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Why can't you create energy out of nowhere

For me it's not enough that a smart guy for hundreds of years said so. Some scientists and religious people said that the earth was flat - untill someone said it wasn't. And we know that it isn't flat, we can prove it. I can prove it.

Do we just say we can't create energy out of nowhere because Newton said so? Is that our argument - and that no one has proven wrong yet? I think you know some kind of mathemagic that proof that Newton is correct; could you please explain it to me?

What about Vacuum Quantum Fluctuations and the Casimir Effect?

Is that just a mathematical estimation? Or where do the energy come from? In my (non scientist) eyes it comes like - from nowhere.

Is a Zero Point Energy Module possible?

I have found this article. Actually all my questions are based on this article. It would be nice if you take a look on the article and try to explain against it.

In this article on a no-name-blog there is the claim, that a lot of scientists (phds, professors and so on from well known universities) say that such a "free energy generator" is possible, and that it was build. But because companies would lose money, it will never come to society. There is a lot of fancy words in it, a lot of PhD and other titles and sources on like Nature.

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    $\begingroup$ "Zero point energy" is a fantastically bad term for the physical phenomenon to which it refers. There is no energy there. Repeat: zero point energy is not energy. $\endgroup$
    – DanielSank
    Sep 23, 2015 at 0:12
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    $\begingroup$ I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it asks several vague questions. The post would be much better if it asked a single, specific, clearly worded question. $\endgroup$
    – DanielSank
    Sep 23, 2015 at 0:16
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    $\begingroup$ I think the last 2 questions are good, though perhaps each should be asked individually. The introduction is a bit strange and shows a lack of research. "Scientists" never said the earth was flat. That's a myth. And conservation of energy isn't because Newton "said so", Newton studied and understood energy very well and his proposed idea of conservation of energy passed numerous tests and study before it was accepted as a scientific law. $\endgroup$
    – userLTK
    Sep 23, 2015 at 0:47
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    $\begingroup$ There's nothing "mathemagic" about physics. It's an experimental and observational science. Mathematics happens to often be useful to describe and codify observational results, but it is in no way fundamental to physics. The idea of "suppressed technology" is laughable on its face. The world contains too many competing interests for any such attempt to long survive the desire of some corporation or government to gain decisive advantage. $\endgroup$
    – paisanco
    Sep 23, 2015 at 1:14
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    $\begingroup$ What fascinates me here is that you seem to believe both that arguments from physics are bunk and that you can make arguments from physics to prove that the world is not flat. $\endgroup$
    – WillO
    Sep 23, 2015 at 3:01

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Conservation laws are intimately connected with symmetries. This was proved by a mathematician called Emmy Noether in 1915 and is called (not unreasonably) Noether's theorem. The only assumption required is that the system can be described with Lagrangian mechanics.

In particular conservation of energy is related to a symmetry called time shift symmetry. This basically means the laws of physics don't depend on what the time is. So given Noether's theorem we know energy is conserved if:

  1. time shift symmetry applies

  2. all physics can be described using Lagrangian mechanics

Ultimately these two criteria have to be tested by experiment, and so far experiment has failed to disprove them. So the principle of conservation of energy is derived from a mathematical proof backed up by experimental evidence. It is most certainly not just something that a smart guy for hundreds of years said.

Since energy is conserved we can't get energy from the vacuum. The question is then why not. The answer is simply that the vacuum is the lowest energy state possible. We can only do work if we can move energy from some higher energy state to a lower energy state. Since there is no energy state lower than the vacuum we can't do any work using vacuum energy.

The article you cite is I'm afraid just one of many based on a misunderstanding of the physics involved. It is certainly true that we can extract work using the Casimir effect, but that's only because the setup of parallel plates involved has a higher energy than the vacuum. We need to put work in to set the system up before we can extract energy from it. The amount of energy that can be extracted is equal to the amount of energy we need to set up the system in the first place, so there is no free energy to be had.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thank you very much for your answer! But it would still have been nice if such a mashine would have existed :/ $\endgroup$
    – Clarissa C. Clearwater
    Sep 23, 2015 at 11:22

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