Vacuum

How much energy can we borrow from a vacuum? Astrophysics

How much energy can we borrow from a vacuum?

Negative energy doesn’t exist; that’s what we learned in school. If it did, then there’d also have to be negative mass – and thus a repulsive gravitational force, because energy and mass are directly linked with each other, as Einstein showed in his theory of relativity. At the micro-level, however, that’s not true (and that’s one of the reasons why physicists are still having a lot of fun trying to unite relativity and quantum theory). In extremely small areas, it is possible for energy to fall below zero for a short time, so that we are essentially borrowing energy…