Thread: Zero Point Energy vs Dark Energy?

Is there a link between quantum fluctuations/Zero-point energy and dark energy?

what are these?
anyone care to explain for the less smart people?

I do not see a connection. I think that dark energy arose out of another sort of energy or dimensional substrate. It is in a sense the opposite of dark matter, so you could say that one could not exist without the other; both could have formed in a short time after the big bang, by accident just like every other form of energy and matter. Were you trying to see if the vacuum energy made dark energy? I don't think so.

Zero point energy (ZPE) is largely a hoax based on several different natural phenomena. Helium frozen to near absolute zero is liquid, so if you froze it to a solid, then you would essentially take energy from it. Except that there is no way to freeze something below absolute zero. (That’s why its absolute zero.)
Another example is the Cassimir effect. Virtual particle pairs are constantly created everywhere by ambient energy. They’re subatomic and the pairs quickly combine and annihilate each other, changing back to ambient energy. If two plates are placed so close together that no virtual particles can be produced by ambient energy between them, then the “pressure” of those virtual particles produced outside of the plates pushes them together. Again, there’s just no way to use this motion to create anything useful.
Dark energy seems to be the energy of space-time itself. So If I powered a starship on dark energy that would seem to make sense, except that the energy is the very fabric of space-time. To use this energy, I would have to physically annihilate, say, one cubic kilometer of space-time, thus making the whole universe smaller by that amount. This is of course impossible.

Virtual particle pairs are constantly created everywhere by ambient energy.

Does that mean that in isolated vaccum without energy (if thats possible?) there would be no virtual particle pairs created because there would not be ambient energy?

Yes, that's essentially the Cassimir Effect. It just takes more energy to create this than you would ever get from it. It's the Quantum equivalent of carrying a ball up a hill and then letting it roll back down. The ZPE hucksters would then say, "Look, free energy!"