Unfolding the Enfolded...

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the concept of an absolute vacuum --a truly empty space--emerged after the famous Michaelson-Morley experiments failed to detect an ether believed to produce friction when matter such as the earth moved through it.

But in the last half of the century, physicists determined the vacuum was far from empty: rather, it was, metaphorically, a sea filled with virtual energy from which energy and matter of our universe arise and back into which they fall.

This energy sea is not merely in outer space; it is everywhere: surrounding and indeed embedding atoms and organisms, as well as stars and galaxies. [Laszlo, p. 27]

Laszlo notes that

Vacuum theories are yet in ferment, but they already tell us that the vacuum is the most fundamental field of the universe. It "glues" quarks, stabilizes atoms and solar systems, and creates mass as well as the forces of inertia and gravitation. It connects all things with all other things. [Laszlo, p. 30]

A number of cutting edge theories involve relating inertia, gravity, and photon radiation and a universal memory to the quantum vacuum. Among the explanations are the following:

• The inertia of acceleration is the force that arises from the interaction of the vacuum and the charged particles that make up material objects, including our bodies. [seePuthoff]
• The force of gravity may be generated between unequal masses as they interact in the vacuum rather than from the warping of space-time claimed in relativity theory.
• The quantum vacuum includes the relatively enormous spaces between the electrons and the nuclei they orbit.
• Electrons orbiting a nucleus and constantly radiating energy would eventually fall into the nucleus due to the loss energy, but for the fact that they derive new energy from the vacuum in which they are immersed. So too would the earth fall into the sun if it were not for the energy it gains from the vacuum.
• When electrons around a nucleus exchange (i.e., gain or loose) energy with the zero-point vacuum field, the radiation of the emitted photons shifts frequency.
  [pp. 28-29, Laszlo]

Still more surprising, matter may owe its very existence to interaction with the vacuum. Experiments reported in 2005 by the Brookhaven National Laboratory show that the vacuum constitutes an extremely dense "gluon field"--that is, a field of the "gluons" (the particles that bind--or "glue"--quarks. Quarks are the fundamental units of protons and neutrons, hence of everything we can think of as matter. This means that the gluon-field of the vacuum is responsible for the enduring presence of all matter in the universe. [p. 30 Laszlo]

Laszlo explains how this sea of the quantum vacuum records information in the waves, vortices and interference patterns in the quantum vacuum.

 He concludes,

Vortices in the vacuum record information on the state of the particles that created them and the interference pattern records information on the ensemble of the particles whose vortices have interfered. In this way, the vacuum records and carries information on atoms, molecules, organelles, cells, even on organisms and populations of organisms. There is no evident limit to the information that vacuum-waves could record and conserve. In the final count they can record information on the state of the whole universe.
[p. 34, Laszlo]

Physicist William Tiller explains, in Conscious Acts of Creation,

Most of the general public hold the idea that the vacuum is not only the absence of physical matter but that it is also devoid of anything! However, this is not so. For QM [Quantum Mechanics] and relativity theory to be internally self-consistent theories, the vacuum is required to contain an amazingly large inherent energy content. This vacuum energy density is calculated to be so large that the intrinsic energy contained within the volume of a single hydrogen atom is about one trillion times larger than that stored in all the physical mass of all the planets plus all the stars in the cosmos out to the present limits of detection, a radius of ~20 billion light-years (provided we neglect the gravitational constant factor which is unity for a "flat" space). This makes the energy stored in physical matter a mere whisper compared to that stored in the vacuum. [ Tiller et al, pp. 385-6]