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Warp drive and ZPE
Posted on Sunday, July 15, 2007 @ 22:09:04 UTC by vlad
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Dr. Paul J. Werbos writes: Hi, folks!
Sometimes when the "champions" of a technology claim they already know every detail about how to do it... that's an effective way to make sure no one can ever do it. I've seen that with a lot of technologies, from next-generation cars to "Orient Express" to "Ajax" plasma hypersonics, and now recently some of the more twisted discussions of space solar power or energy from space.
Maybe warp drive and ZPE have some of the same problem.
Almost all of the popular discussions of ZPE start out from saying "it's all about those (1/2)hw" terms in the Hamiltonian. Just use them and run, and we know all the details."
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe the goal might even be achievable via ZPE, but it cannot be achieved without better understanding of what is going on here.
What bothers me... is that a lot of the talk about those magical (1/2)hw terms seems to be based on ignorance of what happens to them, in the more linear, explicit accounts of quantum electrodynamics that you can find, for example, in Mandl and Shaw. In essence, people wave their hands, throw out those terms, and compute all the classical effects in QED (like the Lamb shift) without those terms. The normal form Hamiltonian is all you need; it has no (1/2)hw terms.
Sure, you can compute the same effects (albeit less directly) using less visible forms of hand-waving, using a path integral kind of approach that disguises the equivalence. But the point is -- if the normal form Hamiltonian and the canonical form of QED produce the same predicts as the less-well-defined path integral approach... then the terms do not have a measurable empirical effect, in the well-tested realm of QED.
Some folks say: "But what about the semiclassical noise effects we need to explain some basic stuff in lasers?" But at the present time, semi-classical approaches don't really capture the hardest state of the art in quantum optics; full-up cavity QED is what does the job. Yamamoto's authoritative text on that subject takes a straight-up canonical approach... based on the usual 3-D creation and annihilation operators, just like Mandl and Shaw.
None of this says that the (1/2)hw terms "aren't there." It says we don't know enough about them to trust any computations and predictions made for phenomena we haven't observed empirically.
(And of course, there is the Casimir effect, the plane version of which was analyzed by Landau decades ago, and fully explained within the capabilities of the normal form Hamiltonian; Milton more recently has done the same with spherical Casimir effects.)
So -- can we understand these terms better, if they are there?
My claim is that the (1/2)hw terms have an analogy to the infinities we subtract away when we do renormalization and regularization. To get precise predictions of QED, people did not just throw away the terms. They came up with a kind of model (regularization scheme) of where the infinities go, to cancel out, and discovered a residual effect that they could analyze without so much handwaving. We will need to do something like this, to get any kind of handle on what these terms might buy us in technology (if anything; who knows?).
How could we do this? This kind of infinity is really deeply embedded in the more conventional formulations of quantum field theory (unless we simply define QFT in terms of the normal form Hamiltonian and the canonical formulation, in which the terms simply do not exist).
Well... there may be a way.
In the heretical full-fledged backwards time theory of quantum mechanics http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0607096
the (1/2)hw terms actually show up as the result of encoding a perfectly well defined pdf over classical field states into Fock-Hilbert space. The "Q" transform is well known in quantum optics, and there are rigorous ways to look at what the noise does. A stochastic source term is necessary in order to match the usual dynamics of QFT (predictions of scattering states and spectra), and raises the question ...
Does this more well-defined stochastic model match the various ZPE theories closely enough to yield similar predictions, even for the kinds of things that Davis and Millis have been talking about?
It would be extremely interesting to know, and perhaps even important.
A caveat however -- this works for bosonic field theories. Vachaspati has argued that it is possible to represent all the confirmed predictions of the standard model of physics through a "bosonic standard model." But he has not yet proven it. It is not so trivial. I have ideas of my own how to get there -- but it does require looking very closely at the strong nuclear force. Intuition tells me that bending space requires enormous energy densities, and we need to look more closely at the strong nuclear force in any case to have the best chance of really being able to do it.
Best of luck to us all,
Paul
P.S. My goal here is NOT to argue that I possess the answers, versus everyone else on this list. That would be a stupid way to do physics. Rather, I am arguing that none of possess all the answers yet.. and I hope someone will be motivated to take some of the next steps to find them...
--------------
Harold
E. Puthoff, Ph.D. writes: Hi Paul, attached is my latest use of the ZPE formalism, just came out in
Int. Jour. Theor. Phys [ Casimir_Electron.pdf]. Shows how the formalism leads naturally to a point
electron without infinite mass generated by the coulomb fields.
Cheers,
Hal
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Re: Warp drive and ZPE (Score: 1)
by vlad on Monday, July 16, 2007 @ 22:26:04 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) http://www.zpenergy.com | Dr. Jack Sarfatti writes: There is no mention of ZPE induced gravity in Hal's paper. Therefore the paper is wrong. Hal has not asked the correct question to solve the problem - neither did Casimir of course.
What's wrong is that Hal has not identified all of the relevant parameters of the problem of the structure of the electron. There is no gravity in his model. In fact gravity gets stronger as the scale decreases. This last statement comes from a Wignerian analysis of quantum gravity measurement as shown by Ng & Van Dam below.
Let me make it as simple as possible, but not, like Hal's model, simpler than is possible.
You have a shell of electric charge. How do you prevent it from exploding under its self-repulsion?
You have two options:
1. Press in radially on the thin shell of charge from outside the shell.
2. Suck in from the inside of the shell.
Hal chooses 1. The correct answer is 2.
The problem with 1 is that it requires too much zero point energy ZPE density on the outside of the shell. So much that the universe could not exist. Hal needs ~(hc/Lp^2)(mc/h)^2 ZPE energy density outside the shell of charge to contain the charge. The virtual photon density outside the charge has w = -1 and is positive. Therefore, the pressure is negative. Hal cannot use w = +1/3 DeWitt outside the charged shell. DeWitt's solution is inside the charged shell.
Pressure acts in two different ways, mechanically and gravitationally. Usually the gravitation of pressure is much weaker than its mechanical action. Note that this mechanical action is basically electrical in origin. The Casimir effect is mechanical.
Hal models his electric shell as empty inside with mechanical pressure from virtual photons on the outside pushing radially inward on the charge. This is his picture. It's wrong for several reasons.
1) the virtual photon pressure on the outside is negative not positive because w = -1 on the outside.
2) there are virtual photons on the inside and from Dw Witt w = +1/3 on the inside.
Therefore, mechanically the positive pressure on the inside pushes the charge outward, and the negative pressure on the outside also sucks the charge radially outward. Therefore, there is no mechanical (electrical) containment of the shell of charge at all!
Remember pressure is the component of force along the normal unit vector of a surface per unit area of that surface.
That's the mechanical action. The gravity action of pressure is opposite to the mechanical action, although usually it is too small to notice compared to the mechanical action in every case except for this one of zero point energy!
Positive pressure gravitates attractively. Therefore, a positive pressure inside the shell of charge will suck the charge radially inward. The issue is how strong is it? Also negative pressure outside the shell of charge anti-gravitates pushing the charge radially inward.
...
For more please see Sarfatti_Physics_Seminars Yohoo Group.
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