(July 20, 2017 at 3:18 pm)RoadRunner79 Wrote:(July 20, 2017 at 2:54 pm)Jehanne Wrote: Are you (like Craig with his "bait & switch") saying that the vacuum caused the virtual particles? If so, what was the cause of the vacuum causing the virtual particles? And, what was the cause of the cause of the vacuum causing the virtual particles, etc., etc? The issue is not where the virtual particles come from but what causes them to come into existence?
As I had already said, I don't know (however something going on within that vacuum seems plausible). What testimony or reason do you give, that I should stop here, and think that nothing is on the otherside? Personally, I think that something has a lot more potential than nothing, and is a wiser assumption. You need a pretty good reason for me to abandon the principle of causality in science.
You need to realize that a quantum oscillator is different than a classical one:
Quote:This energy spectrum is noteworthy for three reasons. First, the energies are quantized, meaning that only discrete energy values (integer-plus-half multiples of ħω) are possible; this is a general feature of quantum-mechanical systems when a particle is confined. Second, these discrete energy levels are equally spaced, unlike in the Bohr model of the atom, or the particle in a box. Third, the lowest achievable energy (the energy of the n = 0 state, called the ground state) is not equal to the minimum of the potential well, but ħω/2 above it; this is called zero-point energy. Because of the zero-point energy, the position and momentum of the oscillator in the ground state are not fixed (as they would be in a classical oscillator), but have a small range of variance, in accordance with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
The ground state probability density is concentrated at the origin, which means the particle spends most of its time at the bottom of the potential well, as one would expect for a state with little energy. As the energy increases, the probability density becomes peaked at the classical "turning points", where the state's energy coincides with the potential energy. (See the discussion below of the highly excited states.) This is consistent with the classical harmonic oscillator, in which the particle spends more of its time (and is therefore more likely to be found) near the turning points, where it is moving the slowest. The correspondence principle is thus satisfied. Moreover, special nondispersive wave packets, with minimum uncertainty, called coherent states oscillate very much like classical objects, as illustrated in the figure; they are not eigenstates of the Hamiltonian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_ha...oscillator