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Heat energy can travel through empty space
- eesmith 7y ago"Heat energy" here means "phonons", not "infrared light." > for many years, textbooks told us that phonons cannot travel through a vacuum," said Xiang Zhang, the professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley who guided the study. "What we discovered, surprisingly, is that phonons can indeed be transferred across a vacuum by invisible quantum fluctuations." It's due to Casimir interactions.