vegevore - Physics Page 3: Background: (Please bear with me for a moment.) For a long time, I had had the idea of an impulse drive (colloquially called an 'antigravity machine') based on the concept, a static electric field crossed with a static magnetic field might produce a force. Originally I had thought that a special substance (a 'dilithium crystal') might be needed for the conversion process. One day it occurred to me that maybe one could do this without such. I began to explore the Poynting vector which is used to explain the power flux in an electromagnetic wave (light beam) and wondering, since the formula does not explicitly contain frequency, whether it would work down to DC. I calculated that a readily produce-able set of fields should yield about 7 pounds of force from a compact system. To cut a long story short, I began to explore how quantum effects might explain that the observed effect might still exist but be very small (unless extraordinarily high fields were used). The concept that came to me was the idea that virtual pairs could form as follows: Suppose that E=Ex and B=By. For an electron-positron pair that forms and then shortly after recombines, suppose that the electron (e-) travels in the +x direction. Then the By accelerates e- in the -z. And the e+ travels in the -x direction (opposite charge and opposite velocity direction), accelerating to -z also. When the pairs recombine, they have shifted a mass in the -z direction causing a similar shift in the +z direction of the structure producing the fields. But I was clear that I did not know how many pairs existed in a given space at a given time. Basically, if Heisenberg's uncertainty principle allows virtual pairs to form, then there should be a nonzero density. This lead to trying to calculate this by the analogy of how pure water is partially ionized. (This brings up the analogy of a MagnetoHydroDynamic (MHD) drive.) Basically, I distilled these ideas into 3 questions: 1. What is the 'pH' of the vacuum? (This is the main question discussed.) 2. What is the stiffness of space-time? It is clear to me from the fact that, as Einstein predicted, light (aka space-time) is bent by massive objects, the vacuum is NOT infinitely stiff and, by analogy to engineering mechanics suggesting stiffness is energy density, that the energy density of the universe is not infinite. Thus giving support to the value supported by Planck's numbers. 3. Does energy gravitate? (or, does free energy gravitate?; clearly, bound energy as that in an atomic nucleus that has been converted by its binding to the mass of the nucleus, does gravitate, but the free photons of, for example, the CMB: do they?) (Aside: recent theoretical efforts by B.Haisch, A.Rueda & H.E.Puthoff have tried to derive mass from the Zero Point Fluctuation activity in space-time: the Casimir force.)