AAWSAP DIRD, Concepts for Extracting Energy from the Quantum Vacuum, April 2010

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QED Vacuum as a Mathematical "Placeholder" for Fluctuating Matter
Fields
The treatment of the QED vacuum as a fluctuating plenum with (formally) infinite
energy density has caused some physicists to call into question the viability of the
second-quantized QED formalism . Jaynes, for example, in considering the
consequences for calculation of the Lamb shift of the 2s level of the hydrogen atom
under the assumption of a much more modest electron Compton frequency cutoff ( ~
1021 Hz), calculates a fluctuating power flow for the Poynting vector of 6 x 1020 MW/cm2
- comparable in every square centimeter to the total power output of the sun - and
states that "real radiation of that intensity would do a little more than just shift the 2s
level by 4 microvolts" (Reference 56). However, despite alternatives to the formalism of
QED that have been suggested (more on this later), second-quantized QED cannot be
lightly dismissed; and this is so even though the infinities that must be dealt with by
such procedures as renormalization caused even one of its founders, Paul Dirac, to
remark: "This is just not sensible mathematics. Sensible mathematics involves
neglecting a quantity when it turns out to be small - not neglecting it because it is
infinitely great and you do not want it" (Reference 57).
A second argument that can be raised against using the QED formalism to further
explore vacuum fluctuation physics is that, despite the magnitude of the energy density
potentially associated with vacuum electromagnetic fluctuations, observation of the
cosmological constant-a measure of net vacuum energy density-has a value that is
only on the order of the average energy density of (ordinary + dark) matter in the
universe ~ 10-9 J/m3 (Reference 58, 59). This leads to what is often referred to as the
120 orders-of-magnitude problem, or "cosmological coincidence." In the mainstream
view, rather than the QED value being discounted, the resolution of this problem is
thought to lie in the domain of infinity (or divergent integral) cancellations, requiring
instead an accounting for the fine-tuning requirements of such cancellations (Reference
60, 61).
Again, the root cause of the difficulties that accompany second quantization of the
vacuum field is that an unbounded plenum possesses an infinite number of degrees of
freedom, each with its assigned ground-state fluctuation energy. In an attempt to
circumvent the difficulties associated with an unbounded, second-quantized plenum,
alternative approaches to QED have been explored in the literature in some detail, a
few of which are discussed in Section V. A number of these alternative viewpoints
interpret the second-quantized QED vacuum with its infinite degrees of freedom as
simply an over-idealized mathematical placeholder for "real" fields that originate in
matter fluctuations whose number of degrees of freedom is necessarily always limited.
Nevertheless, though the alternative formalisms and associated interpretations differ
significantly from the canonical approach, detailed calculations yield results identical to
those generated by the second-quantized field formalism. As a result, even treated as a
mathematical placeholder for matter fluctuation fields, at this point in our discussion
the QED value must be taken seriously. The proposed corollary concerning the
potentially significant conversion of QED vacuum energy to other forms is further
evaluated in the sections that follow.
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