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Comment by _Microft | Hacker News Reader

Reference [24] seems to be important.

“ The source of these optical modes could be the quantum vacuum field, which gives rise to the Casimir force [18,19,20,21], the Lamb shift [22], and other physical effects [23]. It was argued that the use of energy from the vacuum field does not violate fundamental laws of thermodynamics [24].“

Despite the importance of the question of „where the heck does the energy for that come from“, they give it surprisingly little space in the paper.

[24] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Extracting+E...

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Maybe this is dark matter. All those civilisations out there plugged directly into the background juice of the universe make it more 'grabby', slowing the rotation of galaxies. I always put my mad ideas out onto the internet because if they prove to be true then I have bragging rights.

I'm still reading through ref 24 - that's the one that immediately grabbed my attention. Anyone know if the authors have some authority in the subject?

The most accessible interpretation of the quantum vacuum is that it is the “base” state of any system ( including free space ). How much energy is at least theoretically in this base state is either extraordinarily high or infinite.

Now the challenge is that you can only extra energy when there is a difference in energy - the Cassini effect and others get work out of the vacuum via geometry. This geometry takes an equal amount of work to setup as it extracts.

The paper is very focused on explaining the phenomenon, what is good. It also lacks information on the measurement apparatus, what isn't good.

If it's just incoming photons, a photovoltaic element that does not need doped monocrystalline silicon might be a valuable find.

Casimir force is most likely just a van der waals force (from polarization) and not at all related to the quantum vacuum fields.

The casimir effect is sort of by definition related to fluctuations in quantum vacuum fields

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect

That's one explanation for the force. Another is that it's just the electrons/atoms in the two plates attracting each other. It's literally mentioned in the page you linked.

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