Zero Point... Capital Influx usually prides herself on being a hard nosed realist. Unfortunately, the content of the article she cites doesn't really bear much resemblance to reality. The Atlantic Monthly has an interview with the author, Nick Cook, who believes that the government is using antigravity technology and "zero point energy" in classified research labs:

Hutchison is interesting, He's not a trained scientist. He's not an academic. He's just one of these guys who has an intuitive feel for electricity in particular, and other aspects of physics. He puts bits of machinery together. He tunes them. He adapts them. And from those pieces of machinery he's able to transmute metals—steel into lead, or lead into steel. But he doesn't understand how he's doing it. He feels intuitively that he's pulling these effects from the zero-point field. Now, normally to transmute a metal, you need about the same amount of energy as you get out of a low-yield nuclear weapon. And Hutchison's doing that from his wall socket. Those transmutations were documented by a Pentagon team. Now, I tend to sit up and listen when Pentagon evaluation experts are themselves paying attention to things like that. If somebody like Hutchison can do transmutations on a shoestring, that clearly is of concern—particularly as he doesn't fully understand how he's producing these very curious results. And I don't think anyone else does either. People are beginning to postulate that from the zero-point field—if we can call it a field—you could eventually get truly awesome weapons. People were saying similar kinds of things about fission in the late 1930s, and look where that got us.

Now, Instapundit cited this thing sometime ago, but I was too lazy to talk about it then. Instantman took a lot of heat for posting it, and rightly so. When I read this article, I started guffawing after about a page. In my opinion, this Cook guy is a smart fellow who has been misled by his lack of scientific knowledge. He's not able to evaluate the claims he's given with math and physics, so he's vulnerable to an enthusiastic crank. [1] I doubt he even knows what the zero point energy is... If you read the article, Cook's whole theory about "secret Nazi antigravity technology" is pretty ridiculous. There have been huge efforts by academics to explain the theory of gravitation; Podkletnov's stuff is being investigated by NASA, and can't be dismissed outright, but no one has yet been able to reproduce it. As for Hutchison, I googled for him extensively and could find no Pentagon study. I did, however, find priceless gobbledygook from Hutchison's site, such as gems like these:

... the nature of heat may not be completely understood. This has far-reaching implications for thermodynamics, which hinges entirely on the presumption of such knowledge. It should be noted that the entirety of thermodynamics is represented by the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is insignificant in a context of 0 Hz to infinite Hz.

What the hell does that mean? Is he trying to say that we only understand the heating effects of electromagnetic radiation at infrared frequencies? That's not true...ever use a microwave? The references to "Secret Nazi tech" and John Hutchison make it seem as if Cook has tapped into the mysterious source of "zero point credibility". [1] His plight is reminiscent of otherwise intelligent individuals who don't have the genetics or biology to understand that the "axiom of equality" is bunk.