Zero Point Energy doc
Half a Photon Here, Half a Photon There
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| Half a Photon Here, Half a Photon There Half a photon in each state is not much -- a watt light bulb puts out 100 billion billion photons every second -- but there are countless possible states. The result is avast sea of radiation underlying the universe. All those virtual photons constitute the electromagnetic zero-point field, so named because it is present even at a temperature of absolute zero. In the deepest reaches of intergalactic space, where particles are so widely spaced that their mutual interactions are weak, this irreducible radiation field comes into play. In 1910, about halfway between the publication of special and general relativity, Einstein and his colleague Ludwig Hopf investigated how a thin gas would react when immersed in an electromagnetic radiation field. The radiation, they found, would have two counteracting effects on each gas particle. The particle would jiggle as photons bombarded it at random, but its motion would be opposed by a drag force due to the Doppler effect. The Doppler effect would stiffen the ZP OWER C ORPORATION PAGE OF 352 Z ERO P OINT E NERGY resistance of photons in the direction that the particle was trying to move. The particle would smack head-on into blueshifted photons, which, being more energetic than the photons from other directions, would push it back the way it came. This drag force would prevent the random jiggles of the gas particle from developing into net motion. The Einstein-Hopf process would bean interesting, but irrelevant, curiosity were it not for one peculiarity that sets the electromagnetic quantum vacuum apart from other radiation fields the shape of its spectrum. The shape is exactly proportional to the frequency cubed -- precisely the right shape to be Lorentz invariant' A spectrum with this shape does not produce a Doppler effect. The photons that a gas particle meets head-on in the quantum vacuum are no more energetic than those that strike the particle from behind. Consequently, the photons can offer no concerted resistance to uniform motion. (The spectrum and directional distribution of photons, however, do change for particles that are accelerating this is the origin of inertia in our theory, as discussed in the box on p. 15.) This idiosyncrasy of the vacuum electromagnetic field throws the Einstein- Hopf process out of balance (see figure on p. 14). Once gas particles are set in motion by the random fluctuations of the electromagnetic field, nothing can stop them. Over millions of years they accelerate steadily, reaching velocities near to that of light and moving across astronomical distances. Astrophysicists are no strangers to this mechanism. Twenty years ago, one of us proposed it as a possible source of the most energetic cosmic rays. Most cosmic rays consist of electrons, protons, and ions, but those of extremely high energy are missing the electrons. The Einstein-Hopf process would explain this, because it operates more efficiently on protons and ions than on electrons. What no one had considered was that this process could also segregate matter on a cosmological scale. When we first looked into the matter, the Einstein-Hopf process sounded too good to be true. By transferring energy from virtual photons into real particles, would the process yield something for nothing To check, we teamed up with IBM physicist Daniel Cole, an expert on the quantum vacuum. For over five years, Cole had been assessing whether theories of the vacuum violate any basic principles, such as the conservation of mass-energy or the second law of thermodynamics. He was able to find nothing amiss with the quantum Einstein-Hopf mechanism. Download 0.97 Mb. Share with your friends:
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