A Reality Check with Nassim Haramein
Nassim Haramein 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 evolution 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 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 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” 1055grams. In other words, the vacuum, the dark space, the world of nothing, contained a gigantic amount of potential energy that nobody had ever observed. 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.
Today 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 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 an 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…
You’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-hole-proton 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 meantime, 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 remains 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.
To learn more about Haramein, check out his TEDx Talk, The Connected Universe:
