On Feb 10, 2006, at 6:29 PM, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
Check out "Unruh effect" or "Unruh radiation".
I just heard about this tonight; haven't really looked into it.
It's mainstream physics, though, nothing speculative about it.
Apparently, an accelerating body "sees" a uniform "bath" of
radiation -- heat energy -- all around it. This "bath" comes from
the fact that the equations describing pair production are
unbalanced in some strange way when transformed into an
accelerating frame. But spontaneous pair production is a
manifestation of the ZPE, right? Apparently when you're
accelerating the pair members don't behave identically; something
like what happens to produce Hawking radiation.
This effect may prevent practical application of quantum entanglement
communication - assuming that it is possible between non-accelerating
bodies in the same frame.
As I understand it the radiation is isotropic and so can't actually
be used for anything, but I thought this was interesting none the
less.
I know there were experiments in the works recently to detect Unruh
radiation; I don't know if any have been successful.
There are other mainstream ZPE effects besides the Unruh effect.
The Casimir effect, like QM in general, is now becoming mainstream in
the engineering of MEMS devices. See:
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/021401/
Quantum_effect_moves_machine_021401.html
Even more interestingly, about 5 percent of a proton's magnetism is
due to *strange quark pairs* hopping in and out of existence near the
proton's three quarks. See:
http://www.physorg.com/news6048.html
For a lot more:
google: strange magnetism proton pair
For more evidence and some practical theory and application, though
some may consider it more crackpot than mainstream, see:
http://mtaonline.net/~hheffner/HeisenbergTraps.pdf
especially at the end. And ... going way out on a limb:
http://mtaonline.net/~hheffner/ZPE-CasimirThrust.pdf
Horace Heffner
