3 ms·
I read recently that through the Casimir interaction, heat can be dissipated in a 'vacuum' as it is transferred to virtual particles. When this happens and the
by corporate_shi11 7y ago
I read recently that through the Casimir interaction, heat can be dissipated in a 'vacuum' as it is transferred to virtual particles. When this happens and the virtual particles pop back out of existence, do they carry the energy they absorbed along with them into nonexistence? Or by absorbing energy do they become real? Would that then mean energy is being created?
- ianai 7y agoCuation-I’m surely an idiot on cosmology and physics. Current theory is that all mass energy will eventually wind up in black holes - which will then evaporate. All mass energy will then be maximally dispersed in the entropy death of the universe. I think that means the Casimir effect is not destroying mass energy, just dispersing it to a useless state.
- deehouie 7y agosome references please
- eesmith 7y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21770464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21770464 was posted 20 hours ago on the topic, pointing to https://phys.org/news/2019-12-energy-space-quantum-weirdness.html https://phys.org/news/2019-12-energy-space-quantum-weirdness... .
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y agoI'm no physicist, but the article says "phonons can indeed be transferred across a vacuum by invisible quantum fluctuations." Which is not the same as "heat can be dissipated in a 'vacuum' as it is transferred to virtual particles." spot the difference: "transferred across a vacuum" (to some other object) vs. "dissipated in a vacuum" (to nowhere).
- eesmith 7y agoPerhaps physics has a specialized version of "dissipated"? A look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipation suggests that's the case. And perhaps corporate_shi11 is using "dissipated in a vacuum" to mean "transfer of internal energy from a hotter body to a colder one across a vacuum"? shrug - I dunno.
- madhadron 7y agoHeat can be dissipated in a vacuum by electromagnetic radiation. This is how most heat is dissipated in a vacuum. For the Casimir interaction, virtual particles are one way to do the bookkeeping to calculate the force between two objects. One object transfers energy and momentum to virtual particles which in turn transfer the energy and momentum to another object.