On Sep 24, 2004, at 10:28 AM, Jack Sarfatti wrote:

Puthoff on Casimir Force

Strange that Puthoff wrote today

“I'm not trying to scale up the Casimir force effect, never have, never even thought about it.  Discussion of the Casimir effect in ZPE discussions are purely pedagogical, not application oriented, and this is clear to everyone else on your list who emails me privately.  The devices that have not scaled up are Ken's charge cluster devices, not Casimir devices.  My thoughts for ZPE extraction are based on totally different other approaches.  I understand Petersen's work and the implications long before I ever even heard of Petersen.  Where in my work have I ever talked about scaling up Casimir effect for engineering energy extraction devices, where?!”

However, in the interview he said:


(Puthoff) For example, Casimir plates in the vacuum can be considered coupled to an open system, and when driven together by vacuum forces, the vacuum has decayed to a lower energy state and heat has been generated by the collision of the plates, pretty standard stuff. For a more detailed discussion of the thermodynamic aspects of zero-point energy extraction, see D.C. Cole and H.E. Puthoff, "Extracting energy and heat from the vacuum”Phys. Rev. E, vol. 48, p. 1562, 1993."

Rebutted by Ian Peterson who wrote:

"The complexity of the Casimir analysis has led to some untenable assertions. It

has been claimed that the parallel-mirror configuration provides access to an infinite

source of energy [18,***19]. However the maximum energy that can be extracted by

allowing the separation of the mirrors to drop to zero cannot exceed the surface energy

of their constituent metals, which is typically of the order of 1 J.m-2 [20]. There have

also been claims that energy can be extracted by cycling a machine 21].

...

 

16. J Schwinger, L L De Raad, K A Milton Ann. Phys. 115, 1 (1978).

17. S K Lamoreaux Phys. Rev. A 59, R3149-R3153 (1999).

18. R Forward Phys. Rev. B 30, 1700 (1984).

***19. D C Cole, H E Puthoff Phys. Rev. E 48, 1562-1565 (1993).

20. CRC Handbook of Chemistry, Physics, 80th Edn., (Ed D R Lide) (CRC Press, Boca

Raton, FL 1999) pp4-120, 6-144.

21. G J Maclay Phys. Rev. A 61, 052110 (2000).

22. T H Boyer Phys. Rev. A 9, 2078-2084 (1974).”

 

Note that Peterson from University of Coventry UK also rebuts Maclay another one of the NASA BPP "usual suspects"! ;-)

 

Then on August 31, 2004, Hal tried to explain Ken Shoulders charge clusters as a Casimir force which contradicts his above remark:


“The devices that have not scaled up are Ken's charge cluster devices, not Casimir devices.”

I had written to Hal: Even if that is what you mean, I do not see how anything gets "balanced" here? You have a "classical" electrostatic energy density and a micro-quantum ZPF virtual photon density. Both are positive. In what sense do they balance?

Hal replied: “Force balance.  The ZPE pressure (as in Milonni et al.'s paper "Radiation pressure from the vacuum: Physical interpretation of the Casimir force", Phys. Rev. A, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 1621-1623, 1988) outside the sphere presses inward, and there being no pressure from within the ZPE-depleted sphere - - at least from below the Compton freq - - pressing outward, so the net ZPE pressure is inward.  This is what balances (with stability) the outward Coulomb pressure.  This is specifically displayed in http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0408114 .”

What is wrong here is that virtual photons have negative pressure since w = -1 for them and their energy density is positive. It is wrong to use the positive pressure of real photons here. Real photons have w = +1/3 and Milonni’s paper is wrong for that reason. Note also that I do not claim that the strong direct gravity warping of space-time by unbalanced zero point energy pressures have anything to do with the Casimir force. They don’t. These are two qualitatively different physical effects. Hal misunderstood what I actually am claiming when he wrongly said that my effect predicts repulsion between the Casimir plates from the virtual photon negative pressure. In fact, I predict nothing of the kind. Under conditions of the Casimir force, the virtual photon pressure should be zero compensated by the vacuum coherence. The Casimir force is then explained as Ian Peterson does as an induced electric dipole-dipole electrostatic force. The naïve photon pressure models give the right answer for the wrong reasons. It is an interesting fluke like Ptolemy’s epicycles.