Moving mirrors make light from nothing

Well. Im not going to pretend I am an expert on quantum mechanics, but I would say that this is indeed a great thing.

From the article

40 years ago, Moore suggested that a mirror undergoing relativistic motion could convert virtual photons into directly observable real photons. This effect was later named the dynamical Casimir effect (DCE). Using a superconducting circuit, we have observed the DCE for the first time.

This is simply one step on the road to us gaining a better understanding of how the universe around us functions granted it might not have a practical use at this time (i.e. free energy or whatever people seem to want it to mean) but it has a deeper more important purpose, in helping to understand the world around us.

Maybe this will lead to something amazing like free energy, or maybe it will be found to be a complete misunderstanding of a set of results and everyone will have to rethink yet again. Either way the fact that the experiment was conceived and carried out is a great thing, in my opinion

reply to post by davespanners

The team fashioned a superconducting circuit in which the SQUID effectively acted as a mirror. Passing a magnetic field through the SQUID moved the mirror slightly, and switching the direction of magnetic field several billion times per second caused it to 'wiggle' at around 5% the speed of light, a speed great enough to see the effect.

I had a theory that the actual mirror is creating the photons by the oscillations it produces at those speeds. The scientists said that the "photons where shaken from the vacuum".
What does that mean?

Here's somethig that some people might not have heard of...
www.space.com...

To accelerate a bowling ball to the speed newly measured in these blazars would require all the energy produced in the world for an entire week," Piner said. "And the blobs of plasma in these jets are at least as massive as a large planet.

The particles are not light, but actual matter. They are tiny, thought to be mostly protons, but the energy that motivates them is similarly fantastic, and the mechanisms may be intertwined.

Scientists still don't know the exact mechanisms involved in accelerating matter to such high speeds, however. In the case of a blazars, it appears a black hole is involved. Anchoring an active galaxy, a super massive black hole draws gas inward. Some is swallowed, yet some is simply accelerated and then ejected in high-speed jets along the galaxy's axis of rotation. Intense, twisted magnetic fields may play a role.

These objects exist in a vacuum and raise hell at high speeds, right?

Whats your opinion?

~Glu

Originally posted by ElmersGluon
reply to post by davespanners

 

The team fashioned a superconducting circuit in which the SQUID effectively acted as a mirror. Passing a magnetic field through the SQUID moved the mirror slightly, and switching the direction of magnetic field several billion times per second caused it to 'wiggle' at around 5% the speed of light, a speed great enough to see the effect.

I had a theory that the actual mirror is creating the photons by the oscillations it produces at those speeds. The scientists said that the "photons where shaken from the vacuum".
What does that mean?

Here's somethig that some people might not have heard of...
www.space.com...

To accelerate a bowling ball to the speed newly measured in these blazars would require all the energy produced in the world for an entire week," Piner said. "And the blobs of plasma in these jets are at least as massive as a large planet.

The particles are not light, but actual matter. They are tiny, thought to be mostly protons, but the energy that motivates them is similarly fantastic, and the mechanisms may be intertwined.

Scientists still don't know the exact mechanisms involved in accelerating matter to such high speeds, however. In the case of a blazars, it appears a black hole is involved. Anchoring an active galaxy, a super massive black hole draws gas inward. Some is swallowed, yet some is simply accelerated and then ejected in high-speed jets along the galaxy's axis of rotation. Intense, twisted magnetic fields may play a role.

These objects exist in a vacuum and raise hell at high speeds, right?

Whats your opinion?

~Glu

Hi ElmersGluon
As I understand it, you are talking about the extremely energetic particles shot out by blazars.
In that case, as far as we know, we are talking about the matter that is drawn to the "accretion" disk of the black hole and made spin really fast. And while yes, this happens in deep space, which we commonly call vacuum, it's not empty at all actually it's all full of dust and gas; in the case brought by the OP, we are talking about the pseudo-particles that fill an actual vacuum, which withtin Q. Theory is not empty either, it is proposed that is filled with "virtual-particles" which switch to "reality" only to go virtual rigth away. The researches in the OP claim to have proof about this process and, more important, they claim to be able to capture this virtual particles before they return to the un-existing foam of voidness (which reads like a really cool item from an old RPG )

It is an amazing topic indeed.

cheers.

Drakus