On Wed, 12 May 2010 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax said I think so. There are cavities involved, likely. However, they are not supplying any energy, apparently, rather they *configure* the reacting ingredient or ingredients. We know that the reaction rate increases with temperature. I suspect that the energy required -- there must be energy required, but energy is not the only "ingredient" -- is generally supplied by ordinary heat.
Abd, I don't think the heat is ordinary or it would dissipate see quote from Moddel paper below, Regards Fran Quote from Professor Garret Moddel dated 30 October 2009 "Assessment of proposed electromagnetic quantum vacuum energy extraction methods" http://www.calphysics.org/articles/Moddel_VacExtrac.pdf There is a fundamental difference between the equilibrium state for heat and for ZPE. It is well understood that one cannot make use of thermal fluctuations under equilibrium conditions. To use the heat, there must be a temperature difference to promote a heat flow to obtain work, as reflected in the Carnot efficiency of Eq. (4). We cannot maintain a permanent temperature difference between a hot source and a cold sink in thermal contact with each other without expending energy, of course. Similarly, without differences in some characteristic of ZPE in one region as compared to another it is difficult to understand what could drive ZPE flow to allow its extraction. If the ZPE represented the universal ground state, we could not make use of ZPE differences to do work. But the entropy and energy of ZPE are geometry dependent.32 "The vacuum state does not have a fixed energy value, but changes with boundary conditions."33 In this way ZPE fluctuations differ fundamentally from thermal fluctuations. Inside a Casimir cavity the ZPF density is different than outside. This is a constant difference that is established as a result of the different boundary conditions inside and out. A particular state of thermal or chemical equilibrium can be characterized by a temperature or chemical potential, respectively. For an ideal Casimir cavity having perfectly reflecting surfaces it is possible to define a characteristic temperature that describes the state of equilibrium for zero-point energy and which depends only on cavity spacing. In a real system, however, no such parameter exists because the state is determined by boundary conditions in addition to cavity spacing, such as the cavity reflectivity as a function of wavelength, spacing uniformity, and general shape.
