@TerryBollinger

5 months ago

Hi Sabine! Break a piece of metal in a vacuum, then put the two pieces back together. They vacuum weld. If you get lucky in the shape of the break, the same van der Waals (atomic-scale charge nudging) and metallic bond (delocalized electrons) that hold the metal together internally reactivate across the narrow gap, pulling the pieces back together and making them a single piece again.

Given that these are the same forces that make lumps of metal or other materials possible in the first place, there is no need to make the vacuum the final source of the snap-back energy. It is only a return of the energy stored by breaking the metal in the first place.

The vacuum wave analysis idea was Bohr’s idea, not Casimir's. There was no need for it since the known internal bonding forces of the plates were already entirely sufficient to explain the attraction effect and, more importantly, to provide precise mathematical limits on how much energy could be stored.

Bohr’s far more idealized approach — idealized because, e.g., there is no such thing as a “perfect” plane in grainy atomic matter — unfortunately had the opposite effect. Instead of fully quantifying the forces and energy release in terms of the well-known bonding forces inside material objects, Bohr added a redundant hypothetical energy originating from “the vacuum.”

The fact that Bohr’s vacuum energy addition duplicates already well-known internal binding forces is a warning sign. Good old conservation of energy. It's still a great guiding principle!

The interesting piece is what you described: Why is vacuum energy between the two nearby plates negative?

Unfortunately, it's nothing more than a modeling error. Both metal pieces create Van der Waals and metallic bonding potentials close to their surfaces. If one incorrectly extends these near-surface bonding potentials to infinity, the energy potential between the surfaces necessarily goes negative when the bonds begin to reform.

Sabine, I am sorry, and since I'm nothing but a poor, bewildered programmer, I don't expect you to believe me. Nonetheless, for the record, there is no wiggle room for negative gravitational energy in any of this. Bohr did not realize that material objects have bonding fields with positive energy extending slightly beyond their boundaries. By incorrectly presuming a near-field energized vacuum to be a ”pure” vacuum, Bohr wound up with nothing more than an illusion of negative energy vacuums.

The actual energy drop when two plates approach closely is always smaller than the bonding potential of their near fields and thus always positive in terms of gravitational energy.

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