Natural Science Forum / Physics / Research / March 2005

Last year I was at a colloquium where Jaffe presented this point of view
and did a very good job of justifying it. Hendrik Casimir himself
derived the attraction between conducting plates by studying
van der Waals forces between molecues that are far enough away for
relativistic retardation effects to be dominant. Jaffe's article you
cite does a good job of explaining some of the details. Curiously, if
you bring the conducting plates too close to each other, then regular
van der Waals forces take over (with a different power law I believe).

Also, Jaffe and his students have developped an approximation technique
that allows calculation of Casimir forces between conducting surfaces of
various shapes. They've compared their results to more traditional
numerical simulations and get agreement. There are also some experiments
measuring these forces between real materials (look up articles by
Klimchitskaya and Mostepanenko).

Igor

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Arnold Neumaier wrote:
If you like math it is much less work than you might think,
and it is fun! Just start with next years textbook and read it
in your spare time! I started reading math beyond my age when I
was 12, and didn't regret it.

With the right motivation, you can learn 10 times as fast
as when you just wait till the subject comes up in school!

Yep that's how I learned physics, and how I'm learning German. Maybe
I'll try. I read the rest of this year's textbook, so I know linear
algebra... I think.

The paper looks completely sound to me.

Jaffe presents his case without obvious fault and without
unjustified claims. The conclusion also fits my general picture
of qunatum field theory. So I see no reason not to trust it.

Arnold Neumaier