🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan7.160035.25521@athena.mit.edu> redingtn@athena.mit.edu (Norman H Redington) writes:
>In article <1993Jan6.074948.27304@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>, crb7q@kelvin.seas.Virginia.EDU (Cameron Randale Bass) writes:
>|> 
>|>      Just curious.  What meaning is assigned to 'the dynamical analogue
>|>      of the Casimir effect'?  I don't really see any place for the 
>|>      Casimir effect or an analogue in the process.  This isn't exactly
>|>      a subtle indication of zero-point energy.  Are you sure it
>|>      wasn't a joke?  
>|> 
>
>Definitely not a joke: Proceedings of the National Academy 89(4091)1992.

     Thanks for the reference.  

>Incidentally, I can think of a "hand-waving" reason for at once thinking
>that the Casimir effect might be involved. Although everyone thinks of the 
>static Casimir effect as "a subtle indication of zero-point energy", it's
>really not so subtle when you think about it: at a certain scale of distances,
>namely the scale of small water droplets, it's van der Waals and Casimir
>rather than Newton and Maxwell you have turn to. Now sonoluminescence
>originates with bubbles right in that size regime, but in a dynamic
>environment... If only I could think of things like this in advance, I'd
>be Schwinger!

     Unconstrained by experimental results, I can think of at least
     five ways to get light emission from a system, and the Casimir effect 
     is not the most obvious, nor seemingly the most plausible.  At small 
     scales, there are certainly different electromagnetic effects than if one
     envisions hard spheres, but unless one views the electronic levels 
     in an atom as an indication of zero-point energy, I think Schwinger
     may be reaching.

     Theories are a dime a dozen.

                                dale bass
-- 
C. R. Bass                                          crb7q@virginia.edu        
Department of Wildebeest
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