Horace Heffner
Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:26:32 -0700
On Jul 1, 2008, at 3:13 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
The Casimir force can either work to expand or contract an object, depending onthe shape. It has been shown that it works to expand a sphere.
I haven't seen this before. Where does this come from? If you refer to the electron's orbital, that is only maintained by zero point energy, i.e. the energy of uncertain momentum, not the Casimir force. Although the source of both is the same, the zero point field (ZPF), I think they are technically different, though maybe it is just a matter of semantics. The Casimir force is an attracting force between two conductive surfaces caused by the exclusion of a band of frequencies of the ZPF from between them. If a sphere had a conductive surface, I would think the Casimir force would tend to compress the sphere, by excluding some frequencies from the interior of the sphere. Oddly, the larger the sphere the less the compressive force, because the larger then is the wavelength excluded from the interior of the sphere. The largest part of the energy of the ZPf passes right through matter.
Suppose that it causes an ellipsoid to contract.
An ellipsoid should tend to axially contract more than in the longitudinal (long axis) direction?
In any case, the energy available from the Casimir force from a small displacement dx, A the area, x the plate separation is:
E = A [h * c * Pi^2 / (240 x^4) ] dxwhich is highly non-linear, but is symmetric in the sense that the energy gained by attracting two surface elements is exactly the same as that lost by pulling them apart. This symmetry might be broken, however. I've sent the suggested means to do this in a post titled "Casimir force drive free energy motor"
Best regards, Horace Heffner http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/