What Is the Casimir Effect and Its Relation to Vacuum Energy?

[Halcyon-on]

As reported in the professional physics literature in 1995, an entirely classical, that is, non-quantum, treatment of the Casimir force is all is needed to explain the mysterious attractive force

Bob S: can you give me the exact reference of the paper you pointed out.

I'm very sorry if what I'm going to say cannot be used in fiction movies or starships stories, but it turns out that that the Casimir effect is one of the biggest and most misleading myths of quantum mechanics. The fact is that the "Casimir’s original goal was to compute the van der Waal’s force between polarizable molecules at separations so large that relativistic (retardation) effects are essential. [...] These results were derived using the
standard apparatus of perturbation theory (to fourth or-
der in e) without any reference to the vacuum."

ref{ Title:"The Casimir Effect and the Quantum Vacuum"
arXiv:hep-th/0503158v1
Journal:Phys.Rev. D72 (2005) 021301
Abs: In discussions of the cosmological constant, the Casimir effect is often invoked as decisive evidence that the zero point energies of quantum fields are "real''. On the contrary, Casimir effects can be formulated and Casimir forces can be computed without reference to zero point energies. They are relativistic, quantum forces between charges and currents. The Casimir force (per unit area) between parallel plates vanishes as \alpha, the fine structure constant, goes to zero, and the standard result, which appears to be independent of \alpha, corresponds to the \alpha\to\infty limit.}

 

[Born2bwire]

Bob S: can you give me the exact reference of the paper you pointed out.

I'm very sorry if what I'm going to say cannot be used in fiction movies or starships stories, but it turns out that that the Casimir effect is one of the biggest and most misleading myths of quantum mechanics. The fact is that the "Casimir’s original goal was to compute the van der Waal’s force between polarizable molecules at separations so large that relativistic (retardation) effects are essential. [...] These results were derived using the
standard apparatus of perturbation theory (to fourth or-
der in e) without any reference to the vacuum."

ref{ Title:"The Casimir Effect and the Quantum Vacuum"
arXiv:hep-th/0503158v1
Journal:Phys.Rev. D72 (2005) 021301
Abs: In discussions of the cosmological constant, the Casimir effect is often invoked as decisive evidence that the zero point energies of quantum fields are "real''. On the contrary, Casimir effects can be formulated and Casimir forces can be computed without reference to zero point energies. They are relativistic, quantum forces between charges and currents. The Casimir force (per unit area) between parallel plates vanishes as \alpha, the fine structure constant, goes to zero, and the standard result, which appears to be independent of \alpha, corresponds to the \alpha\to\infty limit.}

That is Jaffe's paper is it not? It is a good read.

 

[Halcyon-on]

That is Jaffe's paper is it not? It is a good read.

Yes, it is the Jaffe's paper. Very enlightening indeed.