The Precession of Quantum Foam near Massive bodies

Just a quick question:
quantum foam is, as I understand it, the sea of virtual particles that
come into an out of existence.
It seems reasonable to expect that on average, the point of
annihilation of virtual particle pairs will be closer to a gravitating
body than the point of their creation.

This must cause a general precession - a sea of virtual particles moving
toward a gravitating body. This is partly an illusion because nothing
actually shows up closer to the gravitating body (annihilation leaves
nothing remaining ie density of quantum foam need not increase near the
centre of mass).

But there is an interesting question as to whether this precession
causes any larger scale effect of any kind. Can virtual particles
interact with real particles?

During their brief existence, both the particle and antiparticle have a
mass and this leads to a local gravitational force. Though weak for any
pair of particles, a sea of such particles, all preceding toward the
gravitating body, must have some larger scale effect.

Just a thought.

--
Kind Regards,
Robert Karl Stonjek.

"Robert Karl Stonjek" wrote in message ...
The Precession of Quantum Foam near Massive bodies

Just a quick question:
quantum foam is, as I understand it, the sea of virtual particles that
come into an out of existence.
It seems reasonable to expect that on average, the point of
annihilation of virtual particle pairs will be closer to a gravitating
body than the point of their creation.

This must cause a general precession - a sea of virtual particles moving
toward a gravitating body. This is partly an illusion because nothing
actually shows up closer to the gravitating body (annihilation leaves
nothing remaining ie density of quantum foam need not increase near the
centre of mass).

But there is an interesting question as to whether this precession
causes any larger scale effect of any kind. Can virtual particles
interact with real particles?

During their brief existence, both the particle and antiparticle have a
mass and this leads to a local gravitational force. Though weak for any
pair of particles, a sea of such particles, all preceding toward the
gravitating body, must have some larger scale effect.

Just a thought.


It is interesting that you say that virtual particles must have a
gravitational mass during their brief existence. This would imply
that space itself should have a gravitational mass based on the
average number of virtual particles in existence at any one time.

How would this affect theories of gravitation? Could this be the dark
matter?

Double-A

"Double-A" wrote in message
om...
"Robert Karl Stonjek" wrote in message
...
The Precession of Quantum Foam near Massive bodies

Just a quick question:
quantum foam is, as I understand it, the sea of virtual particles
that
come into an out of existence.
It seems reasonable to expect that on average, the point of
annihilation of virtual particle pairs will be closer to a
gravitating
body than the point of their creation.

This must cause a general precession - a sea of virtual particles
moving
toward a gravitating body. This is partly an illusion because
nothing
actually shows up closer to the gravitating body (annihilation
leaves
nothing remaining ie density of quantum foam need not increase near
the
centre of mass).

But there is an interesting question as to whether this precession
causes any larger scale effect of any kind. Can virtual particles
interact with real particles?

During their brief existence, both the particle and antiparticle
have a
mass and this leads to a local gravitational force. Though weak for
any
pair of particles, a sea of such particles, all preceding toward the
gravitating body, must have some larger scale effect.

Just a thought.


It is interesting that you say that virtual particles must have a
gravitational mass during their brief existence. This would imply
that space itself should have a gravitational mass based on the
average number of virtual particles in existence at any one time.

How would this affect theories of gravitation? Could this be the dark
matter?

Double-A

RKS:
Space could have any gravitational potential at all, as long as it is
uniform. Locally, it would not effect anything too much if at all.

I didn't think of the universe scale implication for the gravitational
mass. It is while space is expanding that the density of quantum foam
might fall in some region, but the density of expanded and non-expanded
space is probably the same.

I was thinking more of the precession of particles. It may be that
there is a precession, but around the kind of massive bodies we find
around here, planets and stars, the effect is probably negligible.
Around Black Holes the effect is responsible for Hawking Radiation
(where one half of a virtual pair crosses the event horizon and is
captured by the Black Holes gravitation).

--
Kind Regards,
Robert Karl Stonjek.

Robert Karl Stonjek wrote:

Just a quick question:
quantum foam is, as I understand it, the sea of virtual particles that
come into an out of existence.
It seems reasonable to expect that on average, the point of
annihilation of virtual particle pairs will be closer to a gravitating
body than the point of their creation.

This must cause a general precession - a sea of virtual particles moving
toward a gravitating body.

This is called ``vacuum polarization.'' In fields where we have a good
quantum theory -- quantum electrodynamics, for example -- the
corresponding effect is calculable, and gives small but observable
corrections to various measurable quantities.

We don't have a good quantum theory of gravity yet, though, and
don't know how to calculate gravitational vacuum polarization
reliably. There are some attempts at low-energy calculations,
which may not depend too much on the pieces of quantum
gravity that we don't understand; John Donoghue, for one, has
done a lot of work in this area. You probably get corrections to
the force in the Newtonian limit that goe as 1/r^4, but they're
tiny (they go as (l_p/r)^2, where l_p is the Planck length, about
10^{-33} cm).

One nice reference to this low-energy calculation is
http://arXiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9712070.

Steve Carlip

Dr. Carlip,

Particle pair production is more likely to occur in regions of space
where there are concentrated levels of mass energy and radiation, and GR
says that this will increase the gravitational effect in these regions,
with respect to greater energy density than the surrounding space has.
This offsets the increase in the negative pressure component that arises
in proportion to the to the hole that gets left behind by anti-particle
during pair production, so expansion is not a runaway effect.

If mass energy and radiation can interact with the energy of the vacuum
to produce an increase in particle density over an isolated region of
space, then the odds are more than just a little bit good that
mass-energy and radiation interacts with these concentrated regions to
cut an attractive field, and this would at least naively appear to be
the most likely causal mechanism for gravity, since you then have enough
of the relevant energy present to enable a viable attractive force.

If vacuum tension increases by way of the "hole" that gets left behind
by the anti-particle during particle pair production, then no new energy
is required for the system to continue evolving as increased tension
will increase the effect that mass-energy and radiation has on pair
production. That is to say that the severity of the gradient between
vacuum and matter increases over time, so that the interaction becomes
more intense, instead. In terms of evolution, the universe then has a
big bang when enough tension is achieved, because the near net-zero
imbalance causes the universe to evolve slowly, until it leaps to become
something else when tension achieves the next order of magnitude up the
evolutionary ladder = big-bang^2

There is no runaway effect, if the "hole" causes the vacuum to expand in
proportion to the anti-particle's contribution to pair production, so
Einstein's cosmological constant is valid in this virtually static
model, because expansion is a caused by the normal evolution of the
universe, rather, it is made necessary by forward progress through space
and time.

Local rho increases at a near-constant pace with increasing negative
pressure in a near-static expanding universe in this cosmological
scenario, and Omega always remains almost exactly 1 because any increase
in vacuum energy is immediately offset by the locally increased
gravitational effect, so the next big bang on the evolutionary ladder
will result in a higher order event of similar nature, and the next
universe will be just as flat as the last.

The expected energy density of the vacuum changes by orders of magnitude
if the majority of the vacuum's energy is concentrated to the isolated
regions of stress, which says that vacuum energy isn't evenly dispersed
throughout the vacuum, rather it settles into energy levels that halo
around massive clusters, thereby returning the energy of vacuum to
physical continuity with every other form of energy in the universe,
rather than to project the contradiction to this universally observed
physics that the vacuum of QFT puts forth.

Steve Carlip wrote:

island wrote:

Particle pair production is more likely to occur in regions of space
where there are concentrated levels of mass energy and radiation,

Yes.

and GR says that this will increase the gravitational effect in these
regions, with respect to greater energy density than the surrounding
space has.

No, it doesn't. The total energy of the two particles in a virtual pair
is zero. To make the pair into ``real'' particles, energy has to be
provided from the outside, for example from the gravitational field.
Quasilocal energy is, as far as we know, still conserved. Quantum
fluctuations can change the *distribution* of energy, and thus have
a measurable effect, but our current theories give us no reason to
expect ``increase[d] gravitational effect.''

(Of course, a complete quantum theory of gravity might lead to
different predictions, but since we don't have such a theory, it's
not possible to say what those predictions are.)

Steve Carlip

Hi Steve, thanks for your rapid reply!

Maybe I'm just not making myself clear, can you quickly review this
stuff when you have time, and maybe make at least one more comment?

http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr/2001-07/msg0034130.html

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=is...gle.com&rnum=2

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=is...gle.com&rnum=5

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=is...gle.com&rnum=6