[extropy-chat] Casimir Torque Project

[Adrian Tymes]

--- scerir <scerir at libero.it> wrote:
> Any work, against the (supposed conservative) 
> Casimir force, when the plates are spinning?

Ah, but that's the key: *supposed* conservative.  It is in the parallel
plate model that was originally proposed, and part of my inspiration
for this was noting all the failed attempts to extract energy from this
that were running into the issue of conservation.  I was also slightly
inspired by the specific problems cold fusion had faced: measurement
errors in energy input potentially overwhelmed the energy output...but
what about a system that had no energy input (from us, anyway), so any
energy output would necessarily be net energy output?

Note that I'm not using parallel plates, nor am I letting the plates
actually approach one another.  Thus, I don't need to put energy back
into the system to pull them apart.  From that perspective, it is
conservative: zero minus zero equals zero.

(I suppose another analogy here might be a sailboat sailing at an angle
to the wind.  Set things up right, and wind impacts sail, sail pulls
against boat, boat steers against the water, and boat can travel almost
any direction along the water's surface - perhaps not directly into the
wind, but see "tacking".  Now, what happens to the sailboat if it sails
behind a cliff on one side of a small island that cuts off the
wind...and what happens if it's chained to a boat in front of it, going
in the same direction, that's just emerged from behind the cliff on
the other side of the island?)