cuz the way physics works is that you can use equations to deduce things that should or could exist within the realm of physics. and it's actually a fairly reliable way to predict things that we can't yet prove the existence of
...I'm a little skeptical of whether the negative energy interpretation of the Casimir effect really means "negative energy" the same way it's applied in general relativity...
I hate to burst anyone's enthusiasm but apparently the guy behind this has made debunked claims about space travel stuff before Sonny white was behind the team that studied the emdrive idea and thought it was producing energy but another team found out they weren't accounting for the energy from the electrical wires in the experiment
I mean maybe they did find something this time but I wouldn't get overly excited until there's more study and peer review, given the source of the claims
Maybe there is something to it! but people sometimes get ahead of themselves with these things because it'd be really exciting if we had figured them out
moreover I'm not convinced you can apply the principles of renormalization to actual energy densities the same way you do to the effective energy density of virtual particles in QFT also the Vacuum Catastrophe makes any treatment of renormalization-based of vacuum energy as a real energy pretty suspect IMO
I think the moral of the story is to approach pop sci journalism with healthy skepticism, since even in the best case, even the most honest researcher is going to report their work from a place of confidence and the journalist, who most likely doesn't actually understand it, is incentivized to jazz it up from there
the crux of the debunking article, because it's wayyyyy down at the bottom: They didn’t make [a warp bubble]. In fact, they didn’t calculate one, either. All they did was show that the three-dimensional energy density generated by this cavity displayed some qualitative correlations with the energy density field required by the Alcubierre drive.
i still think it's important for pointing toward a direction for future research to investigate (preferably for other researchers to investigate), but, yeah, wildly overstated, even moreso than we thought
“To be clear, our finding is not a warp bubble analog, it is a real, albeit humble and tiny, warp bubble,”holy shit
also the Vacuum Catastrophe makes any treatment of renormalization-based of vacuum energy as a real energy pretty suspect IMOThey didn’t make [a warp bubble]. In fact, they didn’t calculate one, either. All they did was show that the three-dimensional energy density generated by this cavity displayed some qualitative correlations with the energy density field required by the Alcubierre drive.They don’t match in a quantitative sense; they were not generated experimentally, but only calculated numerically