Vakuumenergie - Warum nutzen wir sie nicht? | Harald Lesch

Nothing comes from nothing, as the saying goes, but physicists tell us that empty space has energy. NASA has even investigated whether this energy could be used to power a spacecraft. the energy of nothingness, physical nothingness. You can imagine that we take a cubic centimeter of the universe and look at what particles are there and here on Earth, for example in a cubic centimeter of air between 10 and 19 and 10 raised to the power. out of 20 particles, that's a pretty big number, now we can take out the particles except one particle per cubic centimeter, then we would have the average density in the Milky Way.

The average density in the universe is one particle per cubic centimeter. meter in a cubic centimeter universe outside our Milky Way Galaxy You can't even necessarily assume that there can also be a particle, so that's the vacuum, that's the physical vacuum, we take out everything that's in it, everything that really It can be physically tested. in some way that is the vacuum obviously there is in this nothingness in this physical nothingness there is energy where it comes from. What kind of energy is that, the energy of the vacuum? How can you really explain it? ​The developed world is called quantum mechanics.

It is about the fact that all effects, that is, everything that in some way causes a physical effect, is not continuous but is always in quantitative and easy form, always in the form of a package. There is no 0 in this theory, nothing, everything. It fluctuates and a great German theoretical physicist even formulated it quantitatively correctly. These are Heisenberg's famous Heitz indefinite relations which basically describe that nothing, but really nothing in this world, can have the value zero, nothing at all, since we don't know exactly where something is. Because the product of where and how fast is always greater than a number, the number is small, so quantum mechanics plays a role in our normal life.

Effects can occur, but if you delve into the depths of matter, into the structures of molecules, atoms, atomic nuclei or elementary particles, it plays an incredibly important role. If we had glasses and we could be there when the elementary particles interact with each other, we would see that down there everything oscillates, everything oscillates and so on. It would mean that that does not oscillate either and then you made an attempt, a great attempt, an attempt in which you did not force anything to show itself, the energy of nothing had to show itself, how did you do it with two conductors, that is, two metals?

Electrically conductive plates at a distance of one micrometer in a vacuum came very close, that is, millionths of a micrometer of a meter and then measured what was happening. If you now look at these two metal plates, you may wonder how many waves fit between these two. metal plates and how many waves can exist outside the two metal plates, in other words, the possibility of pressure, this due to the character of all quantities of quantum mechanics, should lead to these plates attracting each other, not by gravity, no, no, but simply by vacuum. energy inside and outside the plates A little different, my goodness, that opens up the possibility of an energy difference caused by the two metal plates.

Maybe you could use that, rather this thought comes to mind if that is the case everywhere and it is. Basically, anywhere in the universe. Yes, a universal cosmic energy source of enormous proportions, everything everywhere, it would be possible to harness the energy of the vacuum and with that, of course, the target could be fed, perhaps a star boss. and I mean, if the two plates attract each other, then it exerts its power and that power would be exactly what is needed to maybe make things move, drive turbines, drive dynamos and in this way convert vacuum energy into energy electrical.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. It doesn't work, vacuum energy is the same everywhere, so in simple language always. If you have these two plates here and you want to get to the power somehow, then you would have to push the two plates together so that they are tight. and you would have to separate them again in a circular process. This will of course cost energy to keep them together and 3100 that is not a possible process. You can't extract energy here because separating them requires energy again, which is a circular process. It's a shame, and yet vacuum energy is possibly one of the best ways to solve one of the great cosmic puzzles.

We've known for about 30 years that the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate, so we know it's been a while. that it is apparently expanding, that is, that space-time is expanding and we have known for some decades that it is expanding at an accelerated rate, that is, that the speed of expansion is increasing. What could be the reason for the acceleration? expansion and that's where the vacuum energies play an important role because this is now a bit of, how should I put it, history of science and epistemology, so buckle up now as it gets a bit more complicated.

One of the greatest triumphs of the natural sciences is the connection of the largest with the smallest, that is, cosmology, on the one hand, the largest is probably the cosmos, and elementary particle physics, that is, the most small, on the other hand, that means our most successful theories, i.e. the general theory of relativity, which describes how the entire universe behaves, and quantum field theory, i.e. relativistic quantum mechanics, have to work together and, of course, it would be the icing on the cake. Empirical sciences if we could manage to combine the theory of general relativity that the presence of energy curves space and changes the geometry on the one hand and quantum field theory on the other hand can even explain to us how the vacuum can have energy if these two theories go together and can explain a demonstrable effect, namely the effect that the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate.

The only hope is that we then take this wind vacuum energy from quantum field theory and try to calculate what effects it would have or, better yet, take the observed acceleration of the universe and look at what energy the vacuum should have. so that it can explain the observed acceleration of the universe yes then there is a problem the problem is that the energy density is the energy flowers professionals that you would need to explain how that universe is accelerating today, now only the acceleration is expanding, that this density of energy is 120 120 orders of magnitude smaller than what quantum field theory gives an energy density in a vacuum, so on a school assignment you would say wildly wrong, so the biggest mistake theoretical physics has ever made never, you could also say and But there is an incredible temptation behind vacuum energy because it is one of the few properties that we know in the entire universe.

Just think about what creatures on this small planet on the edge of the Milky Way can have. properties of the entire universe, friends, that's the big story, that's all, that's all, those are the best theories we have and we need them but we have always thought of them to explain the properties of the universe and we know that vacuum energy It's not a myth. There are experiments that clearly demonstrate this. Yes, this vacuum has great energy, but it does not explain the expansion of the universe. The emptiness is there. It has an effect, but we know exactly what it is like.

Not us, NASA has also stopped working on it, the power plant will also exist. The only thing that can be taken away from this is that it is a great powerhouse. mind is, that is, such things have been discovered