There is a long story and a short story - and then there's the other story.
The short story is that ZPE is a predicted, known and measured quantum effect which derives from the fact that "space" is not really empty. Due to the Heisenburg Principle of Uncertainty the conservation of mass-energy may be momentarily "ignored" in empty space, allowing fluctuations in the underlying quantum foam to become manifest in the Baryonic Universe as coupled pairs of massive particles which exist, briefly, and then annihilate one another, absorbing the energy again and restoring the zero energy (empty) state of that bit of space. ZPE was predicted in the mid-1950s and experimentally validated by means of the behaviour of two close coupled plates, where pressure from quantum condensation may be measured. This measured behavior is refered to as the "Casimir effect."
The long story may be read at http://lanl.arXiv.org/find/gr-qc,quant-ph/1/abs:+casimir/0/1/0/past/0/1
The other story is that the usual bad, weird and bogus science fruitcakes leapt onto this idea to assume that the vast amounts of potential energy in this process could be tapped. Certainly there is no argument that there is a lot of potential energy involved, but having said that, there doesn't appear to be anyway of accessing the potential that doesn't involve a black-hole (or two). Given accessible black-holes, there are probably much easier and undoubtedly safer ways of generating power than tapping ZPE. Safer because some models suggest that tapping the energy (which would result in an unbalanced mass/energy equation) could well cause the Universe to implode to protect Heisenburg's integrity. In any case, until you hear that a cheap black-hole rig is available from the local physics laboratory suppliers at prices physicists can afford to pay, don't expect to see much real progress. As for the fruitcakes, if you could harness the amount of hot air expended on the subject, you would have vastly more usefu
l energy than that which all the research done to date suggests is available - which is zero.
Kind Regards
Hermit
---- This message was posted by Hermit to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=26102>
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