{"id":315,"date":"2026-04-25T03:49:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T03:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/?p=315"},"modified":"2026-04-25T03:49:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T03:49:09","slug":"quantum-vacuum-fluctuations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/2026\/04\/quantum-vacuum-fluctuations\/","title":{"rendered":"Quantum Vacuum Fluctuations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

During an email exchange, captured in the previous blog post “Delerium as a Phase Transition<\/a>“, someone wrote back. I responded compulsively:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Tue, Apr 21, 2026 at 6:50\u202fPM Keith Henson <h…@gmail.com> wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Good essay on the nonsense of our times. But you never got around to saying vacuum energy is nonsense.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Oh, Sorry. It\u2019s nonsense\u2013ish\u2013asterisk. I have a formal education in theoretical particle physics. PhD as it happens. And my PhD was on vacuum energy(!!) No kidding!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But first: a quick whack with a search engine reveals that this Nassim Haramein guy is a charismatic crank: I skimmed posts on reddit, on quora, and you don\u2019t have to read far to see what the problems are: Abused formulas, misunderstood notation, and worse. The fact that social media can so precisely pinpoint the flaws in his work actually gives me hope. People can recognize nonsense. The problem remains that we have no effective way to moderate that nonsense. It still spreads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Re vacuum energy. a few quick remarks. It\u2019s real, both physically and mathematically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  • Standard quantum electrodynamics calculations require it; that has been the case since 1932 (if I recall correctly) when Max Born (if I recall correctly) explained hyperfine splitting with vacuum energy. It is now a standard part of first-year quantum field theory, going under the name of “loop diagrams” and “renormalization”.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • The fine structure constant is the most accurately measured number known to man, at ten decimal places. Getting that right requires diagrams up to five loops.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • The vacuum energy underlies something called “the Casimir Effect”; this was my thesis: I computed it for the quarks in a nucleon (neutron\/proton). It matches low-energy measurements to about 8%, so \u2013 pretty good given how simple the model is.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Its also a kind of “mathematical fact”; there is a famous result from mathematics, called the “Atiyah-Singer index theorem” that basically explains, in a formal, concrete, acceptable-to-mathematicians articulation of how vacuum energy actually works in a certain specific case. FWIW, mathematicians don\u2019t actually call it “vacuum energy”, they call it “spectrum of an elliptic operator”, so if you go searching, you won\u2019t get direct hits. But it works out to be the “same thing”, at least if you\u2019re a physicist.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Last but not least: the so\u2013called “Hawking radiation” is the vacuum energy becoming “real” near the surface of a black hole. It\u2019s a bit gnarly, but if you happen to have a very very small black hole on your kitchen countertop, you could warm your coffee with it, but you might have to wait half the age of the universe, and you might not like some of the side\u2013effects. But I digress.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n

    It\u2019s certainly a fascinating and worthy topic, overall, The problem is that physics is, well, hard. Here\u2019s a bad analogy. In major league baseball, you hit a ball with a bat. But so do six\u2013year\u2013old kids; so what\u2019s the difference between the two? Well, a decade or two of really really hard work, and a certain amount of talent and natural gifts. Virtually all six\u2013year\u2013old kids never\u2013ever even come close to becoming major\u2013league baseball players. It\u2019s just how it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I will go farther: not only will humans never extract usable energy from the vacuum, but super\u2013AGI won\u2019t either. At least up to an IQ of a few million. Bets are off, if AGI reaches an IQ of a trillion. There\u2019s an ocean of absolutely freaky mathematics. I think I\u2019m not supposed to say this out loud, in public, but real math is much much stronger than LSD in it\u2019s hallucinatory effects. You sort of have to be level\u2013headed to deal with it, and people like Haramein and the other cranks can\u2019t keep their shit together. They freak out and can\u2019t control it and spew nonsense. The only part they get right is that it is, indeed, weird and freaky and cool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    During an email exchange, captured in the previous blog post “Delerium as a Phase Transition“, someone wrote back. I responded compulsively: On Tue, Apr 21, 2026 at 6:50\u202fPM Keith Henson <h…@gmail.com> wrote: Good essay on the nonsense of our times. But you never got around to saying vacuum energy is nonsense. Oh, Sorry. It\u2019s nonsense\u2013ish\u2013asterisk. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":316,"href":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions\/316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}