Text: What does "Zero Point" mean? "Boyer traces the historical ³creation of the vacuum² as proceeding in stages in parallel with the historical development of ideas about the vacuum. To paraphrase, he says that in the 17th century, it was thought that a totally empty volume of space could be created by simply removing all matter and, in particular, all gases. That was our first concept of the vacuum. Just get rid of all the gas. Late in the 19th century, it became apparent that the region still contained thermal radiation. But it seemed that the radiation might be eliminated by cooling. So the second concept of getting a real vacuum is to cool it down to zero temperature. Just go all the way to absolute zero. Then we¹ve got a real vacuum. Right? Well, since then, both theory and experiment have shown that there is a non-thermal radiation in the vacuum and that it persists even if the temperature could be lowered to absolute zero. Therefore, it was simply called the ³zero point² radiation." Thomas Valone http://www.seaspower.com/InsideZeroPoint.htm

See Also:

Source: