We don’t know much about dark energy, but one thing we do know is that it’s not (at least not straightforwardly) the zero point energy of the vacuum: using that assumption, our estimate for the amount of dark energy ends up being 120 orders of magnitude too big.
I think the measurements derived from the Casimir effect would be the more appropriate standard.
They’re in agreement with those calculations.
Which ostensibly is a direct measurement of the zero point field. I mean everybody knows that predictions based on the planck length are completely bogus.
Well then so much the worse for the idea that dark energy is related to vacuum fluctuations, because without the regularization, it’d be infinite.
The thing with the Casimir effect is that to calculate it, you only need to know about differences in potential energy, that is, any additive constant term drops out. But for dark energy, it’s exactly that term that’s important, and however you slice things, it’s just much too huge. And even for the Casimir effect, it’s quite probable that the zero point energy is only a heuristic device: one can calculate it as a simple relativistic van der Waals force between the two plates.
And the Planck length turns up very meaningfully in several calculations, most importantly perhaps in that of black hole entropy, which is equal to kA/4l[sup]2[/sup], with k being Boltzmann’s constant, A being the black hole’s horizon area and l being the Planck length.
Well you should take a look at the paper in this thread then.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10509-011-0744-4
I’m sure that since D.G. Hajdukovic has a whole theory based on the zero point field strength he has a cromulent method for calculating it.
Not anymore than anybody else; vacuum polarization is not the same as zero point field strength, and can be calculated much independently of the latter. It’s simple the presence of ‘loops’ in Feynman diagrams describing interactions of elementary particles.
Did you even look at what he’s trying to do? the strength of the field will be a function of the particle/energy density.
I didn’t get further than the first sentence, where he proposes that particles and antiparticles have opposite gravitational charge, which I don’t think anybody (else) thinks is the case. So mainstream physics would simply hold that there are no gravitational dipoles, and that’s that as far as his theory is concerned.
Where you are going wrong is to assume that there are more cubic units or that energy can be summed in that way in general relativity. An infinite universe contains an infinite amount of unit volumes of space at any given time, so I cannot see how objectively that there are more units volumes. If you were to sum the total energy of the Universe at any time by adding up the energy of the unit volumes you would expect it to be infinite. Less importantly general relativity doesn’t actually lend itself to summing energy in that way anyway.
It’s not the total energy that matters, because that is ill-defined/meaningless, it’s variety of other parameters, one of which is the dark energy density.
Not much to add, but following with interest.
Been reading some general stuff on Loop Quantum Cosmology. Maybe it’s my much better grasp on complex/hyperbolic geometry over the more esoteric maths involved in string theories, but it’s really clicking with the shotgun way I’ve been thinking about this stuff. I know it’s plagued by semi-classical limitation, not being able to predict anything novel, but it looks a very promising avenue over string theory in looking beyond the standard model toward unification.