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http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap040801.html]Click
*Evidence that the universe will expand forever?
--Cindy
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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The Casimir Effect really is cool. So are the Sysiphus Effect and other examples of apparent violation of conservation of energy in quantum mechanics. Good evidence of vacuum fluctuations, if you ask me.
However, they're not good evidence of "dark energy". The Casimir Effect produces an attractive force, not a repulsive one. The Casimir Effect shows itself as a deficit of energy, not a mysterious source of it. You could argue that if there were enough examples of the Casimir effect around, they could be enough to pull the universe back together again, not keep it expanding forever.
Still, if there's vacuum fluctuations, there's no reason there can't be dark energy, too. You just have to look somewhere else for it.
"We go big, or we don't go." - GCNRevenger
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http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap040801.html]Click
*Evidence that the universe will expand forever?
--Cindy
It sure is pretty! And thanks for the site for Astronomy POTD.
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Cool pic but the caption overstates things quite a bit. For one thing, there's still quite a bit of controversy about the origin of the Casimir effect. It turns out that there are alternate ways to explain the force using standard electrostatics and that zero-point energy is not necessary to explain things.
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