Lost: Four Days and Counting

"In physics, the Casimir effect or Casimir-Polder force is a physical force exerted between separate objects due to resonance of all-pervasive energy fields in the intervening space between the objects. This is sometimes described in terms of virtual particles interacting with the objects, due to the mathematical form of one possible way of calculating the strength of the effect. Because the strength of the force falls off rapidly with distance, it is only measurable when the distance between the objects is extremely small. On a submicrometre scale, this force becomes so strong that it becomes the dominant force between uncharged conductors. In fact, at separations of 10 nm — about 100 times the typical size of an atom — the Casimir effect produces the equivalent of 1 atmosphere of pressure (101.3 kPa).

Dutch physicists Hendrik B. G. Casimir and Dirk Polder first proposed the existence of the force and formulated an experiment to detect it in 1948 while participating in research at Philips Research Labs. The classic form of the experiment used a pair of uncharged parallel metal plates in a vacuum, and successfully demonstrated the force to within 15% of the value predicted by the theory.^"1

^{1  Wikipedia®, Casimir Effect, January 2008, Wikipedia Foundaton, Inc.}