even the
galaxy would look like a dot. In the opposite direction you see the same thing: A cell
is a dot. So is a molecule. An atom. A subatomic particle. “Each boundary is embedded in larger and smaller ones, and it’s the
relationship between the boundaries—the
pattern—that’s important, not the specifics
of one particular boundary.”
In the emerging vision of Haramein, the
relationships between the dots had to be
governed by a fundamental geometry. And
he expected that geometry to be in space, in
the vacuum, in the 96 percent nothingness
of outer space that was constantly overlooked by science. “Maybe space
was permeated with all the information of all things in the space
and was the great connector
between all these things. After all, from infinitely large to
infinitely small, space would
always be present. Perhaps
space defined matter, rather
than the material world defining space?”
At some point on the slopes
it dawned on Haramein that he
had to make a big decision: “I
needed to stop goofing around the
ski industry and really pursue what I
sensed was my calling.” He sold all his
ski equipment and bought a van and all the
books about philosophy, advanced physics,
mathematics, chemistry and spirituality he
wanted to read. For five years he lived in his
van in the mountains of Canada and California, on an annual budget of some $2,500,
an amount he earned with occasional mountain-guide work. He spent his days like a
hermit, alone in his van studying for hours
and hours, interrupted only by some rock
climbing in the early morning and evening.
Haramein kept thinking about the “empty” space. If the vacuum were the great
medium that connected all things, gathering information from all places so as to
self-organize and create the complexity we
observe in the natural world, we need to be
able to find that information, that energy
in space. Space could not be empty—and
that’s what we think we observe.
Experiments in quantum physics have
shown that there’s something in space. Fluctuations can be measured within the core of
atoms even at absolute zero temperature,
when supposedly all energy has to be gone.
To understand this phenomenon, physicists
started making calculations about the energy
density of the vacuum. They came to a startling number: The energy density was 1093
grams per cubic centimeter. To put that in
perspective: If all matter of the universe as
we know it today were compressed into one
cubic centimeter, the density of that cube
would be “only” 1055 grams. In other words,
the vacuum, the dark space, the world of
nothing, contained a gigantic amount of
potential energy that nobody had ever ob-
ABOUT 96 PERCENT OF OUR UNIVERSE IS DARK SPACE,
VACUUM. HARAMEIN THINKS WE COULD HAVE ABUNDANT
ENERGY EVERYWHERE, IF WE CAN UNLOCK THE ENERGY
FROM THAT VACUUM.
served. This outcome was quickly dubbed
“the vacuum catastrophe” or “the worst prediction in physics.” And that’s where science
has left the issue.
Haramein sees in this “worst prediction”
a confirmation of his thinking. The vacuum
field that in his view feeds and organizes the
natural world has to have an enormous information—energy—density. “But in order to
fulfill the job of making everything we see
right, the field has to have the possibility of
being in a perfect equilibrium. It appears to
us as quiet space with zero energy, while it
contains a huge amount of information at the
same time.”
There’s another troubling thought that
the Big Bang theory doesn’t explain: Why
have all objects—galaxies, stars, planets,
atoms and electrons—been rotating for 14
billion years? Where’s that energy coming
from? Spin appears to be at the foundation
of everything. Without spin, nothing can
come into existence. “You may think that the
tree in your street or the rock in your garden is not spinning,” says Haramein, “but
every atom in the tree or the rock spins. And
they stand on a planet that’s spinning. Objects that appear to be inanimate exist solely
because spinning atoms within allow the
objects to radiate and, hence, appear in our
reality.”
But where’s the spin coming from?
“There has to be a fundamental force that
generates the spin,” says Haramein. Once
again, he looks at the vacuum, at space. He
suggests that the spin comes from a subtle
change in the density of the vacuum. The
equilibrium is slightly disturbed, and that
produces the spin much like a butterfly clapping its wings may cause a perfect hurricane on the other side of the world. In 1948,
Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir proposed
an experiment to prove that such fluctuations
could happen in the vacuum. It wasn’t until
the early 1990s that the precise instruments
could be created for the experiment, but
Casimir’s calculations were confirmed, and
in these Haramein finds the evidence that the
spin force is indeed produced by the energy
in the vacuum.
T
One of the foremost
physicists in the world,
Stephen Hawking now
says that black holes
they radiate information
as well—much like the
view of Haramein.
ODAY HARAMEIN LIVES WITH HIS
family of two children on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, where he started
the Resonance Project to do his research.
When I meet up with him, though, it’s in the
mansion of one of his backers in the Santa
Cruz Mountains of California. It’s a hot
summer day. Haramein’s team is busy preparing for an annual meeting of donors. Nassim himself is recovering from a back injury
that he picked up on one of his outdoor
WINTER 2015 T H EO PT I M I ST. CO M 5 7
HARAMEIN SUGGESTS THAT
WE MAY BE TOO OBSESSED
WITH THINGS, WITH MATTER,
WHILE MATTER COVERS
ONLY AN ESTIMATED 4
PERCENT OF THE UNIVERSE.
Imagine: space is
everywhere. If we
could unlock that
energy in the vacuum,
we would have
abundant energy
everywhwere.
5 8 T H EO PT IM I ST.COM WINTER 2015
adventures. He’s still regularly surfing and
climbing. The injury makes it hard to reach
the cup of tea on the table in front of him,
but his mind works fine, and, speaking in his
characteristic voice, he travels the universe
and manages to explain complex issues of
space and time to this lay reporter, patiently
re-explaining himself when he loses me.
If space plays such a critical role in the
creation of the universe, how is information
extracted from the vacuum or whatever is at
the core of the spinning? Twenty years ago,
Haramein began arguing that there had to
be a singularity at the center of every galaxy where information would be spinning
in and out—exactly like we see in the pictures of swirling galaxies. According to him,
that singularity—a black hole—had to both
absorb energy and information and feed it
back into the system. It was an outrageous
proposition. At the time, black holes were
believed to be extremely rare. “My suggestion made me a heretic, and I was kicked out
of some physics conferences,” he says with
a smile.
However, better telescopes have since
confirmed that there’s indeed a black hole at
the core of each galaxy. Haramein and mainstream physics still disagreed about the function. “I said the black hole is the source of
the galaxy; it’s where the formation begins.
But according to mainstream physics, the
black holes were formed by the collapse of
stars. So in their view the galaxy comes first,
then the black hole.” But this dispute has
also disappeared, as it has been discovered
in recent years that black holes are indeed
present prior to galactic formation, and there
appears to be a direct relationship between
the size of a black hole and the size of a galaxy. In the meantime, one of the foremost
physicists in the world, Stephen Hawking,
who used to argue that black holes only absorbed information, now says that they radiate information as well—much like the view
of Haramein.
Recent scientific measurements and
discoveries have confirmed the mostly
theoretical exercises about black holes put
forth by Haramein. But in order for his
theory to bring infinity and finitude together
in a unified field, Haramein needs another
entry point into the vacuum. In his reasoning, there needs to be a black hole, a point
of infinite potential, at each end of the
spectrum—the infinitely large and the infinitely small need to be connected. This has
brought him to another outrageous suggestion: There has to be a black hole at the
core of each atom. Haramein thinks that
the proton in the nucleus of the atom is the
most likely candidate for being the exchange
mechanism with the vacuum at the smallest
level.
“If you describe the protons as mini–
black holes, you solve Einstein’s field equations,” says Haramein. For that to happen,
Haramein had to prove that the force of
gravity within the proton would be exactly
the same as the so-called strong force that
quantum physics uses to describe the energy
in the subatomic world. In his paper “The
Schwarzschild Proton,” published in 2010,
Haramein was able to prove just that. His
calculations—done with the support of former Berkeley nuclear and astrophysicist
Dr. Elizabeth Rauscher—matched the force
of gravity exactly with the strong force as
the energy holding protons together in the
nucleus of an atom. “I was pointing out that
maybe we don’t need the strong force in
quantum theory. That we’re actually dealing with a classical object that obeys the
Einstein laws,” says Haramein. The disconnect in physics between Einstein’s theory of
general relativity and quantum theory would
be resolved.
Haramein went one step further. He calculated the mass of his black-hole proton
in exactly the same way as the calculations
were done for the vacuum density, the ones
that had produced “the worst prediction in
physics.” He came up with a mass of 1055
grams for the proton—more than enough
to make it a black hole. That number is the
same as the mass of all combined matter in
the universe.
Haramein concludes, “That tells me that
the energy of the vacuum carries the information of all protons in the universe [electrons have hardly any mass] in one proton.
I’m starting to think that all the information
is holographic.”
That perspective brings Haramein once
again closer to mainstream physics. Earlier
this week during my visit, I picked up the
August 2014 issue of Scientific American,
which says on the cover: “The black hole at
the beginning of time: Do we live in a holographic image from another dimension?”
The argument in this article seems to align
nicely with Haramein’s thinking. One proton
could have escaped from another dimension
to produce our Big Bang …
Y
OU’VE COME A LONG WAY IN THIS
article, only to find yourself back at
the unimaginable event of the Big
Bang. So why is this all relevant for you?
And why would you believe Nassim Haramein?
He’s right about the black holes at the
center of every galaxy. His calculations of
the black-hole proton appear to be convincing. He has Einstein on his side when it
comes to the conviction that there has to be
some kind of unified field where the same
rules apply. And Haramein’s black-holeproton proposition does solve that problem.
That’s not to say that Haramein doesn’t
have hordes of critics. His thinking runs directly counter to some of the core concepts of
physics today. And even where he comes to
the same conclusions, he arrives there in a
simple way, whereas—just one example—
in the past 50 years, billions have been
invested in a special particle accelerator, originally built under the Swiss Alps, to find the
smallest particle, only to result in the conclusion that there are ever smaller particles to
be found.
Who is this Nassim Haramein, who never
attended a university but instead spent five
years alone in a van in the mountains? In the
mean time, the Resonance Project he set up
in Hawaii, where he continues his research,
has received substantial backing. There are
signs that mainstream science is opening up
to his ideas.
However, his biggest discovery is yet to
be made. And that’s why this is relevant for
you. What mainstream science sees as the
“vacuum catastrophe” or “the worst prediction ever made” is, for Nassim Haramein,
not a catastrophe at all, but the survival of
humanity and the promise of an amazing future. His whole theory is designed around
space, the vacuum—that very nothing, that
96 percent of our universe that science so far
has disregarded and that contains a gigantic
energy potential, albeit kept in a nicely preserved equilibrium. If we were able to access
that potential, our world would be a completely different place, and your life would
be transformed.
Imagine: space is everywhere. If we
could unlock that energy in the vacuum, we
would have abundant energy everywhere.
You would be able to create gravitational
fields, travel to the stars, or constantly watch
sunsets. Transportation would be a completely new concept.
Haramein is convinced that the vacuum
has an elegant geometric structure that provides the perfect equilibrium that makes
us experience space as empty. He sees
clues of that structure in symbols like the
flower of life that can be found in the re-
mains of ancient civilizations. These symbols point to the vector equilibrium, the only
geometric form where all the vectors are of
equal length, thus providing the perfect equilibrium. According to Haramein, that geometry is the clue. If we can break the vectors,
we can access gravity and infinite energy.
“Our challenge is to build the right
‘radio,’” Haramein says. “Nobody can see
radio waves. But they are there, and when
you have the right machine, you can tune in
and you hear music. This challenge is exactly the same. The energy is there. We just
need to ‘tune in.’” That’s why he named his
project, whose goal is to meet this challenge,
the Resonance Project. “If you know the
dynamics of the vacuum, how protons spin,
how they self-organize to produce mass or
energy, you have a road map to build a device that could artificially reproduce that
energy.”
He quickly points out that this is not free
energy, energy coming out of nowhere—ex
nihilo—which would violate basic laws of
physics. “We’re not tapping into a source
of energy that wasn’t there before. It has always been there.” And yet it would be free
and available like the air we breathe. And
limitless. That would be a radical revolution
for societies and civilizations that for centuries have been structured around, and fought
wars over, limited resources.
My eyes travel to the distance, where
they meet the Pacific Ocean as I hear Haramein describing the potential outcome of his
search. He senses he has lost me.
“Far-fetched?” he asks.
“No, I’m hoping,” I retort.
“Remember,” he continues, “the Wright
brothers showed that flying with an aircraft
was possible when, according to the physics of the time, flying was impossible. Subsequently, it took science years to confirm
what already had been done.”
I know. The examples of humanity exceeding its own expectations are many. We
may very well be quite close to breaking this
frontier. If Nassim Haramein leads the way
into the exploration of nothing, his results
could change everything.
JURRIAAN KAMP spent at least 96 percent
of the time in a vacuum, while writing this
EVENT WITH HARAMEIN:
see page 1 for details
WINTER 2015 T H EO PT I M I ST. CO M 5 9