IUBio

Z.P.E. definition (condensed)

Didier A. Depireux didier at Glue.umd.edu
Wed Jan 13 11:15:25 EST 1999


Richard Sargent (dsargent at ix.netcom.com) wrote:


: energy source is discovered.]  Is anyone familiar with contemporary
: research on Zero Point Energy?

There's little "research" to be done. The so-called Casimir effect, namely
the fact that if you put, in a perfect vacuum, two metal plates close to
each other and that they would attract each other, has been measured
indirectly only, by looking at the van der Waals forces in real gases (the
Casimir effect would manifest itself by a 1/r^5 effect, if I remember
correctly).  

But it is true that you don't get "something for nothing". The kind of
power you could get out of the Casimir effect and other ZPE effect is the
same as what you would get from having two masses gravitationally attract
each other, or have an electron-positron pair annihilate: you have to
provide energy to separate the two masses or to generate the pair in the
first place. You don't get "something for nothing". No Physics principle
gets violated anywhere.

						Didier

--
Didier A Depireux                              didier at isr.umd.edu
Neural Systems Lab                 http://www.isr.umd.edu/~didier
Institute for Systems Research          Phone: 301-405-6557 (off)
University of Maryland                                -6596 (lab)
College Park MD 20742 USA                     Fax: 1-301-314-9920



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