A Star called Casimir

As you may know, i am not that successful.

I guess, it’s a just a “bug by birth” – born in the wrong place in the wrong time with the wrong parents...

and the wrong head.

To have no rich parents, to grow in a wonderful landscape without possibilities to make money was not my fault, alas, what happens inside my head, definitely is. So i can tell you many stories how to avoid success.

And Casimir is one of them.

It was an important examination counting for my diploma, which required careful preparation: Theoretical Physics. Eagerly i worked and worked to learn the needful things, but the different energy levels of electrons were simply boring. Don’t understand me wrong! The reason why they differ is quite amazing, however, the exact numbers are not.

So i tried to study, but couldn’t convince me to stay “at the right place”. Instead of that i browsed through my books. Clearly aware of the relevance of the examination, i obeyed my curiosity. But considering the fact, that humankind might not survive the next fifty years (Sleepwalking to the End of the Earth) the simple question of the “meaning of life” comes to mind - and to fulfill your own dreams is much more satisfying than bowing to other peoples rules. Yes, yes, you’re right, at the time of my degree, i didn’t really believe in the Club of Rome, i did just follow my own way to the stars, leaving the money to the poor minds withouth dreams.

And i found the stars, one by one...

while browsing through my books i stumbled across a fantastic story:

The Void can create energy.

I was astonished.

Didn’t all my teachers tell me that energy can’t be destroyed and created? That energy obeys a law of conservation?

So how could that be?

With dry words and the old fashioned typewriter-style of some teaching books of that time i was told that a measurable force can be created out of Nothing because of the vacuum fluctuations which exist even in the pure Nothing, in the empty Void, in the perfect Vacuum where nix, null, nada, zilch can be measured and found.

Nothing, Void, Vacuum – but the quantum noise is still there.

And the quantum noise is action, pure and perfect and permanent action, driving ongoing fluctuations, movings of Nothing on and on and on...

( remember the cosmological constant?)

Now imagine walls inside the Nothing. They will catch the lively Nothing, will restrain its free movements...

forcing it to accept limits by destroying the almighty infinity of the quantum noise. And because action means change of states, it needs more than a single point in universe to exist, it needs a “before” and an “after”, it needs time and space, contexts and interdependencies – it has to behave like...

waves.

But borders, limits, surfaces don’t allow each and every range of time and space. And so the Vacuum has to decide which kind of waves it chooses to move on: the wavelength has to correspond to the cavity resonance of the room built by the walls.

Interestingly this “choice” means a new regularity of the fluctuations, means creating energy depending on the geometrical quantities (!), means the birth of an attractive force: Casimir effect.

You know, my memory isn’t that good, but some things i remember well – like Chaperone or Casimir, knitting the web of the spider.

Lively finiteness, born from boundaries inside the infinity, creating a universe out of Nothing, giving birth to measurability, identifiability, positions, the Here and There, the Now and Then, the Me and You.

That’s my information, guys.