Abstract. A few years ago a hopeful article (Evans 2000 Phys. Scr.61 513–7) appeared in this journal promising that according to its 15 authors' opinion the pending energy crisis could be solved by 'extracting energy from the vacuum'. However, in the past years the energy price has grown to unthinkable heights: a reason for having a look at the promised 'energy from the vacuum' in (Evans 2000). So we shall do so below and shall arrive at a great disappointment: the 15 authors were in error; their vacuum energy stems from a simple flaw of thinking by misinterpreting the well-known Lorenz term of the classical Maxwell gauge theory. Their miraculous conclusion should have made the authors suspicious, that just the Lorenz term should yield a vacuum current. Surely, its a pity that vacuum currents and vacuum energy in (Evans 2000) have their origin merely in a simple flaw of thinking, and all further speculations for a vacuum energy density are in vain. However, better to return to reality.

Quote: Abstract of [1]: Great announcements...

It is shown that if the Loren(t)z condition is discarded, the Maxwell–Heaviside field equations become the Lehnert equations, indicating the presence of charge density and current density in the vacuum. The Lehnert equations are a subset of the O(3) Yang–Mills field equations. Charge and current density in the vacuum are defined straightforwardly in terms of the vector potential and scalar potential, and are conceptually similar to Maxwell's displacement current, which also occurs in the classical vacuum. A demonstration is made of the existence of a time dependent classical vacuum polarization which appears if the Loren(t)z condition is discarded. Vacuum charge and current appear phenomenologically in the Lehnert equations but fundamentally in the O(3) Yang–Mills theory of classical electrodynamics. The latter also allows for the possibility of the existence of vacuum topological magnetic charge density and topological magnetic current density. Both O(3) and Lehnert equations are superior to the Maxwell–Heaviside equations in being able to describe phenomena not amenable to the latter. In theory, devices can be made to extract the energy associated with vacuum charge and current.

Print publication: Issue 5 (November 2006)
Received 2 June 2006, accepted for publication 21 June 2006
Published 11 October 2006