On Jul 1, 2008, at 3:13 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
The Casimir force can either work to expand or contract an object,
depending on
the 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) ] dx
which 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/
