What do you call the effect in which particles and energy randomly appear and disappear in a vacuum?

Question

I heard somewhere that useful energy might someday be harvested from this effect. So what is it called?

Answer 1

They're called virtual particles. Your thinking, though, of zero point energy. The problem with ZPE is that if it could be released it means the vacuum would have to be able to decay to another hypothetical "truer" vacuum state with a lower energy, replacing our traditional vacuum. A decay wave might then expand at the speed of light in all direction, with conventional space itself falling like dominoes. Like they said in Ghost Busters, "It could be bad". Imagine every subatomic particle your body suddenly exploding at the speed of light.

Answer 2

Virtual particles. And, no, one can not harvest energy from them.
It is not even clear if they are "real" because they only appear in
a certain mathematical formulation of quantum field theory called
perturbation theory. There you essentially decompose the formal solution
of the equations into an infinite (and mostly divergent) series of particle interactions.
I would be very surprised if that is how the world works... by infinite summations
over infinite divergent summations.

One should never mistake an algorithm to solve an equation for the solution
of the equation itself... or even for the physical reality it approximates.

But too many people do.

Answer 3

a blindfold. or bourbon. works for me. i hate scotch.

jimmy