Terry, (Using this email because the uni. server is down for some reason).
The Casmir Effect works with glass plates. If you read the paper: "Comment on Zero-point Fluctuations and The Cosmological Constant", Michel F.C., Astrophysical Journal, 466:660-667, 1996 The approach Casmir used is described as a neat calculational trick not to be taken literally. Schocastic Electrodynamics is described as the poor man's Fourier Transform for dealing with *vacuum polarisation* (not the same). Elsewhere it says that zp of the lattice exists but not for a continuum. I will revise it and may be drop off a few of the important points here. I don't know what BEC is. I remember Puthoff back in 2001 in Brighton describing an American invention which was meant to 'detune' the the zp by creating a beat frequency between two slightly different sized spheres which could then just be rectified. He was candid and said it didn't work. This seemed to be a very direct test of the zp *hypothesis*. Not knocking the ideas of the vacuum seeming to having some physical even mechanical property, the following paper is undeniable: Graham and Lahoz, "Observation of static electromagnetic angular momentum in vacuo", Nature Vol. 285, 154 (1980). Quoting them: "It is remarkable that no know 'particle' can be identified as the agent of the observed electromagnetic angular momentum in the exchange with the mechanical detector. However, this does not imply that a new entity has to be introduced, because the concept of energy-momentum carried by macroscopic quasi-static (italics mine) electromagnetic field is already contained in Maxwell's equations. According to these, and as directly implied by our experimental result, permanent magnets and electrets can be used to build a flywheel of electromagnetic energy steadily flowing in circles in the vacuum gap of a capacitor as if Maxwell's medium were endowed with a property corresponding to super-fluidity. The certainly new insight is that the quasi-static Maxwell's field is not merely an unobservable medium of interaction between matter and matter: it has in fact the mechanical properties postulated by Maxwell, in contradistinction to any 'action at a distance' theory." ZP is not the way to explain this. Stick to real experiments and not hyper-extrapolated theory. Regards, Remi.
