I think I have a (general) grasp of what you’re saying. It certainly gives me a clearer perspective on why physicists are so dismissive of the ZPE claims.

That’s what I was asking for, and I appreciate the time and thought you put into your post.

Thus, you only can see the effects of non-conservation-of-energy type things via gravity on the very largest scales — looking at the whole Universe.

-Rob

In fact, we do have very good reason right now to believe that there *is* energy in the vacuum– what you might call “zero-point energy.” However, the only way that that interacts with anything is through gravity — it’s causing the expansion of the Universe to accelerate. Gravity depends only on total energy density. Indeed, gravity doesn’t really have a global conservation of energy law….

To harness it for actual work on something small scaled (like, say, smaller than a cluster of galaxies), you would need to have transitions in the vacuum energy.

Consider fusion. You can fuse Hydrogen up to Helium, because the mass of Helium is less than four times the mass of Hydrogen, and the extra energy comes out by E=mc^2. You can keep doing this all the way up to iron (56 nucleons). However, if you try to fuse iron to something heavier, it *costs* energy, you can’t get energy out.

If you contemplate E=mc^2, you will realize that iron has a whole lot of energy available… much more so than was released by the fusion of hydrogen up (through intermediate stages) to iron. However, via fusion, there’s no way to get it out.

The vacuum energy is analogous. Even though it’s there, we’d have to find a lower vacuum energy level which the vacuum could transition to in order to extract energy. Barring new physics, there isn’t any such thing available in our Universe. (And if there were, there’d have to be a good reason why the vacuum throughout most of observable Universe hadn’t *already* decayed to that lower energy– there would have to be some sort of serious “activation energy” (in the language of chemistry), similar to that which keeps stable elements heavier than iron from spontaneously decaying all the time.)

-Rob

“Men are four: He who knows not and knows not he knows not, he is a fool–shun him; He who knows not and knows he knows not, he is simple–teach him; He who knows and knows not he knows, he is asleep–wake him; He who knows and knows he knows, hi is wise–follow him!”

We don’t need to spend time worrying about your particular gizmo; we already know it can’t work.

This is exactly what I have been thinking about computer science lately. Since it is such a new field, we do not yet know all the perpetuum mobiles that lurk just beneath the surface.

A good theoretical background is important in every subject. It can guide you through difficult places and warn you against deceptive “shortcuts”.

–A

While many systems have some minimum energy, even at 0 Kelvin, this energy can never be extracted, because there is no state of the system with a lower energy.