Is it possible to tap into zeropoint energy?

>you have to have a differential
>DIFFERENTIAL
NOT
0
>A mountain lake can't be used to power turbines unless there's some lower place you can dump the water.
YOU HAVE NOT DESCRIBED ANY PROCESS IN YOUR EXAMPLE THAT IS "0". YOU HAVE TO CREATE THE "LOWER PLACE", CREATION IMPLYING "NOT 0". YOU ARE INCREASING POTENTIAL BY CREATING ANOTHER FORCE THAT CAN MOVE WHAT YOU WANT TO WHERE YOU WANT. FROM NOTHING COMES NOTHING.
potential is not 0, it is unmanifested and still "is". It "exists" as potential, existing meaning it is a thing that can cause an effect. A "thing"(cause) or effect is not nothing, at it's roots are motion and motion is not inert (0).

You CANNOT reach absolute inertness or "absolute 0". You can come close, but it's always no cigar unfortunately.

Of course, i'm not taking the position that it's possible to violate the conservation of energy principle like posts like the OPs seem to imply when they're talking about "free" energy. I don't think i've said anything that implies a violation of the conservation of energy principle. I'm just questioning whether electrical energy really comes out of a battery or generator or it's just polarising the vacuum/dirac sea/quantum foam/whatever-term-you-use-for-a-seething-quantity-of-energy-which-usually-has-a-net-charge-of-zero-because-of-its-random-nature locally in a circuit to allow the "energy" to flow in the first place.

Sometimes it seems as though saying energy comes out of a battery or generator is over-simplifying what is really going on, similar to when people try and explain magnetism to kids as "you get magnets because the atoms act like smaller magnets". Has anyone really defined what electricity, magnetism and energy actually are, rather than in terms of how we use them?

Energy is the capacity to do work. By definition.
It's useful because it's a conserved quantity.
It, and momentum.
In Relativity, the two are inescapably bound together in a 4-vector. You can't have one without the other.
Electric charge is also valuable because it's a conserved quantity.
All conserved quantities reflect symmetries of space and time. See Noether's Theorem.
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem
Energy is conserved because the laws of physics don't change with time. You expect to get the same result if you do the experiment today or tomorrow or in 2500 AD. Momentum is conserved because the laws of physics are location independent. We expect the same results here and in Andromeda. (Which doesn't mean you don't have to take local conditions into account. A rock will fall slower on the Moon. But that's a local parameter. Newton's Laws haven't changed.)

Magnetism really doesn't exist, any more than "centrifugal force" does. Both appear due to your choice of a frame-of-reference. The reason there "appears" to be magnetism isn't so obvious, but here's an excellent explanation.
>galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/252/rel_el_mag.html

In the case of an electric generator, we can trace the flow of energy and watch its transformation from a moving wire to the drift of electrons within that wire, to the transmission of that energy across the country
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poynting_vector
to it's conversion back into motion or heat or light.
None of those processes require the notion of vacuum energy. It's like the luminiferous aether. We've found it's not needed and can never be detected. We can't prove it doesn't exist. But why retain it?

On the other hand, the vacuum energy DOES have measurable effects.
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_shift
Casimir force (detected)
Hawking & Unruh radiations (still theoretical)

yes, black holes
>inb4 hawking radiation is a meme

>Energy is the capacity to do work. By definition.
That is a widespread but wrong definition.
Consider the heat energy of the air in a room.
It has no capacity to do work.

Zero is indeed a number, Cadet Capslock.
Subtract any two numbers, and the difference is a number.
Subtract any number from itself, and that difference is zero.
This is not a difficult concept.

Zero-Point Energy = Dark Energy

GIVE ME MY NOBEL PRICE NOW!!!

On the contrary. What if you had a container with a vacuum inside. If you open a hole, the air rushes in (and could drive a generator, proving that useful energy has been extracted) at the expense of a little heat of the gas in the room. It would of course require more energy to create the vacuum than you would get out, but that's not the issue here.
As far as I know, we could extract zero point energy but it would require more energy than we would get out. (Entropy, conservation of energy at macroscopic scales etc.)

How many apples do you have in your hand right now ?

I have no apples in my hand, there are apples that could be in my hand though.

A placeholder.

I think you're just on some other unnecessary definition of "zero" than the rest of us

No, there is no true definition or explanation of zero. It is purely undefined because it is of NO QUANTITY.

How do you define NOTHING. Where is there a "0" in nature? There is none.
>What if there were 0 apples on the planet
Then we wouldn't know what they were, they would be undefined.
If we knew what they were and they were wiped out for whatever reason, is there now "0" apples? No, because there is the memory of the apple, the blueprint of the genetic makeup of it.Obviously we don't know that blueprint, but if we did then it would just be a matter of transmuting matter into the order of a seed.Quantity is of no concern, it is the purely the QUALITY of things that make them different.

"0" has no quality or quantity, you can say that it does but that doesn't make you correct. You can call it a "number", but it is undefined. What is there to count? It's a placeholder.
>it has the quality or quantity of "0"
Which is undefined! You can go ahead and "define" it, but there will be no explanation behind such a crackpot claim. You can't make "0", and "0" can't make anything.

it's just a name
if you want to attack it (and more power to you if you do) you should attack the concept and how they attempt to hold it up

>YOU HAVE NOT DESCRIBED ANY PROCESS IN YOUR EXAMPLE THAT IS "0". YOU HAVE TO CREATE THE "LOWER PLACE", CREATION IMPLYING "NOT 0". YOU ARE INCREASING POTENTIAL BY CREATING ANOTHER FORCE THAT CAN MOVE WHAT YOU WANT TO WHERE YOU WANT. FROM NOTHING COMES NOTHING.
you're arguing with someone that agreed with you

brainlets itt

0 point energy is the lowest possible energy for a particle oscillating in a quantum well. It basically means you can't have a particle with 0 energy, because, well, you'd have nothing.

False vacuum energy, on the hand, does exist. It's being tapped into all the time, by the inflation of the universe. False vacuums inflate true vacuum miniuniverses at the speed of light. Tapping into this seems a bit farfetched for now though.

No, because zero-point energy is the same everywhere. Trying to harness it is the same as trying to harness the heat and/or pressure of room temperature air without interacting with anything outside the room.

No matter how massive it is or isn't, this energy is off limits to us. The only effect it might theoretically have is on a literally universal scale: gravitationally giving the universe more positive curvature the more of it there is. And it's a possible explanation for dark energy. There's still some questions regarding these ideas, however - not the least of all that the predicted mass is way higher than it should be if we just go by the curvature of spacetime (nearly or exactly flat to fairly high precision instead of very positively curved as predicted) or the acceleration of expansion (much slower according to redshift surveys than predicted).

>0 point energy is the lowest possible energy for a particle oscillating in a quantum well.
My understanding is that in the context of QFT every location in space has values for all quantum fields and so is also subject to a type of zero-point energy. As in everywhere could potentially be a particle if it were to oscillate at the right frequencies, and so the uncertainty principle puts a limit on how truly empty a vacuum can be. How off base am I here? Any reading material you would recommend if I'm massively misunderstanding it?

Meant to quote for the second half.

ironic schizo-posting is one of my favorite sci memes

You have to make the can of vacuum first.
You're just storing energy.
It's no different from putting a weight on a higher shelf.
When you empty a vacuum chamber, the air has to go somewhere. You're actually expanding the entire atmosphere a trifle. When you re-admit the air into your can, the atmosphere reverts -- it falls back to its former state.

You might find it easier to visualize if you do the experiment at the bottom of a swimming pool. Emptying the can will raise the level of the water. Before, it displaced no water save for the thickness of its walls. Once emptied, you've cleared out its internal volume.
The water "wants" to go back to a state of lower energy. If you won't let it into the can, it'll try to force the can upwards so the water can go downwards. That's buoyancy.
The work of raising the can does not come from the molecular motion of the water atoms.

As for your other point, suppose it took 1000 joules to drag a single joule out of the vacuum. Not very efficient, eh? But still, at the cost of 1000 joules, we now have 1001 joules. Even if it's just in the form of heat, energy conservation has been violated.

Maybe I should have been more precise.
There's definitely thermal energy is the air.
But it can do no work without a differential.
I didn't want to give a thermo lecture.

>it's just a name
Connotation or denotation it still doesn't exist. The name in it's entirety is a meme. "Zero (which doesn't exist)- point(how do you define what doesn't exist as a point?).

>if you want to attack it (and more power to you if you do) you should attack the concept and how they attempt to hold it up
read: If he agreed with me then he wouldn't have said: "The zero-point energy exists". He is currently describing EVERY SINGLE FORM of power we currently use today.

>False vacuum energy, on the hand, does exist.
But it still doesn't exist without the other part of the equation, expansion. It is still not a thing by itself.

Attached: magnet.jpg (640x480, 185K)

That's what I said. It would take more energy to create the vacuum than you would get out of it.
The key point is that you can do useful work if you have an entropy gradient. Inside the container, very low entropy. Outside the container, high entropy. Getting rid of this entropy gradient releases potentially useful energy, but increases the overall entropy of the system.
Returning to OP, you would need something with even less energy than the lowest possible energy state to extract 0 point energy. (probably) Not possible.

At least, not possible without putting in more energy than we would get out.

Well this is the thing right. Break it down further, forget about background radiation and all this shit.

Let's just look at a DC dynamo. What is it doing really?

You're not getting ANYTHING out of the vacuum. (In this case, "vacuum" is a volume with the air pumped out. Not the quantum vacuum.)
The energy is all in the gravitational potential energy of the air which has been lifted away from the Earth.
Energy is not entropy.
Suppose I have two bodies at different temperature. For simplicity, they have equal masses and specific heats.
I allow a reversible cycle (a Carnot cycle) to transfer heat between them. More heat flows from the hot body into the engine than the engine rejects to the cold body. The difference is work done. A shaft turned or electricity generated. The two bodies come to some intermediate temperature which is cooler than the average of the hot and cold initial temperatures.
But the entropy change of the system is ZERO. That's what "reversible" means.

Stop talking about entropy gradients. Entropy changes tell you which processes can spontaneously occur. They don't tell you whether work is done.

The opposite of my Carnot cycle problem is simply slapping the masses together. Heat will flow between them and their net entropy will increase. ZERO work is done.

Hey, I agree with you. You are correct. I'm not arguing with you.

We agree. I mentioned entropy gradients because they tell you whether a process will occur of its own accord. If you think about the specific scenario, you can then establish whether useful work can be extracted.