The weak Casimir's force is interpreted as resulting from an asymmetry of the pressure exerted by vacuum fluctuations on a thin pair of parallel metal plates. As a force does exist that can be put to work the question arises whether one could extract energy from vacuum.
See:
Casimir’s force is a relativistic correction to the van der Waals force. Van der Waals force varies as r^-6, and the corrected force varies as r^-7.
- H. B. G. Casimir and D. Polder, Phys. Rev. 73, 360–372 (1948), The Influence of Retardation on the London-van der Waals Forces
- Robert L. Forward* Phys. Rev. B 30, 1700–1702 (1984), Extracting electrical energy from the vacuum by cohesion of charged foliated conductors
That would be great! If the vacuum fluctuations provide energy we will solve our energy problem. Charles please teach me: Where did Big Bang energy come from? Was it vacuum fluctuations if there was nothing before Big Bang? In one of the books of Brian Green (may be Fabric of Reality) there is a nice picture of vacuum fluctuations: looks very busy and energetic! It would be nice to harness that energy. I must read more about Casimir forces and vacuum fluctuations.
Has anyone really measured Casimir force between metallic plates? I shall be interested in the literature.
I am involved in neutron scattering study of the battery material for clean energy. But if we can extract energy from vacuum fluctuations then we do not need these any more perhaps.
We should first have good batteries (PV storage), then the warp propulsion from vacuum energy.. later, the beam me up scotty.
Please do not stop your neutron scattering experiments !
Lukas: Do not worry. I shall not give up my neutron experiments on practical battery materials which are already providing us clean energy. But the idea of exploiting vacuum fluctuations for energy is extremely fascinating.
Bye the way what does the expression "the beam me up scotty" mean?
I got this in Wikipedia:
"Beam me up, Scotty" is a catchphrase that made its way into popular culture from the science fiction television series Star Trek. It comes from the command Captain Kirk gives his chief engineer, Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, when he needs to be transported back to the Starship Enterprise.
Though it has become irrevocably associated with the series and movies, the exact phrase was never actually spoken in any Star Trek television episode or film.
Beam me up, Scotty" is similar to the phrase, "Just the facts, ma'am", attributed to Jack Webb's character of Joe Friday on Dragnet, "It's elementary, my dear Watson", attributed to Sherlock Holmes, "Luke, I am your father", attributed to Darth Vader, or "Play it again, Sam", attributed to Ilsa Lund in Casablanca and "We don't need no stinkin' badges!" attributed to Gold Hat in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. All five lines are the best known quotations from these works for many viewers, but not one is an actual, direct quotation.
I still have learn English!!!
I was referring to this wonderful machine which transports you where ever in time and space.. the ultimate goal of all of us, researcher...
well, I am not so sure this should be it.. we are doing a lot of harm to our planet with our modern (actual) belief (religion) into science&technology. A lot of what we do would probably be better invested in "alternativ" science: do something for the wealth of the planet, the living creatures and their minds (for those who have some).
Clean energy of course is a wonderful goal, especially if this goes in pair with cheap. It would be the start of a new geopolitics ! No war for oil anymore.. not for water, not for food, not for minerals... paradise.. but we have already had paradise.. what made Adam bite into the apple, why did we made today's world out of it? What does Buddha say about it? or Mohamed? I am not convinced Science&Technology is safe for humans.
Quantum interpretation of the Casimir force, based on the asymmetry of the pressure exerted by vacuum fluctuations on a pair of parallel metal plates, is the last bad idea of a decaying theory.
@Daniele. i) Theories do not decay, they are right or wrong in a well defined physical frame. ii) Quantum interpretation of the Casimir force is an interpretation not a theory.
@Tapan. Yes the Casimir force has been measured.
See: - Astrid Lambrecht & Serge Reynaud ; Recent experiments on the Casimir effect: description and analysis, séminaire Poincaré (Paris, 9 mars 2002), in: Poincaré Seminar 2002, Progress in Mathematical Physics 30, Birkhäuser (2003),B. Duplantier, V. Rivasseau (Eds.) ISBN 3-7643-0579-7. http://www.bourbaphy.fr/reynaud.pdf
@Charles, I agree. In fact I made reference to the theory of Quantum Mechanics with regard to the decaying theory. That interpretation of the Casimir effect, which according to scientific literature has been measured, is possible only inside basic concepts of QM in which it is possible to claim "a vacuum isn't empty" and "it is possible to extract energy from a vacuum". I don't like to play with words. Vacuum statistical fluctuactions are possible only in a theory where the Principle of Causality isn't valid. I am unable to give now a systematic alternative, physical and non-statistical, causal and non-casual, interpretation of the Casimir effect because now I am attending to other questions but
I know it is possible. I need time.
The Casimir force is sort of a Van de Waals force between the plates. Zero point fluctuation isn't an energy but a choice of the energy origin. If it were energy, it would be possible to extract it from the Casimir force, but it isn't. Speculation about vacuum that isn't vacuum is metaphysics.
@Claude.
- "Zero point fluctuations is not energy" is an authoritarive argument, I was expecting Physics arguments pro or against the possibility to extract energy from vacuum. Up to now I only read pro arguments in literature based on very general arguments and no experimental test.
- It is physics. There exist a force that should produce work. The question is about wether or not this energy comes from some vacuum that needs a definition anyway. QM allows for the half particles of the second quantization to form real full energy particles as soon as they disappear almost immediately at the time of their creation. The question is therefore: do they live long enough to act in the real world? And this is related to the quantization of time too. (https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_time_quantized2)
My reaction when I first red a paper on the extraction of energy from vacuum was that it would violate the second principle of the thermodynamics. But my second thought was: a principle is not a demonstration and it could be violated itself by Casimir's force set to work.
Many physicists, even the greatest, haven't understood what is a fluctuation, but anyway nobody has understood quantum mechanics. There is no "half-particle" or something like something, there is a coherent superposition of everything which sums to zero. The vacuum being empty, there is nothing measured and therefore all that is metaphysics. The Casimir force doesn't show the energy of vacuum, it shows the energy of two plates, which obviously isn't vacuum. All to much obvious perhaps, and a huge lost of time.
OK, Claude I understand the point: Casimir's force is "simply" a relativistic correction to the van der Waal's force between to metal plates that does not need any more interpretation. Thank you.
@Charles: Now I have gone through the literature of the Casimir effect a bit including very nice paper by E. Elizalde and A. Romeo, Am. J. Phys. 59, 711 (1991) and the torturous review article by G. Plunien et a., Phys. Rep. 134, 87 (1986). I looked at the experimental paper of S.K. Lamoreaux (PRL 78, 5 (1997)) and a paper by R.L. Forward (PRB 30, 1700(1984)) who has given possible devices for extracting energy via. Casimir force. My question is why no one has succeeded in extracting energy so far? The device of Forward looks rather simple but of course one has to bring the plates very close (a few nm) and therefore the plates have to be very precisely plane parallel. But today's engineering should be able to do it. Have you tried any experiment in your lab Strassbourg?
My knowledge on the Casimir force is perhaps too out of date to comment. When these energy extraction scheme first started to be talked about my question was; why is this Casimir force exempt from the same limitations as gravitational or magnetic forces? For gravitational force energy is extracted by dropping mass into potential wells. Once the mass reaches the bottom energy extraction (conversion) stops until someone puts energy back in and lifts the mass back up. Do parallel conducting plates somehow provide us with an infinite hole in which to drop things?
@Tapan. No I did not try experiments but Francesco de Martini did in the 80s and did not succed. It seems irrealistic to use macroscopic objects for experimenting.
Alain Aspect did measurmement on the interaction of an atom and a mirorr and showed it is of quantum nature. (which would explain why it does not work with macroscopic objects).
So the point is: the Casimir force is both of relativity and quantum nature, two theories that supposed not to be compatible one with the other.
By the way it great of you having read these papers.
http://quantumoptics.phys.uniroma1.it/DeMartini/Francesco_De_Martini.html
http://scholar.google.fr/scholar?hl=fr&q=alain+aspect+casimir&btnG=&lr=
@Paul. Yes this is one way to illustrate the contradiction that arises from Casimir's force extracting energy from the vacuum.
Yes it can! Never mind the PR papers you quoted. Just consider this. I have just lit a gas stove and heat a cup of water for a tee. According to the Big Bang theory this huge amount of energy is extracted (borrowed) from vacuum, along with all other energy in the Universe. It's like in real life: we all live on what we borrow: energy from vacuum, money from banks, trust from people... Even our vacuum is borrowed from another vacuum in which BB happened. It's all a zero sum game and the whole Universe is a speedy train heading for a wall - a moment when Destiny will inevitably come to collect.
Read US Patent Application 20130283797. Available online through appft.uspto.gov.
Dear Anthony,
While this might be theoretically correct, it would be ridiculous to spend any money on patenting this idea unless you can demonstrate a gadget that can deliver a quantity of energy that would pay off the investment of building it (and patenting it!) in a year of use. If anything else happens with the patent application, be sure that USPTO is just sucking money out of you!
I bet that the energy you invested in moving your hand to write the patent is about 1E35 times larger than the energy that could be generated by a ton heavy device of this type in one million years of use. So counting the already generated energy minus, I would not say that any net positive energy can be extracted for all it counts. Am I right?
Dear Mario,
Actually, the calculations indicate more on the order of at least several watts per cubic centimeter of the actual accelerative portion of several versions of the device can be extracted (and that is if one assumes a poor efficiency of between 1 to 3%). As far as money expenditure, patenting it before producing it is not an unusual procedure and is not as expensive as you make it sound. The costs of actually building the proof-of-principle device far outweigh the patent expenditure.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Physical Sciences
- Quantum Physics