It might come as a surprise that both the gecko’s ability to walk across ceilings in apparent defiance of gravity and the evaporation of black holes through Hawking radiation can be understood as arising from zero-point fluctuations of quantum fields. The connections can be made thanks to work done at Philips Laboratories in the late 1940s by Hendrik Casimir and collaborators, work described in a series of three papers. 1–3
Almost two decades earlier, Fritz London had used the new quantum theory to derive the attractive force between atoms or molecules without an electric dipole moment; his result represents one of the theory’s early major successes. Before London’s calculation, the van der Waals attraction between polar molecules was understood, but the origin of the experimentally known nonzero van der Waals correction to the gas law for nonpolar gases such as helium was a mystery. London explained the origin of the...
