- #1
sanman
- 745
- 24
My next thread is about the Quantum Vacuum -- this idea that the vacuum is actually a player/participant in the behavior exhibited by objects, particularly smaller ones.
So suppose we then take all the random/imprecise behavior shown by particles, and "outsource" these to the vacuum itself. So intrinsically, the particle itself is highly defined and precise -- it's only that it's sitting in this agitating vacuum which is knocking it from all sides, thus making it look imprecise/fuzzy to us.
The electron would be happy to tightly hug the atomic nucleus under the pull of charge interaction, but the annoying vacuum keeps bopping it around like a tetherball, so that it jiggles around in these blurry orbitals.
This annoying agitating vacuum surrounds everything, and we just can't get rid of it in order to measure how things would behave without all the constant agitation. So what do we do?
In my opinion, Statistics and Probability are the lowest-quality descriptors of last resort, but we're willing to take any port in a storm -- especially when it's a storm we can't get rid of, like the always dynamic quantum vacuum. We're willing to settle for these abstract probability distributions and wave objects whose composition we're unable to fathom.
In chemistry, there is the concept of Dynamic Equilibrium, whereby even if things look quiet/still at the macroscopic level, at the microscopic level things are teeming with activity. A disturbance or imbalance may cause a precipitate to appear, for example. It is perhaps in this context that the otherwise abstractly probabilistic "wave object" can have tangible meaning, in the sense of being an imbalance in the low-level noise of the dynamic vacuum.
But surely low-level dynamic noise around a "center-line" net equilibrium of zero, is tremendously different from being flat-lined at zero. The fact that the vacuum is dynamic instead of perfectly quiet/still is of extreme importance to the future progress of physics -- and yes, engineering.
So far, the only consideration I see engineers giving the Dynamic Vacuum is merely on how to cope with its annoying effects (eg. unwanted effects on electrical currents flowing in ever-shrinking circuits)
How can we make the vacuum work for us? By this, I'm not necessarily talking about trying to extract actual energy/work from it (although I see lots of people dreaming about extracting Zero Point Energy, despite the unlikelihood of net harvest of energy from the sink). I'm just talking about useful ways to exploit the dynamic quantum nature of the vacuum.
A couple of years back, someone made a strange little "spring-like" device by harnessing the Casimir effect. They placed 2 finely etched sinusoidally corrugated surfaces together, and it resulted in a lateral Casimir force that acted almost like an invisible spring. I've read that MEMS devices have to be designed to take into consideration the effects of the dynamic vacuum.
I'd read that the Speed of Light is actually a little faster than C inside a QED cavity than it is in open space. I found that interesting, because it seems to imply that Speed of Light is a function of the vacuum.
I also wonder -- why doesn't the interaction/buffeting by the dynamic vacuum on an entangled particle then destroy its entanglement? Yes, the little knocks from the briefly-lived virtual particles are very brief and small compared to any interaction with a non-virtual particle, but what is the threshold of disturbance that would break entanglement? How come the vacuum itself doesn't break entanglement?
So suppose we then take all the random/imprecise behavior shown by particles, and "outsource" these to the vacuum itself. So intrinsically, the particle itself is highly defined and precise -- it's only that it's sitting in this agitating vacuum which is knocking it from all sides, thus making it look imprecise/fuzzy to us.
The electron would be happy to tightly hug the atomic nucleus under the pull of charge interaction, but the annoying vacuum keeps bopping it around like a tetherball, so that it jiggles around in these blurry orbitals.
This annoying agitating vacuum surrounds everything, and we just can't get rid of it in order to measure how things would behave without all the constant agitation. So what do we do?
In my opinion, Statistics and Probability are the lowest-quality descriptors of last resort, but we're willing to take any port in a storm -- especially when it's a storm we can't get rid of, like the always dynamic quantum vacuum. We're willing to settle for these abstract probability distributions and wave objects whose composition we're unable to fathom.
In chemistry, there is the concept of Dynamic Equilibrium, whereby even if things look quiet/still at the macroscopic level, at the microscopic level things are teeming with activity. A disturbance or imbalance may cause a precipitate to appear, for example. It is perhaps in this context that the otherwise abstractly probabilistic "wave object" can have tangible meaning, in the sense of being an imbalance in the low-level noise of the dynamic vacuum.
But surely low-level dynamic noise around a "center-line" net equilibrium of zero, is tremendously different from being flat-lined at zero. The fact that the vacuum is dynamic instead of perfectly quiet/still is of extreme importance to the future progress of physics -- and yes, engineering.
So far, the only consideration I see engineers giving the Dynamic Vacuum is merely on how to cope with its annoying effects (eg. unwanted effects on electrical currents flowing in ever-shrinking circuits)
How can we make the vacuum work for us? By this, I'm not necessarily talking about trying to extract actual energy/work from it (although I see lots of people dreaming about extracting Zero Point Energy, despite the unlikelihood of net harvest of energy from the sink). I'm just talking about useful ways to exploit the dynamic quantum nature of the vacuum.
A couple of years back, someone made a strange little "spring-like" device by harnessing the Casimir effect. They placed 2 finely etched sinusoidally corrugated surfaces together, and it resulted in a lateral Casimir force that acted almost like an invisible spring. I've read that MEMS devices have to be designed to take into consideration the effects of the dynamic vacuum.
I'd read that the Speed of Light is actually a little faster than C inside a QED cavity than it is in open space. I found that interesting, because it seems to imply that Speed of Light is a function of the vacuum.
I also wonder -- why doesn't the interaction/buffeting by the dynamic vacuum on an entangled particle then destroy its entanglement? Yes, the little knocks from the briefly-lived virtual particles are very brief and small compared to any interaction with a non-virtual particle, but what is the threshold of disturbance that would break entanglement? How come the vacuum itself doesn't break entanglement?