Robin: Thanks for the feedback, and in one sense you are right (and I'll add 'permittivity' to your list), but I was thinking of a property akin to 'pressure'... and I'm going to have to think about how to better express my thoughts!
Why does electrical current 'flow'? Well, because of an imbalance of electric charges between two regions, one can think of each region being at a certain pressure, and the delta between them is called 'voltage', or potential difference for the old fogies. Connect these regions with a conductor of some kind and electrical current will 'flow'. Now, can this analogy be applied to the vacuum? GIVEN: Two Casimir cavities, C1 and C2, with plate spacings of d1 and d2, respectively, and d1 *NOT* equal to d2 so one Casimir cavity excludes more wavelengths of virtual particles than the other, then there would be a difference in some kind of property between C1 and C2 (ED1 and ED2; ED=energy density). QUESTIONS: - Can that difference be thought of as a kind of pressure? - How would you measure that pressure? - Would that pressure diff cause some polarization of the vacuum? And more importantly, - If you 'connected' one of the plates of C1 to one of the plates of C2, would you get some kind of 'flow' (of something!) between them? (A flow of virtual particles perhaps?) - If a flow of virtual particles can occur, then what would you use to connect C1 to C2? - Would it be a continuous flow since you probably can't deplete the vacuum? - Can you equate various aspects of atoms (I'm thinking physical spacings) as Casimir cavities with different spacings (after all, there is only vacuum between subatomic particles), and thus the above situation is present everywhere, and there are continuous flows of vacuum going on within atoms/nuclei? I seem to have triggered a constant flow of questions, but I'll stop there! :-) G'nite all, -Mark Iverson -----Original Message----- From: mix...@bigpond.com [mailto:mix...@bigpond.com] Sent: Saturday, July 28, 2012 9:15 PM To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: Re: [Vo]:FYI: Polarizable vacuum analysis of electric and magnetic fields In reply to MarkI-ZeroPoint's message of Thu, 26 Jul 2012 07:51:13 -0700: Hi, [snip] >Good question. > >How can ANY properties of the vacuum/ether/ZPF be measured? We already know some of them: 1) Polarizability of the vacuum. 2) Permeability of the vacuum, together yielding 3) The speed of light. 4) Planck's constant. 5) The fine structure constant, though I'm not sure whether or not that properly deserves the title of property, as it's dimensionless. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
