olaf said:
Could ZPF explain odd phenomena that exists in the animal kingdom such as the high degree of syncronicity in schools of fish or insects detecting pheromones despite the fact that the wind is blowing the chemical in the opposite direction.
Is ZPF the reason why particles once paired continue to interact with each other even after separated? Nonlocality?
In nonlocality can one of the electrons be moved to another galaxy and still interact with its sister electron?
Does anyone have anything interesting to say about ZPF.
As far as I know (and I'm willing to learn), ZPF is a useful model describing the structure of empty space. From time to time, empty space "produces" pairs of particles (a particle and an anti-particle), which tend to run into one another and self destruct at once.
Quantum entanglement, the explanation for how particles remain "linked" even after they move apart, is a different matter. As a proof, you can have quantum entanglement among particles that are not in empty space, you can entangle existing particles, and other things.
The four forces (gravity, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear) are most of the reasons for which particles interact when seperated.
Nonlocality is a result of quantum entanglement, and says that two particles that are entangled have some linked properties. The best example is spin, where two entangled electrons have opposite spins, but you don't know which one has a positive spin.
As long as you do nothing that would reveal the spin of either particle, the electrons behave as if they had one half positive and one half negative spin. As soon as you check, one is positive and the other negative, *and the entanglement is broken*.
In theory, the dsitance between entangles particles does not matter, but there are lots of practical problems before we get to galaxy spanning distances. First problem: noise. Random particles or waves bumping into your electron will reveal its spin, so the system collapses very fast. I think the record is about 1 meter. Second problem: you *cannot* predict how the particles will split up (whether you get positive or negative spin), so you can't use this to communicate.
Back to ZPF, or at least my take on it: if you look at a huge volume of space, and assume it will produce a particle pair, you get a tiny amount of energy. If you look at a smaller volume *and assume it will produce the same number of particles*, you get a larger energy output. Since there are quantum effects meaning that there is a minimum level of energy that can be produced, the model states that *when* particles are being created, a small volume has a greater energy output than a large one. It's counterintuitive, and completely useless for energy output purposes (since a smaller volume means lower chances of getting anything), but it's a common excuse among free energy followers.
To reply to your second question, nonlocality has in theory no distance limits. However, entanglement requires that the particles be in contact at some point (or linked to the same atom, forcing their spins to be opposed), and noise very quickly destroys entanglement. So the odds of entangled particles being at any significant distance from one another are extremely low, and they will not stay entangled very long even if they are far apart.
Nonlocality does not allow communication, either, and is limited to the quantum scale. It can explain odd outcomes at the scale of a few photons for a few nanoseconds over a few nanometers, but then it breaks down.
