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Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/casimir-force-co-opted-to-generate-free-energy-midichlorians-not-included/ [arstechnica.com]

This week, a company called Casimir Inc. emerged from “stealth mode” to announce that it had raised significant funding from venture capitalists willing to roll the dice on free energy. That’s right: a startup has gotten serious backing to develop sources of perpetual free energy. The people behind this fantastic new energy generator also brought us the wildly successful WTF thruster [arstechnica.com] EM-drive that could supposedly directly convert electricity into a propulsive force.

(Its one practical application was in the show Salvation, where it was treated with the same detailed attention to physical laws as Galaxy Quest’s Omega-13.)

With that success, who are we to be skeptical?
[...]
The Casimir force is a real thing, arising from the fact that a vacuum is not actually nothing. Instead, it is filled with a froth of virtual particles becoming real in pairs, waving to us, annihilating each other, and sinking back into the soup of virtual particles. The Casimir force emerges when we create an imbalance in the spatial distribution of these virtual particles
[...]
Put simply, a mode describes how a photon can spread out and occupy a space.
[...]
The Universe is big, so it has an enormous number of modes. But if you create a confined space within the Universe, such as the gap between two closely spaced metal plates, there are only a few modes available, and they are less likely to be occupied by a particle. Between the plates, we have no particles; outside the plates, we have particles. This excess of particles, as they bounce off the plates, drives them together.

This is the Casimir force.
[...]
To get a continuous flow of energy, according to Casimir Inc., the setup needs to be slightly different. The plates are fixed so they can’t move together, and a row of pillars is placed between the plates. The plates and pillars are then connected via the device that will be powered (a load). From here, things get hazy because the details are missing—or at least highly obfuscated.
[...]
there are a couple of ways to make tunneling asymmetric (and hence might work). The one proposed in the paper [doi.org] by Casimir Inc. is that the structure it has designed somehow has modes between the plates that follow the same rules as a hydrogen atom, and the tunneling involves an electron going from a high-energy state to a low-energy state (at least in hydrogen, these would represent different energetic states).

If this is the case, one would expect a net flow of electrons from high energy to low energy via tunneling. Unfortunately, although the math in the paper looks fine (I’ve not checked it in detail), the underlying assumption—that the modes are identical to those in a hydrogen atom—seems quite shaky.
[...]
Nevertheless, the company claims to have made a device and measured a drop in voltage between the plates and pillars. The company also claims this voltage is predicted in a paper that doesn’t appear to have any predictions, which is necessary for success.

I would be shocked if Casimir, Inc. had not measured a potential difference. For a decade, surfaces of materials were the bane of my existence.
[...]
But let’s give the company the benefit of the doubt and assume it will observe (or already has observed) an electron flow from the plates to the pillars due to the Casimir force—it’s not impossible. These electrons still need to be coaxed through a load where they can give up their energy.
[...]
Eventually, the whole charge pump will grind to a halt, leaving no current flow. In other words, I expect that no useful energy will be extracted. But I do value the company’s service in burning through a bunch of VC money.

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