ZP OWER C ORPORATION PAGE OF 352 Z ERO P OINT E NERGY His solution an inexhaustible supply of such devices, each to be discarded after the Casrmir collapse Puthoff concedes this would not be possible with metal plates but suggests that engineers try designing zero point energy machines with a cold, charged plasma, or gas. The Casimir effect would pinch the plasma together Puthoff says, and energy in the form of heat and condensed, charged particles would result At least one such device, Puthoff says, maybe in the works. Moscow physicist Alexander Chernetsky has built a plasma generator that reportedly takes 700 watts of electricity from a wall socket and gives back 3,500 watts, creating a little more than three horsepower out of nothing. The Soviet government was impressed enough to back his research with several hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment. I went to the Soviet Union to look at Chernetsky’s work Puthoff says. I couldn’t tell in a couple of days whether his equipment really works or whether there is some fallacy in his experimental design. But It is plausible that it might be extracting zero point energy Whether or not Chernetsky’s power system works, other equipment apparently based on zero point energy and the Casimir effect is underdevelopment. The inventor Ken Shoulders, who hopes to create the next generation of circuits for laptop computers, telephones, and large-screen TVs. Shoulders hopes to create these new appliances through a phenomenon he has discovered and put to use. Called condensed charge technology, or CCT, the phenomenon occurs when electrons crowd together much as in Chernetsky’s plasma or Puthoff’s metal plates, When electrons are packed densely enough, they no longer repel each other says Shoulders. Instead they form charge clusters that hold together even without a wire to carry them. That lets us build circuits from grooves in a sheet of ceramic or plastic. Condensed charges can move through these grooves one thousand times faster than electrons travel through a semiconductor chip What is more, says Shoulders, it’s fairly easy to generate condensed charges Just make a spark. His first major trick, Shoulders hopes, will be replacing today’s silicon computer chips. If anyone else made so unlikely a claim, few would listen. But the sixty-two-year-old Shoulders, formerly of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford Research Institute, possesses extraordinary credentials In the early Sixties, he made the world’s first vacuum microelectronic circuits and the very first prototypes of the equipment now used to manufacture silicon chips. According to Shoulders, his new circuits will render silicon-based technology obsolete. It looks like there is nothing in electronics that you cannot do a whole lot better with clustered charge he says.