Harry Jabs
Harry Jabs | |
|---|---|
| Known for | Electric Universe cosmology, Tesla's "space energy", revival of the Aether concept in modern physics |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics, Cosmology, instrumentation, biophysics |
| Institutions | Institute for Frontier Science, California |
Harry Jabs is a physicist, engineer and inventor who works outside the institutional mainstream on the revival of the aether concept in physics, on Electric Universe cosmology, and on Nikola Tesla's claim that usable energy can be drawn from space itself. He is Co-Principal Investigator at the Institute for Frontier Science, a small non-profit research laboratory in California, where he collaborates closely with the biophysicist Beverly Rubik.
Biography
Jabs earned a Master of Science degree in physics at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and a second Master of Science degree in physics at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.
He is described by the Institute for Frontier Science as a multi-disciplinary scientist and engineer with a track record of invention and research spanning physics, chemistry, life sciences and medicine, electronics, mechanics, micro-mechanics, material science and computer science. He holds seven patents and eight disclosures of invention, and has received two NASA certificates of recognition. Much of his laboratory work has involved designing detectors and instrumentation — in particular ultra-sensitive photon-counting equipment used at the Institute for Frontier Science to measure extremely weak light emission from living organisms.
Scientific contributions
Electric Universe cosmology and Tesla's space energy
Jabs is a proponent of the Electric Universe view of the cosmos, the tradition associated on this wiki with Wallace Thornhill and David Talbott, in which electric currents and plasma — rather than gravity acting alone — are the dominant organising forces in space. In 2014 he presented "Electric Universe, Tesla's Space Energy, & Galactic Model" at the ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference run by Tesla Tech, bringing together three themes: the electrical model of stars and galaxies, Nikola Tesla's conviction that energy is available "at any point in the universe", and a proposed galactic model built on electrodynamic rather than purely gravitational principles.
This connects the Electric Universe and Plasma Cosmology research programmes to the independent-inventor and free-energy community, where Tesla's remark that "ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point in the universe" has long been read as an anticipation of energy extraction from the vacuum.
Revisiting the aether
Jabs' most substantial published contribution is the 2018 paper "Revisiting the Aether in Science", written with Beverly Rubik for Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy. The paper argues that the historical rejection of the Aether around 1900 was premature and rested on a misreading of the evidence.
The authors make several points that run directly against the textbook account:
- The Michelson–Morley experiment is conventionally credited as the death blow to the aether, but "this is not exactly so." The results were not nil — they showed roughly 25% of the expected 30 km/s aether-wind signal due to the Earth's orbital motion.
- Following Reginald Cahill, they note that interferometers operated in vacuum consistently return a "null" result, because a refractive index of exactly n = 1 produces complete cancellation of the geometric path-length effect. Interferometers operated in air or in a dielectric, by contrast, repeatedly show drifts of the order of 8–12 km/s. On this reading the null results are an artefact of apparatus design, not a disproof of the medium.
- The aether was abandoned chiefly because Special Relativity contradicts an absolute frame of reference — a theoretical preference rather than an experimental verdict. Einstein himself later came to accept a new version of the aether in connection with General Relativity, writing that "to deny the aether is ultimately to assume that empty space has no physical qualities whatsoever."
Jabs and Rubik then argue that twentieth-century physics quietly reintroduced the aether under other names. The quantum vacuum has turned out to possess a genuine physical structure — an elastic modulus, a stress tensor, a shear tensor, magnetic permeability and susceptibility, and a characteristic electromagnetic wave impedance of 377 ohms — and is now better described as a "quantum plenum" with an energy density of the order of 1094 g/cm3 mass-equivalent. They observe that John Wheeler took this plenum, rather than elementary particles, as the proper starting point for describing nature.
Their proposed "neo-aether" is a primordial substrate underlying fields, matter and sentience alike. Within it, particle spin may be understood as a vortex in the aether, electric fields as a polarisation of the aether, and matter itself as a dynamic modification of the aether at the foundation of quantum field theory. The authors situate this alongside the Akasha of Vedic philosophy, the luminiferous aether of Huygens, Maxwell's molecular vortices, the zero-point energy of quantum theory, the dark energy of cosmology and the quantum potential of David Bohm — treating these as different names for one substrate.
They also draw the practical and philosophical consequences: it may be possible to transform some of the enormous energy of the quantum plenum into useful energy forms, which is the tradition Tesla, and later Forward's Casimir-force proposals, belong to; and because the aether has roots in perennial wisdom, admitting a neo-aether into science "may be one step toward healing the rift between science and spirit," potentially forming the basis of a panentheistic cosmology.
Biophotons and the biofield
With Beverly Rubik, Jabs has built photomultiplier-based instrumentation to detect ultraweak photon emission (biophotons) from human beings and other organisms, and to test whether intention, energy healing and extraordinary mind-body states measurably change that emission. This experimental line is continuous with his aether work: in "Revisiting the Aether in Science" the authors suggest that an interaction between organisms and the neo-aether may be fundamentally involved in life processes, and that practitioners reported to live on "cosmic energy" may be transducing zero-point energy into biologically useful form. He has also worked with Rubik on the potential health effects of wireless radiation from communication devices.
Works
- Rubik, B. and Jabs, H. "Revisiting the Aether in Science." Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 14, no. 2 (2018), pp. 239–253.
- Rubik, B. and Jabs, H. "Effects of Intention, Energy Healing, and Mind-Body States on Biophoton Emission." Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy (2017).
- Jabs, H. "Electric Universe, Tesla's Space Energy, & Galactic Model." ExtraOrdinary Technology Conference (Tesla Tech), Albuquerque, New Mexico, 30 July – 3 August 2014.
- Rubik, B. and Jabs, H. "Ultraweak Light Emission from Humans and Other Organisms in Health & Healing." Society for Scientific Exploration Annual Conference, Sunnyvale, California, June 2014.
- Rubik, B. and Jabs, H. "Wireless Radiation, 5G and Our Health." United States Psychotronics Association, 2019.