Imagine if we could collect the energy out of thin air. And I mean it quite literally. You know how you were taught that a vacuum is nothing but empty space? That isn’t exactly true, at least in the ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Suppose you want to empty a box. Really, truly empty it. You remove all its visible contents, pump out any gases, and—applying some ...

Try as they might, scientists can’t truly rid a space or an object of its energy. But what “zero-point energy” really means is up for interpretation. Suppose you want to empty a box. Really, truly ...