Can we use zero point energy?

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Energy is everywhere, but yet we struggle to extract it and make use of it. It's not just stars burning with fusion or the vast amounts of energy locked up inside matter. Our current understanding of space indicates that empty space itself has energy. Is this real? Is this something we can harness? On the fringes, there are people willing to sell you devices that extract energy from space to make your toast. Should you buy one? Could that possibly ever be real? Could we use it or might we be trapped like thirsty sailors? Energy everywhere, but not a drop to use. Today on The Pod we will tackle the conspiracy magnet, but fascinating physics of zero point energy. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Hello, I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites and space and there are just some points in the week where I have zero energy. That's what we're talking about today, right? Good point. Good point. Yes. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I have zero energy for physics grifters. Oh, yeah. So on the topic of physics grifters today, do you have a like most outrageous grift that you have ever seen that is physics related? Or is it the one we're talking about today? I think zero point energy is gotta be in my top five. There are actually folks out there who will sell you over unity machines for $50,000 that produce energy from nothing and obviously they're a scam. But the thing that really irks me is that the real physics here is so interesting, so fascinating, so cutting edge and the grifters pollute all that to make a little bit of a buck. They could promote the actual science, the mysteries, the things we have figured out, the work that's going on, the excitement of future discoveries, but no, they gotta pretend the government is hiding something and they're gonna sell you the secrets. You're such a wonderful nerd. It's not they're taking people's money. It's they're missing out on the science. And I'm with you. I'm with you. It's a bummer. But you said it's in your top five. Can you give us one other that's in your top five? I know I'm pressing you. This is, it's great the way I don't give you a heads up ahead of time before asking me these questions. My other favorite one is the alleged grift that physicists are the grifters because we're just collecting grant money, getting rich. Everybody knows how easy that is while doing nothing, right? We just sit around all day. We could discover dark matter if we wanted to, but we're too lazy because we've been sucking off the government teeth for so many years. But of course, in reality, we're all like scrambling to get a small fraction of a dwindling amount of research money. And everybody in academia has overworked, if anything, and underpaid. So it's pretty frustrating to see people try to make a buck off of accusing academics of being grifters. Yeah, yeah. Or maybe y'all are just really bad at the grift. Bad at, you know, getting money from the government. I can't bring myself to say the sucking on the government. We'll move on, move on. That was a farm reference. That was a farm reference. Yeah, I know, I know. I should be way more comfortable with that. And my goat still hasn't given birth. Those were, I know. I was going to ask you for the farm update. No, nothing. No, no, those were like Braxton Hicks contractions and goats or something, but she prolapsed and I had to deal with that. And it's been all kinds of fun on the farm, but she has not had her babies yet. Okay, so you won't say teet, but you will say prolapse on the air. Nice. Your standards are weird, Kelly. Yeah, well, you know, that's right. That's right. Yay, biology. Welcome to Kelly's farm grift. I don't know how it works yet, but we'll find out. Okay, good luck. I am also working too hard and getting paid. Actually, I'm losing money. I'm losing money on this grift. But anyway, okay, today, today we are talking about zero point energy. And as Daniel pointed out, there is amazing physics happening here. There really is. And a horrible grift. So we're going to get into both. Exactly because my goal is to share with everyone the actual science going on on the cutting edge, which is so much more interesting than the nonsense being spread by the grifters. So let's share the reality with everyone, the joy of uncertainty, the excitement of future discovery. And zero point energy is right in the sweet spot because there is so much exciting science, so much we don't understand about how it works. But before we dig into this episode, I wanted to know if people out there thought it was possible to make use of zero point energy. If you'd like to join our group of volunteers to answer without any preparation, tough physics questions for other people to hear, please write to us two questions at Daniel and Kelly.org. We'd love to have you in the meantime. Here's what people had to say when I asked them if they could make use of zero point energy. Zero point energy is the lowest energy state. The vacuum of the universe has some energy in it. And theoretically, we could use this energy and convert it into useful work. It could possibly be useful in mechanical quantum systems. I'm not sure how we can utilize zero point energy, as I imagine is basically zero. Maybe we can pull some of it out from some of those hidden string theory dimensions. The lowest energy possible. So I would say we cannot use it. In the wonderful animated movie The Incredibles, the villain uses zero point energy to abduct a baby. So I'm pretty sure if it can be used, it can only be used for evil. We can use it to be supervillains and freeze people. Fringe Science points to top secret research subject to secrecy, but in those places, there are also men who stare at goats. It might solve all of their energy problems, or maybe it would destroy the universe. Interesting. Answers like these always remind me that the extraordinary are not a random draw of the general public. They are a very specific group of wonderful human beings with very specific knowledge sets. Who have watched The Incredibles? Otherwise known as our favorite nerds. That's right. We love the extraordinary. It can only be used for evil. I love that one. Yeah, but otherwise, there's some open-mindedness and also a lot of doubt here that zero point energy could be used for powering your toaster and making your breakfast. Yes, well, our audience is appropriately skeptical and good on them. We will validate their concerns today. Before we get into the details of how zero point energy could be used, I guess we should explain what is it and why do we think it's there? I need that, yes. That would help me. So remember that physics operates basically two huge frameworks to describe the universe. General relativity to explain gravity and really big stuff, quantum mechanics to explain really small stuff. We haven't unified them, so we don't really understand what's going on. But every time we do physics, we have to pick one. We don't know how to bring them together and have like a unified description. And today we're playing in the quantum world. So put all thoughts of time dilation and spatial curvature aside for now and think just about how we describe the universe in terms of quantum mechanics. That means look at the thing next to you. It's a cup. It's an apple. It's a remote control. It's the dishes, whatever. And think of what it's made out of. Tindy little particles, right? You've got up quarks and down quarks bound together to make nuclei. You have electrons whizzing around them. All of that makes your elements. And that's the particle view of the universe. We don't know what's inside those particles yet. If anything, we think maybe there is something there. But that's our current most fundamental view of the universe from a quantum scale. Still with me? Yeah, I'm looking at a U spoon, which you're used to fix a prolet. Oh, man. I'm glad it's not a me spoon. That's all I gotta say. I'm glad it doesn't hurt to laugh anymore. It's so much more fun recording with you when it doesn't hurt to laugh. And just for clarification, that's an EWE U spoon? That's right. I did use it on a G-O-A-T. But it is meant for sheep. And was that the greatest experience of all time? Oh, I see what you did there. No, it wasn't. It wasn't great. It's kind of low on my list. But she seemed real happy when it was done. Welcome to the only podcast where you'll mix quantum particles with farm references. That's right. Okay. All right, we're getting... I am now imagining the particles in the U spoon and we are moving on. All right. So quantum mechanics can describe the universe in terms of these particles. But in the 1950s, we moved on from quantum mechanics of single particles to thinking about everything in terms of quantum fields. It turns out to be really hard to think about more than one particle at a time and particle destruction and particle annihilation. The calculations were getting really complicated. And so instead of thinking about each individual particle and its Schrodinger equation, physicists said, let's weave it all together and think of it as part of one big field. So instead of having an individual particle, you know, have particles as excitations in a quantum field. So it's not that there's an electron here and an electron there. Instead, these electrons are both excitations in the same field that fills all of space. And for lots of people, fields are a weird concept. What is it? Why can't I feel it? What does it look like? And the way to think about a field is that it's just a number everywhere in space, like temperature. You see, there's a temperature in Virginia and there's a temperature in California and there's a temperature in Brisbane. You're putting a number everywhere on the planet. That's a field. Quantum fields are just like that, except sometimes they have weird numbers like complex values, right? Four plus seven I or something. But you can just put them everywhere in space and then use them to do calculations. Okay. But instead of referring to temperature, four plus seven I tells you what about the electron? Right. So it tells you how much energy there is in the electron field at one location. Okay. So as an electron moves through the universe, instead, there's a ripple in the electron field. So a little pulse of energy that moves coherently through the electron field. That's what an electron is from a quantum field theory point of view. Okay. And so when you say ripple, ripple really just means how much energy is in one place and like the difference between the energy at one place and the energy in the position next to it. Exactly. When you're thinking about waves, you always have to think about what is doing the waving. And in this case, it's the field strength, which takes energy. And so you could imagine like I have an electron here in California, which means the electron field is zero everywhere except for a little bubble in Irvine where it has a little pulse of energy where those numbers are nonzero. And then I send it to Virginia and now my electron field is zero here and there's a little pulse of electron field strength in Virginia. So that's how you think about like one electron in the electron field. Okay. And one really fascinating philosophical question is, are these fields real? Like, is this the map of the universe that we use to describe things? It's helpful to do calculations. It works for predicting what's going to happen to large Hadron Collider, et cetera, et cetera. Or are these things just like shortcuts in our mind? We come up with this concept and invent it. And it's just useful for us or they really out there. That's like a deep question in philosophy. We're going to dig into a little bit later. I'm looking forward to that. And one really looked at me like I didn't mean it. I do mean it. I'm interested in, you know, where metaphors break down. Okay, go on. That was a look of pleasant surprise. It was a look of skepticism, I think. Anyway, go on. But to get there, we first need to think about what happens when you take all the particles out of the fields. So imagine first you have a cubic kilogram of something, you know, like goat, cubic kilogram of goat, all right. And that has lots of different particles in it. So the quark fields are buzzing, the electron fields are buzzing, because you don't just have one quark or one electron, you have like 10 to the 29, and they're buzzing everywhere. So lots of energy, right? All right. So now remove the goat from your cube of space. That sounds bad. Sorry. Kelly, you have to put on those gloves that go all the way up past her elbow. And you know why to do this messy job. So she removes the goat from this chunk of space. And what's left? Well, you know, maybe there's a few particles of cosmic rays, you build some shielding. So none of them come in. They have like a very well shielded box of space. What's left in there? Well, the quantum fields are still there. Even if you remove all of the energy in our description, we're not talking about whether they're real or not. In our mathematical description, the quantum fields are still there, even when there's no particle, right? There's like slots in a connect four game, or they're like places to park. Even without a car, there's still a slot there to put your car, right? So the way we think about the quantum fields, the framework is, you know, there's a lowest energy state with no particles. There's a one particle state, a two particle state, a three particle state, they can describe many particles at once, but they can also describe zero particles. Okay, so now the value is zero at all of those locations. Asterisk there, there are zero particles there. We're going to get an in minute to whether that means there's zero energy there. But there are no particles. All right, but I, you know, I think in the future, the example should start with, there's maybe zero, and then you get a goat, because then I'm more excited. But then you took a goat away, and now I'm kind of sad. But all right, anyway. Okay, so I see where we're going. I'm following you. Yes, I forgot to think about the complete arc of the goat, as I'm telling my story. You know, the goat should have some adventures, you know, should have some challenges that overcomes on its way to explaining quantum fields. You need to think about the emotional journey that I go on during this explanation. But anyway, okay, so I've lost a goat. Carl Jung would be very disappointed in my episode here. You've lost a goat. Don't worry, we'll end up restoring your goat somehow. Yes, don't forget to get back to that. Okay, so we have these quantum fields, and they fill space, and we're saying that they're out there. They can describe particles, but they can also describe non particles, like they can describe the vacuum. And that's what we call the vacuum, when you remove all the particles. Now the fields are down to their lowest energy state, right? Having a particle requires energy, having two particles, more energy, having zero particles, less energy. So if you take a chunk of space and you remove all the goats and everything else, you have no particles left in there, you still have the fields. Okay, okay, and the fields have a really weird property, which is zero particles don't have zero energy. All right, that is weird. Why not? Because the quantum field itself is now the thing in the universe. Particles are just like a blob, they're an effect of the field, an emergent property of the field, the way that like a wave in a bathtub is not a fundamental thing, it's an emergent property of water and the kinematics, whatever. So now quantum mechanics, quantum field theory describes the field itself, and the equations of quantum field theory, you talk about how that field moves, what's its kinetic energy, what's its potential energy, and you have oscillations and people who think about wave equations will recognize it's like a double differential equation there that tells you things oscillate back and forth between kinetic and potential energy. For example, when you have an electron there, this energy in the field of the field is vibrating, right? But because this is a quantum thing, it can't be perfectly determined. And if it had zero energy, it would be perfectly well known. And to be crystal clear, states can have well-defined energy without uncertainty in their energy. But when the energy is non-zero, the field amplitude and momentum obeys the uncertainty principle. If the energy is exactly zero, the amplitude and momentum are both zero, which would violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. So quantum mechanics demands that the lowest energy state, the no particle state, is not a zero energy state. So the field is still there, it's still vibrating, it still has some energy, right? But it doesn't correspond to a particle. Particle is a specific kind of vibration of the field requires a certain chunk of energy. You remove all the last particles, you get down to zero particles, not zero energy. It's baked into the very fabric of reality. So one thing that you said really kind of like stuck in my head, which may have caused me to miss some of the rest of it. So what stuck in my head was surprisingly not the part about the goat, but was... If something stuck, you can use a U-spoon usually to pull it out. That's not what the U-spoon does, Daniel. Oh, sorry. Does it push things back? Oh, no, really? Oh gosh. And then it holds them in place. Anyway, okay, so... No, no, I'm so sorry. Well, U.S. All right, anyway. I had all these beautiful mental images of quantum fields I was going to convey, and now they're all just replaced with a prolapsed goat. Yeah, well, she's not prolapsed anymore because I put the harness on and then I put the spoon in, and I tied it to the harness. And you put on those gloves. And what's the sound effect for putting on really long latex gloves? I'm sure Matt has that somewhere in his library. These were just the short black nitrile gloves, then they make the snapping noise. Anyway, what was your question? Okay, so my question, okay, so you said it can't be zero because if it was zero, we would know exactly what the value is. And that feels so human-centric. That feels like the humans would know exactly what the value was, so that can't be the answer. And we can't matter that much. I mean, we believed that everything revolved around us and it turned out we were wrong. And so what is there more to it than that? Or it's like, I'm putting too much emphasis on us and any classical object would have... What am I getting caught up on here that is incorrect? No, you're exactly right to put your finger on that. Thank you. I should have been more clear about that. It's not us at all. We are irrelevant. It's not about observers or conscious entities or anything mystical like that at all. It's just that quantum objects do not have a determined state. It's about the quantum object itself and the fundamental nature of the quantum world and what is real. So these things that are out there can be in a superposition of multiple states, which gives them an inherent fuzziness. Just like any quantum particle out there can be in various states simultaneously. That's the quantum fuzziness of the world. It's not about us knowing something or us not knowing something, except in the sense that it's impossible for us to know certain things because those things are not determined. They're not part of the universe. Reality is sort of incomplete in that sense. Or our mental picture of reality, what we expect from reality comes into conflict with how reality actually works. So there's just sort of limitations to how these things can exist, regardless of whether we know them. Another example that's maybe similar and easier to access is the puzzle of the electron. When people were understanding the structure of the atom, they were like, oh, an electron, it's kind of orbits and nucleus. And then they were wondering, well, why doesn't the electron fall into the nucleus? Because electron has an electric charge and it's going around in a circle. And if it's going around in a circle, that's acceleration. Acceleration means radiation. How does the electron turn to go around the nucleus? They're wondering, it has to emit a photon to do that, to balance conservation momentum. But if it's constantly emitting photons, it should lose energy. Basically, why don't electrons collapse into the nucleus was the big puzzle for many years. And the answer is that the electron is not really moving and orbiting and radiating. It's in its lowest stationary state, right? It cannot go to a lower energy state because a lower energy state would have information about position and momentum, which exceeds the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It's impossible to have an electron just totally at rest, because its location and its velocity would be perfectly known then, not to us, but determined by the universe. So that's why an electron doesn't fall into the nucleus because it has a lowest energy state, right? The lowest energy solution to the quantum system at that point is not zero energy, it's non zero energy to be consistent with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The same thing applies to quantum fields everywhere because in the end, electrons are anyway just ripples in those quantum fields. And so all the fields out there cannot relax beyond a certain minimum energy. When you think about space and you take away all the particles, you still have fields in there. And those fields still are buzzing with this energy. That's just very basic tenet of quantum mechanics. All right, the universe cannot chill. I mean, you're right, but it's pretty cold out there. But actually, this energy is not like a tiny amount of energy. Let's take a break. And when we get back, Daniel will tell us how much energy we're talking about. Right then, who's all in for cancer research? UK's race for life. Anglers, ramblers, climbers, biversiders, surfers, gamers, bikers, hang gliders, book clubbers. Let's go all in against cancer, all in to help fund lifesaving research. Join our London events throughout the summer. Sign up now and save 30% off entry. Visit raceforlife.org. Discount ends 24th of May, 2026. T's and C's apply. We're back. And Daniel was telling us that we are talking about a non zero amount of energy in our fields here. But Daniel, you were telling us that it's not zero because it can't be zero because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. But it's small, I thought. And so if it's a small amount of energy, I thought you said it's not a small amount of energy just a second ago. How much energy are we talking about here? Yes, so it sounds like it should be a tiny amount of energy, like just a little bit of residual at the bottom. You can't quite scrape it out of the box. You know, it's like when you finish your juice box and it's a little bit left there and you're like slurping and you're like, okay, I'm never going to get all the juice out of the box. Right? Do you still have juice boxes, Daniel? No, but I still remember though I love juice boxes. Especially at the end, you're trying to get like the straw into that last distant corner to like really get out those last little bits of juice. And then you find an extra pocket and you get like, you know, a last little delivery of juice. It's wonderful, right? The little joys. Anyway, you might be imagining it's like that, but it's not like that. Not at all. It's more like you're drinking a juice box and you're floating in the Pacific Ocean of juice. Because if you add up all of these zero point energy contributions from all the quantum fields, right, you get a ridiculous number. You get 10 to the 113 joules every cubic meter of universe. What? Yeah. That's a big number. And let me give you some context. If you add up all the energy stored in all of the stars and planets and rotation and everything in the universe, the whole observable universe, you get 10 to the 73 joules. What? Okay. But now I'm telling you that the zero point energy in quantum fields is 10 to the 30 bigger every cubic meter than all of the energy in the universe. So like way more energy. Way more. Next to me in a cubic meter than there is in the sun. Yes. Daniel, you're wrong. You recorded this incorrectly when you were taking your notes. How could that be possible? This is why I'm telling you the cutting edge of physics is much more exciting than the grift. I mean, this is crazy stuff, but this is what the numbers tell us. So, of course, nobody knows what to make of this. Nobody takes this seriously and is certain that it's correct. This is a deep problem in physics, understanding what is the vacuum. You know, we have a model of quantum field theory. It seems to work really, really well. And yet it has this bonkers prediction. And this prediction also is in conflict with the other half of physics, right? General relativity, which describes the universe and its expansion and motion of stars and planets. Now we're talking about so much energy that it's going to have general relativistic consequences. You know, if you take all this energy and you put it in the universe, it's going to gravitate. It's going to change how the universe is curved. It's going to be very, very confusing. And so this is what's known as the cosmological constant problem. The fact that we observe an energy density in the universe that's very, very small compared to what we would calculate if we just sat down and said how much energy is there in all of our quantum fields. Our quantum fields have 10 to the 120 too much energy compared to what we observe out there. So, add this to the reasons why it's hard to do quantum gravity, because we just don't know how to make a universe work with both of these theories. And I was going to say, so do you think this is wrong? But then I guess something is wrong somewhere and it's hard to know where. Exactly. This feels wrong. It feels very wrong. But you know, just because it feels wrong doesn't mean that it is. There's so much about the universe, which is bizarre and surprising and confusing and yet real. And that's the joy of physics. That's why we do experimental science, because we want to discover the universe and not just speculate about what it might be like. And that's why we follow the math and we look for evidence and we don't just dismiss things because they smell weird, right? Because sometimes reality is much weirder than any human could imagine. That's the whole reason we're doing this. Those are the best moments, right? So, we have this calculation that says there's 113 joules of energy every cubic meter, right? And again, that's every cubic meter. So, if the universe is infinite, that means that the vacuum has infinite energy, like literally infinite energy. Like how do you even think about this stuff, right? Yeah. So, we should have no energy problems. We just need to harness this. And now I'm the grifter. Yeah, exactly. Right. So, let's tap into this, right? Power our goats with the quantum fields. I'm sure somehow go maybe goats know how to do it, actually. Just realize that maybe that's why they are the greatest of all time. Oh my gosh. Amazing. Amazing. What I kind of appreciate about farm life is that like, there's a prolapse and then you've solved it and it's gone. And you're like, problem solved. Whereas you're like, oh, we're off by 120 orders of magnitude. Who knows how to solve this problem? I mean, there's something nice about problems you can solve in an afternoon. But on the other hand, it is exciting to have these big unsolved problems that you need to work on. There's that probably apocryphal story about Einstein spending an afternoon chopping wood and being like, wow, this is so satisfying. You spend time, you make progress. How rewarding. Whereas we all know that like research, you know, there's no correlation between time spent and progress made. It could be like six months of banging your head against the wall and then suddenly one afternoon it all comes together or not ever. Yeah, I like having a mix of those things in my life. Yes. Yeah. So, this brings into sharp focus the question we asked earlier, which was like, you know, an abstract philosophical question. Our field real man, you know, past this kind of stuff. No, past the banana. Past the banana peels, exactly. Thank you. You know, does it really matter anyway? Well, now it seems like it really kind of does matter because the fields are real and they're bursting with energy. And our whole existence is just like this tiny juice box on the Pacific Ocean, right? It matters because our lives are limited by energy. I mean, we're literally at war right now over energy. It's crazy if energy was freely available. You don't think we're at war over energy as it's going to turn into a political podcast. We have quanta fields, we have goats, we have politics. We have it all today. I think that energy is playing an important role in how this war is playing out. Let's maybe we will go there. All right. Definitely energy is important to our lives, right? And if energy was freely available, infinite energy freely available to everybody, it would change what it means to be human on this planet, right? So, if we are surrounded by nearly infinite energy, we should figure that out. It's no longer just a question for the halls of philosophy. It's like, is this real, right? And sometimes people describe the quantum vacuum in terms that make it sound more real than it is. You know, people sometimes describe this in terms of virtual particles. And you'll hear lots of popular science descriptions that the vacuum has particles popping in and out all the time. And I think this is a little bit misleading. And I think it's worth digging into why that is. Yeah, sure. What does that even mean? Like lots of popular science, it has its origins in the truth, but there's a fundamental misunderstanding there. The issue is that there's two ways to tell the quantum story of the universe. The one way is the way we've done today, which is say, fields are the fundamental thing. Particles are ripples in those fields, right? And they are special ripples that move in a coherent way. Everything's nice. But in that sense, particles are not fundamental. Fields are the fundamental thing at the heart of the universe. The foundation of the universe is fields, right? That's cool. And that works. Some people don't like that because they say, you know, how do we know the fields are real? We never observe a field, right? You can only see a field's effects on particles. You want to know is the magnetic field there? You put a particle in it, you see the bend on the particle. Why are we using fields at the foundation? Let's use particles at the foundation. And you can do that. Mathematically, you can say, I'm not interested in fields. When two electrons want to interact with each other, they don't do it through the electromagnetic field. I'm going to say they do it through a virtual particle. And you often hear this description in popular science that two electrons exchange a photon when they interact, right? That electromagnetism, for example, is mediated by a photon exchange. That's really a very different way of describing the universe. It's saying, particles are the foundation. Everything is particles. Get rid of fields. Don't talk about fields. And that works too. You can use the particle picture to say, particles are the foundation of everything. But then these particles that are being exchanged between the two electrons, they're not real particles. They're virtual particles. And they're not really the same as real particles. We have a whole other episode about what virtual particles are. But in a sense, they're just another way to think of the same mathematics. Like if two electrons exchange a bunch of virtual particles, or if there's a ripple in the field, it doesn't really matter. Mathematically, it makes all the same predictions, just a question of like, what's your interpretation? But these are not real particles. And so you can think about the universe either as being filled with fields or having an infinite number of virtual particles. Either one works. And so that's where this notion comes from, that the vacuum is filled with particles. But it's not filled with real particles. It's not like there are electrons popping out of the vacuum that you could like capture and use. It's just another mathematical way to describe the same thing, right, that you can't access this lowest energy state. Either it's the lowest buzz that the field can do, or it's a minimum number of virtual particles, but virtual particles are not observable. So it's just, it's a mathematical trick. And because they use the word particle, it sort of pumps your intuition in certain confusing and misleading ways. And so it's not that the vacuum is like popping out particles that you can collect and treat as real particles. Got it. Okay. However, there are ways to probe this quantum vacuum, right? If the field is there and it's real, possibly we can interact with it, right? And so people have done experiments to see like, can we see if the quantum vacuum is real? And these experiments are fascinating. Maybe the most important one is called the Casimir effect. It's a good name. I mean, not as good as like the Weiner Smith effect, which I hope to one day, you know, create. I mean, for most things that you think about, like the most of physics, the large H on collider, or, you know, superconductivity, none of this matters. We just think about relative energy, not like the absolute, like, are we, you know, seven joules on top of zero or seven joules on top of 10 to the 113 doesn't matter, because we're only thinking about energy differences usually. But you can sometimes create experiments that are sensitive to the absolute scale. And so the Casimir effect is super cool. You take two mirrors, basically two sheets of metal, and you put them really close to each other. Okay. And because these two sheets of metal are conductors, conductors have this property that they can't have electric fields inside of them. If you have an electric field inside a conductor, the electrons just move around and rearrange to cancel it out. That's why, for example, you can't get a cell phone call when you're inside an elevator, because an elevator is made of metal, and the metal inside the walls moves to basically cancel out your cell phone signal, right? Because if there's an electric field, and there's electrons just hanging out, it's going to push those electrons in exactly the way to cancel it out. Okay. So you have two sheets of metal, and they can't have electric fields in them. What that does is it suppresses certain kinds of frequencies between the two sheets of metal. Okay. So if you're going to have fluctuations in your quantum field, think of them as waves, right? Now you can only have waves that happen to have zeros right at your two sheets of metal. If you were going to have waves that would be nonzero inside your sheets of metal, those are canceled out. So when you put these two sheets of metal really, really close together, then you change which frequencies can exist between those sheets and which frequencies can't exist between those sheets. It's sort of the same reason why having a mesh in front of your microwave protects you from those microwave, because it insists that the electric field is zero and all the places on the mesh, which means that there's no solution for the waves to be on both sides of the mesh. And so it protects you. In the same sense, having these two conductors really, really close to each other means that there's no solutions, even for the quantum vacuum, in certain frequencies between the conductors. But that does not break the Heisenberg uncertainty principle because why? Oh, great question. So outside of these plates, you can't have modes below a certain energy because it would violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. What happens between the plates is that those modes are just disallowed. So it's not that the modes have lower energy, they just don't exist. And so between the plates, you have only some frequencies of the vacuum are allowed. Outside of the plates, all frequencies are allowed. So you end up with lower energy between the plates because some of the frequencies of the vacuum are not allowed. So it's sort of like you've changed the conditions and now the vacuum is different. Not that the vacuum is now violating the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, it's just that there are only some modes in there, some frequency modes. All of those modes obey the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, but some of them are disallowed because of the conductor. So the nature of the vacuum has changed essentially. But it is the case that now at every spot in the field, you know the value is zero. You're right. If the value of the field would be zero, that would violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. But at those frequencies, there is no field there. It's not that it's zero, it's that there is no field. Yes, because that field is no longer compatible with this configuration. So between the two sheets, you have a certain number of modes of the vacuum. Outside the sheets, you have all those same modes plus more. The vacuum can do more outside than it can inside. Cool. Right. Very clever trick to sort of change the nature of the vacuum. And you might think, all right, that sounds cool, but we're still in banana peels mode, right? No. That's this whole episode, Daniel. All right, go on. Are the goats going to eat the banana peels at the end? Is that what that's going to be the emotional arc for the goats? Goats will eat banana peels, right? Well, you've got to get back to bringing my goat back from the abyss. And so maybe the banana peels, what will bring it back? I'm going to sell a machine that generates goats from the quantum vacuum. Yes. To farmers. Great. Okay. Love it. All right. So what happens now is you have a greater energy density outside these two sheets than inside, right? Because you have more quantum modes accessible to the vacuum now because you haven't changed the vacuum on the outside only on the inside. What that means is that there's a pressure. You have a greater energy density on the outside, lower energy density on the inside is a pressure on these two sheets. So if this is really happening, then you should be able to measure this. You should put two sheets together and you should be able to see them get squeezed, not by any other force, just by like the energy density gradient of the vacuum itself. And we're going to take a break. And when we get back, we're going to find out, does that really happen? All right. We are back and we have been enjoying our banana peels during the break. And we now have two plates. And in the middle of the plate, there is fewer frequencies, less energy outside the plates. There are more frequencies, more energy, and that should make the plates smash together, or at least move closer to each other. I'm being hyperbolic. But is that what happens, Daniel? So for a long time, nobody knew. This was predicted by Casimir in 1948. Very cool idea. I love when physicists come up with clever ways to trick the universe to reveal what's actually happening. That's like the real genius of experimental physics. But this is not a complicated experiment. Why does nobody know? Why not just do it? Not a complicated experiment. You have to have mirrors separated by microns. This thing is going to be a small effect. And so it wasn't measured until 1997. Steve Lamarowe at University of Washington pulled this off. He didn't have two sheets. He had a plate and then a sphere. The idea being, bring the sphere really gently close to the plate and see if you can measure any force between them. So he has a sphere over a plate and then he's shining a laser onto the sphere and then measuring to see like, does the angle of the laser change? The key is to set it up really clean so you can measure really small effects. Because if you have two mirrors with an area of like a centimeter squared and you're able to put them within a micron of each other, not easy, right? Then they're going to have the attractive Casimir force of about 10 to the negative seven Newtons. That's like the weight of a water drop that's half a millimeter in diameter. So this is a really, really small effect. And then the idea would be that that effect would ever so slightly bend the laser and they'd be able to measure the bend in the laser. That effect would move the sphere and the laser is bouncing off the sphere. So it changed the path of the laser. Got it. Okay. Here they're using a laser just to tell where is the sphere. Got it. Okay. It's sort of like in torsion experiments when you want to see like, is my pendulum bending at all? And so you have a mirror on and you shine a laser just amplifies a small effect into a measurable effect. It's part of the experimental cleverness. Yes. Yes. Anyway, so this was finally seen in 1997 was confirmed at just the size that Casimir predicted, right? So not only does it happen, it happens exactly the rate predicted by the calculation. So you're like, whoa, that's awesome. What does that mean? Does that mean the vacuum is real? That we're actually sitting on a Pacific ocean of juice slurping out the last details. But doesn't that make all of the like, space time stuff not work? Like, shouldn't? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It definitely breaks everything about the cosmological model if it's real, right? And so there's a raging debate about this. People say, yes, it's real. Other people say, actually, there are other ways to explain it. So Bob Jaffe at MIT, not like a fringe guy, like a very well known physicist. After this experiment came out, he was like, I don't know, this is crazy. I'm on team Bob. He came out with this paper called Casimir Effect and the Quantum Vacuum in 2005. And it argues that what you're seeing there is not necessarily the quantum vacuum. He was able to derive the same effect just using Van der Waals interactions, just saying like, look, I know what the charges are in these conducting plates. Can I use my knowledge of nuclear forces to predict the same thing? And it comes out to be an effect of the retarded Van der Waals forces, basically the fact that information doesn't flow at infinite speed. And so there's like a time delay based on where things are, and this adds up in a certain way. And so that's fascinating because he doesn't ever reference a quantum vacuum in his derivation and gets exactly the same numbers. But then philosophers weigh in and they say, okay, you can calculate that in this context, but it's sort of a pedagogical point saying that this effect is due to the materials we have there in space. When that's also what Casimir was saying, he's saying, you put these materials in space, you change the nature of the quantum vacuum. This goes to the heart of the question you were asking earlier, right? We've changed the nature of the vacuum by putting those plates there. So there's still a raging philosophical debate about, does this show that it's real? Is it just Van der Waals? Does that mean the same thing anyway? In effect, these are two different ways of computing the same thing, which makes it philosophically very confusing about what it means. So I guess being on team Bob is the same thing as being on team Casimir. Yeah, exactly. In the end. Or better way to say it is that there's some philosophers who say, actually, you guys agree. But there are other ways to see the effects of the quantum vacuum. There's like the Lamb shift in the hydrogen atom. Their energy levels that according to the Dirac equation should be totally identical energies, but they're slightly different because they are interacting with the vacuum. Vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field nudge the electron, slightly shifting its energy. And this has been measured and it's totally accurate. The Lamb shift is a real thing. And again, this comes down to a philosophical question like, okay, it's not like they're particles popping out of the vacuum that you're interacting with. The field is there. The field has this energy, you can interact with the field. And so this is another piece of evidence that it's out there, right? It's real. So I think in the end, the weight is in the direction of the quantum vacuum is out there, it's real. We don't know what that means from a cosmological point of view. But it certainly seems like all our predictions are saying that we're sitting on this massive ocean of energy. But the question of the episode is not, is the quantum vacuum filled with energy or where does Kelly have to put her hand inside a goat? It's can we make use of the quantum vacuum? Yeah, well, and when you brought up the Lamb shift, I thought you were going to bring us back to pro lexis, but I guess you didn't. How did I miss that obvious connection? I'm thinking of Willis Lamb, wasn't it all? Prepare to make that joke. I apologize to all the listeners. I'm a little disappointed in you, but that's okay. Sorry, we're going to move on. We're going to move on. Okay, so it might be a real thing. Is it a thing that we can use? And should you be paying $50,000 to buy it to make energy to cook your toast? Yeah, don't buy an over unity machine. The issue is that to make use of energy, you need an energy difference, right? You need a gradient. You need to hide in a low, you know, like if you have water on a mountain, you can't use the potential energy of the water being up on the mountain unless you can flow down somewhere and then you can extract that energy, it turns into kinetic energy, it spins your water wheel, etc. Or if you have like a voltage difference inside of a battery, you can take advantage of that. So what you need is a difference, but this quantum vacuum energy, this zero point energy, this is the lowest energy of the field, right? You can't go lower. And so if you can't go lower, not only can you not extract any energy, because it can't go lower, right? But also there's no gradient there, there's no difference, there's nothing to use. But there's all that energy there. That's all that energy there. And it feels like, but didn't we figure out how to use it? I mean, we have the Castamere effect, it applies a pressure, can't you somehow extract that energy? You can turn Castamere pressure into energy, like, you know, you have a little piezoelectric device, which creates electricity when you squeeze it, you can put it between Castamere plates, right? Castamere plates, squeeze it, you get electricity. Oh my gosh, have we built a Castamere over unity machine? Should we be selling these to our listeners for $50,000? Well, you know, this works once, right? The plates get pulled together, they generate energy, but then you have to reset them. And so in effect, all the energy comes from the configuration that you built. It cost energy to put the Castamere plates in that setup and set everything up. And then you recover that energy when they collapse, which is like carrying water up a mountain and then saying, look, free energy, it flows down the mountain. Cool. But now you're going to carry it back up the mountain, right? And the original energy came from you carrying it up the mountain. So Castamere batteries are not useful, right? It's the configuration of the plates, which cost energy. You're not really mining the vacuum. Do you think there's any chance that we could figure out a design where you could extract energy? All right, so here's what Daniel sounds like a grifter, right? Yes, absolutely, because we clearly don't know what's going on here. Like, we have this bizarre situation where we have a very accurate theory of physics like quantum field theory predicted up the wazoo and down the wazoo 12 decimal places. It works, folks. It's amazing. It works so well that I almost had a spiritual experience when I first saw these calculations and I thought, this is like, you know, not the hand of God, but like this is the underlying mechanism of the universe itself. This is the territory, not the map, right? On the other hand, it makes this bizarre prediction, which is deeply at odds with our knowledge of the expanding and accelerating universe and everything we know about gravity and cosmology. So something is clearly wrong. And the best part of being on the cutting edge of physics is the humility it requires, right? Something we know is fundamentally wrong. And in 50 years, people are going to look back and be like, wow, how did they not see it? It was so obvious. Like, they just had these two things in their head at all times. It's nuts, right? And so something here is wrong, which means that everything we've said today could be totally wrong. And it could be that we discover the quantum vacuum is very different from what we thought it was. And the theory of quantum gravity gives us new insight as to what's going on. And there isn't energy out there in these fields, or there really is. And quantum gravity shows us that these rules we think are hard and fast about quantum field theory, that there's a minimum of zero energy, you can't go below. Maybe that can be broken sometimes, right? Maybe quantum field theory is emergent. It's not exact. And so there's some situations in which it doesn't apply. And in those situations, you can do crazy things and, you know, get to negative energy to stabilize wormholes and all sorts of crazy stuff. So yeah, it's definitely possible that in the future, we're going to be extracting energy from the vacuum due to an improved theory of physics. But with our current, obviously flawed and incomplete understanding of physics, there's no way to get energy out of the vacuum. And so if somebody out there is trying to sell you a machine, ask yourself, has this person invented quantum gravity? And yet I've never heard of them. And now they're on the internet selling devices for $50,000 instead of collecting Nobel prizes? Ask yourself if that makes sense. Okay. Well, so that's exciting. We're either going to like, have a Nobel Prize winning discovery in physics where that like absolutely changes the way we look at the universe. Yes. Or we're going to be able to extract almost infinite energy. Or both. Or both. Who knows. Or both. Maybe both. Exactly. Yeah. And nobody knows where that discovery is going to come from or who is going to make it. These grand revelations sometimes come in the most unusual, unexpected places. Probably not from pro lapsed goats. And you never brought my goat back, Daniel. No, that's what I was about to do. You never know where you're going to find it. So sometimes you got to pull on those gloves up to your elbows and you got to dig around inside the weirdest of places and keep an open mind for what's in there. It could be quantum gravity, Kelly. Oh, wow. So when your goat gives birth in a couple of weeks, who knows what's going to come out. Could be secrets of the universe. I know. Ada said we're going to name the first goat sprinkles, but maybe we should name it quantum gravity. Casimir. That's right. The Casimir effect and quantum gravity. We'll see what happens. All right. Well, I've got high hopes. It's too bad there's not a kid effect in physics because that would be a great name for Lottie's babies. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. All right. Well, we covered a lot of ground today, probably a surprising amount of ground today, but we had a lot of fun and we ran away from politics as fast as we could. And thank you for joining us on Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Thanks everybody for listening. 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