Interessant fand ich dieses Experiment über das ich neulich gelesen haben.
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Empty space is anything but, according to quantum mechanics: Instead, it roils with quantum particles flitting in and out of existence. Now, a team of physicists claims it has measured those fluctuations directly, without disturbing or amplifying them. However, others say it's unclear exactly what the new experiment measures—which may be fitting for a phenomenon that originates in quantum mechanics' famous uncertainty principle.
"There are many experiments that have observed indirect effects of vacuum fluctuations," says Diego Dalvit, a theorist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico who was not involved in the current work. "If this [new experiment] is correct,
it would be the first direct observation of the field [of fluctuations] itself."
Thanks to the uncertainty principle, the vacuum buzzes with particle-antiparticle pairs popping in and out of existence. They include, among many others, electron-positron pairs and pairs of photons, which are their own antiparticles. Ordinarily, those “virtual” particles cannot be directly captured. But like some spooky Greek chorus, they exert subtle influences on the “real” world.
For example, the virtual photons flitting in and out of existence produce a randomly fluctuating electric field. In 1947, physicists found that the field shifts the energy levels of an electron inside a hydrogen atom and hence the spectrum of radiation the atom emits. A year later, Dutch theorist Hendrik Casimir predicted that the field would also exert a subtle force on two closely spaced metal plates, [...] But now, ()
http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2...ty-space-maybe