-----Original Message----- From: Edmund Storms Jones, why do you or anyone believe the Casimir force is real? Yes, a force is measured but assuming it is caused by unbalanced ZPE is not consistent with observation or logic.
Ed, most of physics does not agree with you on this point. Of course, a force of some kind is real and measured at nano-geometry. Casimir predicted this and it has been shown to be real in actual experiment and in manufactured devices- which makes your basic "observation" premise false from the start. There is no valid alternative explanation to a few of the experimental findings. In general, it is pretty clear that those who reject QM or do not understand QM very well, will reject a Casimir force despite the overwhelming evidence in favor of it. It is true that the Casimir force was not measured to high precision until the mid 1990s, but it has since been verified precisely and the theory is essentially proved in practice. Moreover the Casimir force has become important in computer technology, especially micro-mechanical structures like hard disks heads. The terabyte hard drive would be impossible without application of Casimir dynamics just as the CPU would be impossible without QM electron tunneling. When you reject most of QM, you dig yourself into a deeper and deeper hole. > ES: First of all, all materials are assumed and found to be transparent to the ZPE. Yet when a small gap is created in a material, this gap is claimed to produce an imbalance in the ZPE such that a force is created and energy can be extracted. A glass lens is transparent to light yet it can be focused so that 90% of the thermal energy of photons in sunlight can be applied to a few percent of the corresponding surface area. Temperatures sufficient to melt steel are possible. This is a decent analogy for the kind of imbalance which appears at nano-geometry but with ZPE "focusing" instead of photons. In fact, the term "virtual photons" is used with ZPE. Jones
