The elusive Casimir effect suggests we could use vacuum energy to move objects and make stuff – but can something really come from nothing?
"Nothing will come of nothing." Shakespeare's epithet seems the kind of self-evident statement that only poets and philosophers would argue over. And physicists like Chris Wilson.
Last year, Wilson and his team at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, provided what seems a particularly egregious case of something for nothing. They claimed to have conjured up light from nowhere simply by squeezing down empty space (New Scientist, 19 November 2011, p 16). That would be the latest manifestation of a quantum quirk known as the Casimir effect: the notion that a perfect vacuum, the very definition of nothingness in the physical world, contains a latent power that can be harnessed to move objects and make stuff.
Sightings of this vacuum action have been mounting over the past decade or so, leading some physicists to propose a new generation of nanoscale machines to take advantage of it, and others even to suggest a leading role for vacuum energy in determining the origin and fate of the cosmos. Others remain to be convinced. So what's the true story?
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