Two Vacuum Chips

1 At a Glance

2 The Funded One: Casimir Inc

Harold "Sonny" White spent twenty years running NASA's EagleWorks lab, the agency's advanced-propulsion shop, before leaving in 2019. His company, Casimir Inc, says its MicroSparc chip pulls usable power from the vacuum the way White likes to put it, "a solar panel that works in the dark." On May 12, 2026, the company announced a $12 million seed round, oversubscribed from an $8 million target, led by Scout Ventures and including Tim Draper. The chip is a 5mm by 5mm part targeting 1.5 volts at 25 microamps, with commercial availability pegged to 2028 and a first market in tire-pressure sensors and wearables.

White has the credentials, the money, and two peer-reviewed papers behind him. So read those papers precisely, because this is where the story turns. The 2021 paper in European Physical Journal C and the 2026 paper in Physical Review Research (volume 8, article 013264, "Emergent quantization from a dynamic vacuum") are real, reviewed physics. Neither one claims to extract energy from the vacuum. The 2026 paper's own data-availability note states that no data were created or analyzed in the study; it's a theoretical result about where quantization comes from. The energy-extraction story lives in fundraising decks, a Joe Rogan appearance, and social-media framing, not in the reviewed literature. We walk through that distinction in detail in our Sonny White deep dive.

What's actually been demonstrated is a chip reading about 30 millivolts, shown on a podcast in May 2025, and a roadmap to 1.5 volts. No outside laboratory has confirmed the output, and the gap between a 30-millivolt bench reading and a commercial power chip is enormous. The money and the credentials are real. The working product is still a promise.

3 The Solo One: ZPF Technologies

Douglas Miller works as an air traffic controller at Houston Center and holds a 2006 aeronautics degree from Embry-Riddle. On the side, he runs Zero-Point Field Technologies and is developing the Zero-Point Field MEMs Array, a micro-fabricated chip whose GHz-actuated wedge cavities are meant to polarize virtual particle pairs and push off the vacuum. Here's the part that sets him apart from almost everyone in this space: Miller is explicit that he isn't trying to extract energy at all. His pitch is navigation, modulating the vacuum to steer, not to power. "Navigation via ZPF modulation, not extraction," as the company's own write-up puts it.

The numbers tell you how early this is. The near-term prototype is projected to produce 3 to 15 millinewtons of thrust on 10 watts, roughly the push of a few grains of rice resting on your hand. From there the company's math scales fast and loose: 0.6 to 9 newtons per square centimeter, and a claim that a 100-square-centimeter array "could generate 576 to 10,891 newtons." Those are projections stacked on projections, not measurements. Nothing has been built. The balance sheet shows $5,400 invested and no burn rate beyond annual fees.

Miller is raising $350,000 to build and test a prototype in nine months, part of a wider $1 million ask that also covers a second idea, a "fusion reactor enhancer." He's lined up cleanroom time through Rice University's Shared Equipment Authority, names Embry-Riddle as a hoped-for partner, and plans a non-provisional patent filing in June 2026. It's a serious, specific plan. It's also a long way from a working device, and the physics it rests on has problems of its own.

4 The Physics Each Leans On

Both companies rest on the claim that the vacuum has structure you can engineer. The strength of that claim is not the same on each side.

White builds on Hendrik Casimir's 1948 force, measured to precision by Steve Lamoreaux in 1997, and on Harold Puthoff's polarizable-vacuum model, the same framework cited across the AAWSAP and AATIP propulsion work. His 2026 paper passed peer review at an American Physical Society journal. You can disagree with the interpretation, and many physicists do, but the foundation is published, measured, and defended in the open literature.

Miller's foundation is more contested, and a reader weighing the two ventures should understand why. He cites the 1994 Haisch-Rueda-Puthoff model that treats inertia as a vacuum effect ("Inertia as a Zero-Point-Field Lorentz Force," Physical Review A 49, 678). That paper was influential, but a 2009 analysis in the same journal concluded its central result was an error rooted in a non-relativistic shortcut. He also draws on Barry Setterfield's "variable constants" work, and Setterfield's claim that the speed of light has decayed over time sits well outside mainstream physics, tied to a young-earth-creationist cosmology and traced back to a single mishandled data point. A partly-refuted 1994 paper and a fringe cosmology aren't the same footing as a peer-reviewed result. That's a judgment about what the physics can bear, not about Miller.

To his credit, Miller hides none of this. He lays out his sources, his early stage, and his shoestring budget in the open, and he's blunt that the array is unbuilt and the figures are projections. That candor is rarer than it should be in this field, and it earns him genuine credit. It just can't, on its own, firm up a contested foundation.

5 What Neither Has Shown

Here's what matters when you cut through the funding gap and the credential gap. Casimir Inc has a bench reading of about 30 millivolts and a target of 1.5 volts. ZPF Technologies has a fabrication-ready design and a set of projections, with nothing built yet. Neither has handed an independent lab a device that produces net energy or measurable thrust and said, "check our work." Until that happens, both sit on the speculative end of the spectrum, regardless of how the round was priced.

The irony is that the builders are more careful than the headlines. White's reviewed papers pointedly avoid the free-energy claim; the hype is bolted on from outside. Miller flatly denies he's chasing free energy at all. The "infinite power from empty space" story belongs to the audience, not to either founder's actual filings. That's the tell worth remembering: the closer you get to the bench, the more modest the claim becomes.

6 Why It Matters

The vacuum-energy chip is becoming a genre. As fabrication gets cheaper and the physics of structured vacuums gets more airtime, more of these ventures will appear, and the distance between the demo and the headline will keep growing. The two companies here mark the range of what's out there right now: a venture-backed team with peer-reviewed physics and an unverified chip, and a lone engineer with a careful, openly-documented plan built on a shakier theoretical footing.

Why does a site about MH370 and suppressed propulsion care about a $5,400 startup and a tire-pressure-sensor chip? Because the orb question runs straight through this physics. If the vacuum really can be shaped to produce thrust or negative energy, that's the propulsion mechanism a lot of the evidence on this site points toward. The way you'll know it's real isn't a funding announcement or a podcast demo. It's an independent measurement somebody else can repeat. Casimir Inc and ZPF Technologies are both worth watching for exactly that moment, and worth holding to exactly that standard until it arrives.

7 Key Sources