How does the attraction between two metal plates support a new effect (or force)?
Isn't it expected that two plates attract each other due to the London dispersion? If so, how does the experiment differentiate between the two?
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Did you check Wikipedia? – Qmechanic Jun 16 '20 at 16:09
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2Well that measurement part says absolutely nothing about how it was originally measured and how to differentiate between london dispersion forces. – NutsAsker Jun 16 '20 at 16:17
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The claimed measurement of effects of the vacuum energy (the Casimir force) is highly controversial. Many experts seem to agree that the measured effect has nothing to do with the attractive force due to vacuum fluctuation, and instead is explained by the interaction between relativistic currents, see e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0503158.
Prof. Legolasov
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1Correct. But it may be that this is two ways of looking at the same thing. – Andrew Steane Jun 16 '20 at 17:30
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2@AndrewSteane there are definitely two good effective description, but there can only be one fundamental description – Prof. Legolasov Jun 16 '20 at 19:31
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1I agree that, but might this not be comparable to the situation with Unruh radiation, where a calculation involving vacuum in Rindler frame looks different from an inertial frame calculation of an accelerating detector responding to correlations, but both are right. Similarly, the currents in the reflecting surfaces may be closely connected to a suppression of low order modes in the vacuum. – Andrew Steane Jun 16 '20 at 21:51