A very interesting idea. Of course, then you'd run into the problem of "shifting" to a far away place and not having an energy source to turn all your virtual particles into real particles again, but that's just a minor detail! But I think that it's a good idea- all I'd ever thoguht of was making the particles "jump" from place to place. I think that, if we ever really meshed quantum mechanics and relativity, we could find out whether or not either of our ideas would work, and if they could, how to implement them. As for surrounding particles with a caccoon of negative energy... that would certainly reduce how they were affected by the outside, like almost to zero interference from outside sources, but we have no idea whether or not a negative energy field could ever be created. Aslo, there would be some things that might affect it: I don't think that a negative energy field could ever be rendered stable, or to keep it from fluctuating. Also, it would be sure to encounter fields of positive energy, and while the negative energy and the positive energy would cancel eachother out for a while, eventually the positive energy would "fill up the void" created by negative enery. I wonder if multiple negative energy fields encountering each other would provide a cumulative amount of negative energy, like if it would become "more negative" than it was before. However, I suppose that one might look to negative energy the same one looks at anitmatter: they both are the opposties of positive energy or real matter. We should explore this idea further. And yes, I do think that a virtual particle created by vacuum fluctuations would dissipate, since there is still that negative energy affecting it, which would probably "drain it" of all its borrowed energy unless it was able to become a real particle. But there's just so much wierd stuff going on outside the event horizon of a black hole that it's hard to be sure. However, I don't see any way the particle could be denied the gravitational energy from the hole.

• Something else that popped into my head - Schnee/">Schnee - July 1, 1998 - 12:16 UTC
  • This would mean a whole new set of laws... - Astrophysicist - July 1, 1998 - 12:47 UTC
    • Re: This would mean a whole new set of laws... - Schnee/">Schnee - July 1, 1998 - 13:00 UTC