In ancient Greece, the School of Parmenides and Zeno held that space is a plenum, whereas Democritus opposed this view, proposing that space consisted of emptiness in which material particles were free to move. The latter view was adopted by science, for the most part, up to the present day. Was this an example of disinformation through mind control to delay meaningful scientific progress?

This is very much the case and is a keen intuitive insight appreciating more fully now the power of mind control and its ubiquitous presence, not only in the current moment but all through human history. This has been done time and again to retard scientific progress, and as you can see by this example, thousands of years have gone by without detailed interest and focus on the energetics of the Zero Point Field. The concerted effort for this exploration could have arisen much, much earlier. It could have been explored intuitively in a much more thorough fashion than even science allows currently, but other than arising here and there with discussions of the ether in a general abstract way, the level of interest has been minor because of ongoing mind control to suppress curiosity about the phenomena related to the energetics of supposedly empty space. Science once again missed the boat and is only now revisiting the concept. Time will tell how things progress from here.