🧵 Vacuum energy density and relativistic effects

Anonymous at Sun, 20 Oct 2024 13:57:48 UTC No. 16441192

One of the common proposals for resolving the discrepancy between the standard model prediction of vacuum energy and the observed value is yet-unaccounted for destructive interference of virtual particles that causes the vacuum energy to reach a small but non-zero value. A common objection to this is why the value is none-zero.

Is it possible that the value actually is zero, but due to relativistic effects, the destructive interference is not complete? Imagine for a moment that a stationary observer is watching a standing wave on a string. This can be imagined as a wave travelling down the length of the string, reflecting back, and causing constructive and destructive interference with the wave travelling down.

An observer moving at close to c travelling past the stationary observer would see the events in a different order due to the non-simultanity of events and length contraction etc. So they may well observe a different standing wave pattern.

Is it possible that this same phenomenon is responsible for our observations of there being a none-zero vacuum energy constant? The local vacuum energy actually is zero or very close to it, and at cosmic scales, due to the increased velocity of distant objects, they appear to us to have a none zero vacuum energy which actually further increases their acceleration, thus also explaining why distant objects appear to accelerate proportional to their distance?

Interested in your thoughts, thank you gentlemen