In 1973, Edward Tryon proposed the zero-energy universe hypothesis: that the Universe may be a large-scale quantum-mechanical vacuum fluctuation where positive mass-energy is balanced by negative gravitational potential energy.
United States Department of Energy | International Atomic Energy Agency | Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design | Department of Energy | United States Atomic Energy Commission | renewable energy | energy | International Energy Agency | Valero Energy Corporation | United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce | solar energy | Energy | Efficient energy use | Origin Energy | EDF Energy | Nuclear Energy Agency | German nuclear energy project | Federal Energy Regulatory Commission | dark energy | vacuum cleaner | Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission | Energy Star | Devon Energy | Constellation Energy | Westar Energy | Vacuum Oil Company | Progress Energy Inc | Monster Energy | International Solar Energy Society | geothermal energy |
It originated in 1973, when Edward Tryon proposed in the Nature journal that the Universe may have emerged from a large-scale quantum fluctuation of vacuum energy, resulting in its positive mass-energy being exactly balanced by its negative gravitational potential energy.
unstable: for example, the world lines of the dust particles in the Gödel solution have vanishing shear, expansion, and acceleration, but constant vorticity just balancing a constant Raychuadhuri scalar due to nonzero vacuum energy ("cosmological constant").
Robert Jaffe of MIT argues that the Casimir force should not be considered evidence for vacuum energy, since it can be derived in QED without reference to vacuum energy by considering charge-current interactions (the radiation-reaction picture).