The fabric of spacetime is roiling with vibrating quantum fields, known as vacuum energy. It's right there, everywhere we look. But could we ever get anything out of it?
We can even calculate the strength of this vacuum energy. When we apply the rules of quantum mechanics to determine how much the fields vibrate in isolation, we get…infinity. That's right, there's an infinite amount of energy filling every bit of spacetime. That's because there's no limit to the amount of vibrations that these fields can have. Small vibrations, medium vibrations, and big vibrations are all happening in every quantum field simultaneously.
Wait, wait—how can the fields have infinite energy but still have more energy to produce particles? To answer this question we can turn to a clever experiment designed by the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir.
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