THE UNATTAINABILITY OF ABSOLUTE ZERO AND THE ZERO-POINT ACTIVITY OF THE QUANTUM FIELD OF SPACE: TWO DISTINCT PROHIBITIONS AND THEIR INTERPRETATION

This paper proposes a conceptual interpretation of the zero-point activity of the quantum field (quantum vacuum) filling space, within the author’s previously proposed self-replication programme. Relative to the previous version, a substantial logical conflation has been corrected. The third law of thermodynamics and the zero-point energy were previously presented as "two complementary foundations of the unattainability of absolute zero"; in fact they are independent statements about different things. The third law forbids reaching the temperature T = 0 in a finite number of steps, and the reason for that prohibition is purely entropic — zero-point energy plays no part in it. The zero-point energy asserts something else: that even at T = 0 the ground state is not a state of rest. The author’s interpretation attaches to the second statement, not the first: what is ineliminable is not the temperature but the activity, and it is this activity that is proposed to be identified with the "primordial field" from whose local condensations, according to the author’s programme, particles arise. The testable criterion and the falsification condition have also been revised: it is shown that the Casimir effect tests standard quantum electrodynamics and does not discriminate between the proposed interpretation and the received one, while the previous falsification condition would have refuted quantum mechanics rather than the interpretation. The relation that would make the interpretation testable is stated explicitly, together with the plain admission that it has not yet been derived. It is further noted that identifying the zero-point field with the field that feeds self-replication inherits the cosmological constant problem: the zero-point energy density and the observed dark-energy density differ by roughly 120 orders of magnitude, and no resolution is offered here.