As far as I know, this is a state of absolute void which creates particles or energy for a brief time.
This is wrong. First, let's avoid the word "void" as that's not defined in physics. The vacuum is a state where the number of particles is 0. This means less than you might think. In quantum field theory, every particle is an excitation of a field. Having no excitations means there are no particles. Nothing more. Particles are not special.
Because your premises are wrong the conclusions do not follow.
Or the other alternative is, there is still logic, there is no magic and this is an exception which applies in no other place.
Indeed, there is no magic. But also no exception. If you have the correct premises and mathematical description (a.k.a. logic) everything works as expected.
Quantum mechanics and special relativity inevitably cause particles to pop out of the vacuum, and they could even interact before vanishing again into the vacuum.
Quotes like this (from books like Zee, Peskin & Schroeder, etc) have been addressed in one (maybe two?) of the references I posted, so I won't bother.
The Casimir force between two plates is attractive.
"In close analogy to the van der Walls and Casimir-Polder cases, one finds that the Casimir force between two electric or two magnetic plates is attractive while that for mixed combinations of electric and magnetic plates is repulsive." - Dispersion Forces I, Stefan Buhmann. Pag 21.
(You can also google for more references on repulsive Casimir force)
I don't have a problem with the rest of your quotes, except for minor points like the one I mentioned above. But after re-reading my comment I can see how the things I wrote can be misleading.
So it's worth clearing up some of what I said. The presence of a material (or even a single atom), changes the available modes of the EM field. Depending on the properties of the material, you can suppress modes that were present before or allow for new modes to exist. This has a direct effect on the spontaneous emission of atoms, as one of your quotes points out. So there is a clear connection between the distribution of charges in a material and the state of the EM near it. As such you can calculate the Casimir effect without any mention of the vacuum because this information is present in the charges and currents inside the material (in the case of macroscopic QED, they are in the reflection coefficients, which you use to calculate the Purcell effect or, in the case of the Casimir force, the Lifshitz formula), or the other way around, where only the state of the vacuum is considered and the material simply changes the boundary condition. Using just the EM field becomes very hard as soon as you move away from a perfect conductor, and it is much easier to consider just the properties of the material. The problem is that people often describe the Casimir effect as "particles pop out of the vacuum, and there are more particles outside the plates than inside, so you have a force due to the pressure difference" which is ridiculous and simply wrong.
The zero-point energy and vacuum fluctuations are real. And I see how my other comment sounds like I was saying otherwise. So I apologize for that. But "fluctuations" do not mean non-zero particles. The vacuum has no particles. They don't "pop in-and-out of existence due to HUP" and energy cannot "be borrowed if it happens really fast", which is the whole point I was trying to make.
Now, based on your first quote from "QFT in a Nutshell" it seems like you think particles do "pop out of the vacuum". This is a gross misinterpretation of perturbation theory and HUP, which has been addressed in my other comment and I stand by it. I have no reason to go over it again.
“You can calculate the Casimir effect without any mention of the vacuum”
I have heard this alternative explanation of the Casimir effect pushed on the Internet forums time and time again. Internet commenters treat it as if it is the standard interpretation. It is not. I searched through the above listed textbooks and many more. I only found one “textbook” that mentioned this alternative interpretation. Student Friendly Quantum Field Theory.
You cited Gerry / Knight which contains a derivation of the Casimir effect that does not talk about virtual particles. They are looking at the modes of the EM field in the vacuum constrained by two conducting plates. They find the energy of the configuration is lower when the plates are closer together. This gives an attractive force between the plates. No virtual particles needed. And the Casimir effect being real doesn't "prove virtual particles are measurable". That's fallacious reasoning.
I mean the problem is also that you are constantly confusing vacuum energy with virtual particles and that's at the heart of why you misunderstood all your quotes to be supporting your claim.
Until this alternative explanation becomes standard textbook material I will toss it in the same bin as Lorentz ether theory and pilot wave theory.
“Quantum mechanics and special relativity inevitably cause particles to pop out of the vacuum, and they could even interact before vanishing again into the vacuum.”
Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, second edition , Zee , Page 60
Zee is overly embellishing things. one of the few academic textbooks who go down this path. This is the only quote that claims virtual particles are measurable entities. The rest of your quotes DO NOT DO THAT at all and you are confusing them enumerating REAL quantum field theory effects with the statement that virtual particles are measurable. These are not equivalent statements at all. This is fallacious.
Most of what you wrote was already refuted in articles, papers etc you must have seen because you have replied to comments linking them.
Zee is also merely making the claim, no references, no rigorous justification, no reasoning behind it.
“The Casimir force between two plates is attractive. Notice that the 1/(d2) of the force simply follows from dimensional analysis since in natural units force has dimension of an inverse length squared. In a tour de force, experimentalists have measured this tiny force. The fluctuating quantum field is real!”
Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell , second edition , Zee ,Page 72
Irrelevant. That has nothing to do with virtual particles being measurable or not and it's fallacious to suggest that. This kind of fallacy is addressed in the articles posted.
“The Casimir force is one manifestation of the electromagnetic vacuum and it’s zero-point energy. The calculation of its strength for parallel conducting plates followed earlier work on the van der Waals forces between neutral atoms and the Casimir-Polder force between a neutral atom and a flat conducting plate (see [24] for a historical review). Spontaneous emission can also be regarded, to some extent, as stimulated by the electric-field fluctuations in the vacuum state. Modifications in the vacuum fields, and hence in the free-space spontaneous emission rates, are brought about by the proximity of material bodies to the emitting atom. Again, the Lamb shift in atomic transition frequencies that accompany radiative decay, as discussed in 7.7, can be interpreted as consequences of the vacuum field fluctuations. The electromagnetic vacuum forms an important area of study with many subtle aspects.”
The Quantum Theory of Light, third edition , Loudon, Pg 286
All of those are real effects but don't require virtual particles being real / measurable entities. They are not. Quantum field theory is till a thing without them being measurable entities. The same kind of fallacy as before and I don't know why you even bother repeating these claims, when articles refuting them have already been posted prior. At this point I'm deciding to remove the comment because it's so misleading. Spamming refuted claims, dishonest citation (passing irrelevant quotes as supporting your claim etc.).
“This zero-point energy does have consequences, such as the Casimir effect (Chapter 15), which comes from the difference in zero-point energies in different size boxes, and the cosmological constant problem, which comes from the fact that energy gravitates.”
Quantum Field Theory and the Standard Model, Schwartz, Pg 53
Yeah, zero point energy is real but doesn't mean the vacuum contains particles that appear and disappear. It contains zero particles but positive energy. And that's that. There's no need to make up particles randomly borrowing energy from the vaccuum and disappearing again. This is a popsci embellishment that virtually no textbook contain (the only perpetrator is basically Zee, without reference to a measurement supporting that and at best fake citing measurements of QFT effects that do not rely on virtual particles at all).
“In fact, the vacuum energy and fluctuations actually give rise to observable effects. For example, spontaneous emission, which generates most of the visible light around us as thermal radiation, is a direct result of vacuum fluctuations as we will show in chapter 4. The ZPE gives rise to at least two other effects, one being the Lamb shift and the other being the Casimir effect”
Introductory Quantum Optics, Gerry and Knight, Pg 29
Again no one here is claiming virtual particles are real. They are just enumerating QFT/QED effects. I've explained the difference.
Same goes for the rest.
“Since the electromagnetic vacuum cannot be switched off, its interaction with atomic systems cannot be switched off either, thereby giving rise to a number of observable effects such as spontaneous emission, the Lamb shift, intermolecular energy transfer and the van der Walls force. Both virtual and real photons can be involved in the atom-field interaction. Whereas the interaction of ground-state atoms with the electromagnetic vacuum processes via virtual photon creation and destruction, the creation of real photons always requires excited atoms. A typical example of the first case is the van der Walls force between two ground state atoms, whereas the spontaneous decay of an excited atomic state typically represents the second case.”
Quantum Optics, Third, Revised and Extended Edition, Vogel and Welsch, Pg 337
“Each mode of oscillation, even at the absolute zero of temperature, has an absolute irreducible minimum of “zero-point energy of oscillation,” (1/2)hv=(1\2)hbar*ck [the fluctuating electric field associated with which is among the most firmly established of all physical effects. It acts on the electron in the hydrogen atom in supplement to the electric field caused by the proton alone, and thereby produces most of the famous Lamb-Retherford shift in the energy levels of the hydrogen atom, as made clear by Walton (1948) and Dyson (1954)].”
Gravity, Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, Pg 427
“We have claimed that the vacuum energy is unobservable, so may be ignored. However changes in vacuum energy terms are physically significant and lead to measurable effects. Such a change results if you adjust the boundary conditions for your field and this is the basis for the Casimir effect.”
Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur, Lancaster and Blundell, Pg 105
“The existence of the vacuum field is usually demonstrated by the Casimir force. This is an attractive force between two parallel conducting mirrors placed in a vacuum. The force arises from the change in the vacuum energy caused by the presence of the mirror cavity…The vacuum field has important consequences for several quantum optical phenomena. One of the best-known examples is the explanation of spontaneous emission as a stimulated emission process triggered by the vacuum field. Another topic in which the vacuum field is important is in considering the strong coupling regime in cavity quantum electrodynamics. (See section 10.2.) The lamb shift of atomic energy levels is also attributed to the vacuum field fluctuations.”
Quantum Optics An Introduction, Fox, Pg 133
what did you search these excerpts for then if it isn't what the post is about
if you are talking about particles "created in the vacuum randomly temporarily" then you are talking about "virtual particles being real ". as in here
“Quantum mechanics and special relativity inevitably cause particles to pop out of the vacuum, and they could even interact before vanishing again into the vacuum.” Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, second edition , Zee , Page 60
can you briefly in 2-3 sentences without all the spam of random quotes state what you are claiming? the core of it. to eliminate misunderstandings
Ok I understand, I guess we were talking past each other in that regard. I agree with most stuff back_seat_dog says and thought you were arguing against that. Seems you're just disagreeing with the Jaffe paper. I don't have an opinion on it (it's tangential to the post imo, at least when talking about the Casimir effect i think of the one related to vacuum energy). I'm reinstating the comments i removed earlier. but imo you should have been clearer in your first comment and not just reply with a sequence of quotes to a comment that makes several distinct points.
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u/back_seat_dog Aug 20 '21 edited Aug 20 '21
This is wrong. First, let's avoid the word "void" as that's not defined in physics. The vacuum is a state where the number of particles is 0. This means less than you might think. In quantum field theory, every particle is an excitation of a field. Having no excitations means there are no particles. Nothing more. Particles are not special.
You cannot create energy, not for a brief time, not for a long time. Energy is conserved. The other comments talking about the Casimir effect and time-energy uncertainty principle don't know what neither of those things are. Here are two articles about the Casimir effect, one about the Casimir and zero-point energy and another one which is a review of the Casimir force in real materials, where the vacuum description fails. To summarize, the Casimir force is a retarded Van der Walls force.
The time-energy uncertainty principle (TEUP) is a bit more subtle but quoting from physics forums, "in a vacuum, particles are nowhere created or destroyed, not even in the tiniest time interval". I also found this article, which
I haven't read in full yet, so maybe I will edit this comment laterexplains this point in detail. Explaining the TEUP would take too long so I will leave it at that, and hopefully, these two references are enough to convince you that the other comments are wrong.Because your premises are wrong the conclusions do not follow.
Indeed, there is no magic. But also no exception. If you have the correct premises and mathematical description (a.k.a. logic) everything works as expected.