Natural Science Forum / Physics / Particle Physics / December 2005

From the Second Revised Edition of Super Cosmos

Lenny Susskind and I not only met each other at Cornell in 1963, but we
knew a lot of the same people like David Finkelstein and Gary Gruber.
Indeed, I arranged for David to come to Esalen in 1976 as described by
Gary Zukav in “The Dancing Wu Li Masters.” Out of that came Werner
Erhard’s meetings with Lenny, Feynman, Coleman, Hawking and many others
that Lenny has described on John Brockman’s website. Finkelstein met
Werner at Esalen. Werner, of course, provided the money for the January
1976 Esalen Physics Consciousness Month-Long that I directed.  I had
previously met with Lenny and David Finkelstein at the Belfer School of
Yeshiva University and had stayed at Lenny’s Berkeley flat prior to
that. Here is an excerpt of Lenny’s very first moments at Belfer in 1967
more than 30 years before the discovery that dark energy was most of our
universe:

“I saw David Finkelstein, who had arranged my new job … I also saw P. A.
M. Dirac … Dave introduced me to Yakir Aharonov … He was talking to
Roger Penrose … They were talking about vacuum energy. Dave was arguing
that the vacuum was full of zero-point energy and that this energy ought
to affect the gravitational field.”

I sat in on Roger’s Twistor Course at Birkbeck in 1971 when I was with
David Bohm and Basil Hiley. The gravitational effect of the zero point
energy density, as distinct from its Casimir electro-mechanical effect,
is precisely a point of debate I had with Hal Puthoff who proposed, in
analogy with quantum electrodynamics, that only differences in the zero
point energy should gravitate rather than the absolute amount. Only the
latter is consistent with Einstein’s equivalence principle. Lenny had a
big head start here in 1967 a year before the Haight-Ashbury Flower
Revolution. I only really began to grok the vacuum energy problem in its
fullness in 2002 when the real meaning of both dark energy and dark
matter hit me square in my Mystical Third Eye like a bigga cosmica pizza
pie. That’s amore! I had a similar epiphany at Brandeis in 1961 when I
basically saw that the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect demanded a
faster-than-light action at a distance. Sylvan Schweber and Stanley
Deser told me not to think about that problem.

“Dirac didn’t like vacuum energy because whenever physicists tried to
calculate its magnitude, the answer would come out infinite. He thought
that if it came out infinite, the mathematics must be wrong and that the
right answer is that there is no vacuum energy. Dave pulled me into the
conversation, explaining as he went. For me this conversation was a
fateful turning point – my introduction to a problem that would obsess
me for almost forty years and that eventually led me to The Cosmic
Landscape.” p. 65

On Dec 15, 2005, at 8:08 PM, Jack Sarfatti wrote:

"Li-Xin-Li's paper ... addressed a problem raised by Stephen Hawking
that quantum effects might always conspire to prevent time travel [to
the past] ... using a wormhole; waves circulating between the two
wormhole mouths might build up an infinite density ... shutting down the
time machine before it started. Li-Xin Li proposed the ingenious
solution .... Li-Xin Li proposed the ingenious solution of putting a
reflecting sphere between the two wormhole mouths to reflect the waves
and stop the infinite buildup of energy. I had never received such an
important paper from a prospective student ... he was one of the few
dozen people in the world able to do these complex quantum calculations
-- and furthermore ... he had original ideas. Even more to the point he
was interested in time travel. ... I did have a good idea for him to
work on: how time travel might be applied to explain the origin of the
universe. ... At one lunch we received a fortune cookie that said.
'Trust your intuition. The Universe is guiding your life.' ... I need to
tell you about different kinds of vacuums ... A normal vacuum ... has
zero [energy] density and zero pressure ... The Casimir vacuum has a
positive pressure in the two directions parallel to the plates but a
large negative pressure along the line connecting the two plates, which
sucks the plates together."  Richard Gott “Time Travel”

(Neg Pressure Gravity Repulsion)/(Neg Pressure Casimir Attraction) ~
Lp^2A/L^4

Note that the repulsive antigravitation of negative pressure seems to
contradict the above electro-mechanical sucking of the plates together.
In fact, both happen simultaneously from different co-existing physical
mechanisms. The electro-mechanical effect is much larger than the
antigravitation on the small scale of the Casimir effect. Indeed, the
ratio of the antigravity repulsion to the electro-mechanical attractive
Casimir suction is the Planck Area times the area of the plates divided
by the 4th power of the separation of the plates. This is small compared
to 1 for those experiments. In contrast the negative pressure of the
dark zero point energy density on the cosmological scale almost ¾ of the
critical density flat space boundary between the closed (positive space
curvature) and open (negative space curvature) universe. That
accelerates the universe. There is no competing electro-mechanical
effect in the cold empty space of our expanding accelerating universe.