ZPEnergy.com - Warp drive and ZPE

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...
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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