Yes, it's called inertia. Bernie Haisch and Alfonso Rueda derived it (F=ma), and published it in Physical Revue A in 1994.
-mark From: Harry Veeder [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, May 17, 2013 11:44 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Vo]:Nickel Aluminum (NiAl) Assuming the casimir force is the best explanation of the observed force on the plates, wouldn't the vacuum energy produce a drag on all moving bodies? Harry On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 1:22 PM, MarkI-ZeroPoint <[email protected]> wrote: Ed: Two things... 1. I don't think Fran's explanation adequately explained the Casimir effect... (sorry Fran). Theory posits that the vacuum is made up of almost an infinite range of frequencies (some have proposed a cutoff frequency, probably approaching the Plank frequency). Closely spaced, parallel conducting plates will ONLY exclude vacuum frequencies LARGER than the spacing between the plates. This is what creates the unbalanced forces which want to push the plates together. All vacuum frequencies are pushing on the outside surfaces of the plates, but a limited range of frequencies are between the plates, so forces pushing plates apart is less than outside forces pushing plates together. This effect only becomes significant for very small plate separation. 2. Empirical evidence for the Casimir effect is now fairly well established, and has been tested by several groups, including Steve Lamoreaux from your old stomping ground of Los Alamos. It has also become a practical issue now that nanotechnology has reached the commercialization stage. The following is from the Wikipedia article: ------------- One of the first experimental tests was conducted by Marcus Sparnaay at Philips in Eindhoven, in 1958, in a delicate and difficult experiment with parallel plates, obtaining results not in contradiction with the Casimir theory,[22][23] but with large experimental errors. Some of the experimental details as well as some background information on how Casimir, Polder and Sparnaay arrived at this point[24] are highlighted in a 2007 interview with Marcus Sparnaay. The Casimir effect was measured more accurately in 1997 by Steve K. Lamoreaux of Los Alamos National Laboratory,[25] and by Umar Mohideen and Anushree Roy of the University of California at Riverside.[26] In practice, rather than using two parallel plates, which would require phenomenally accurate alignment to ensure they were parallel, the experiments use one plate that is flat and another plate that is a part of a sphere with a large radius. In 2001, a group (Giacomo Bressi, Gianni Carugno, Roberto Onofrio and Giuseppe Ruoso) at the University of Padua (Italy) finally succeeded in measuring the Casimir force between parallel plates using microresonators.[27] --------------- -Mark
