I've never delved into Casimir Force, but I have to say, it's really intriguing. As I understand the basic evidence of Casimir Force: experiments seem to verify that metal plates at extremely close distances in a vacuum preclude longer wavelengths of the "aether-equivalent", creating a higher pressure outside the plates than between. I just have a few questions, and the Vortexians seem an excellent crew to ask: 1) Does the measured Casimir Force match with those predicted by the underlying theory with precision? Have any specific materials (esp. conductors/nonconductors) been discovered to be Casimir-outliers? 2) Does the force exercised upon the plates necessarily have to be an aether repulsion, in lieu of a plate attraction?
It is known that precision-milled metals can bond together when brought into proximity in a vacuum. I'd always attributed this to broken crystalline structures being essentially unbalanced, and desiring chain completion, much like molecular bonds. For reference on the metal bonding, see cold welding as a quick reference:(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_welding) I ask, because it seems that, experimentally, in order to get the plates close enough without touching, the milling precision would be identical to, possibly far surpass, the level at which one would demonstrate cold welding. 3) With the presence of Casimir Force, how does one measure the effects of Newtonian Gravity at nano-scales? In consulting Occam, I would first ask the question as to whether this is just another incarnation or variance of gravity (another completely invisible force, with which we cannot contribute any of its characteristics to a detectable particle, but can only verify its existance through inferrence of evidence, and conformance to mathematical models) The immediate thought would be to alternate the same experiments with plates of different mass, but that gets rendered moot by practicality, as at those distances, the mass at the back of the plates is rendered virtually meaningless. Really, only the faces of each plate feel the largest attraction with rapid, exponential dropoff within nanometer(s)
