Zero-Point Energy

About Zero-Point Energy

Zero-Point Energy is a four-part interactive explainer of the quantum vacuum, each scene building on the last. The first is a field surface summed from 24 modes in a shader, with virtual particle pairs that borrow energy and die sooner the more they borrow; drag ħ to zero and the surface goes flat — the classical vacuum. The second is the harmonic-oscillator ladder, with the probability curve built from the Hermite recurrence and a particle sampled from it in real time, still moving at n = 0. The third puts two mirrors in a sea of field modes and reads out the Casimir pressure as the gap changes. The fourth sums ½ħω over every mode up to a cutoff and shows the predicted vacuum energy pulling away from the measured one — the cosmological constant problem. Every readout is computed from SI constants, and each scene explains itself in a side panel.