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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 3698831" data-attributes="member: 177">Okay, two things.First, QM only allows this sort of thing for very short times.  You can borrow a bit of energy, yes, but you have to pay it back, and soon.  There is as yet no evidence that the laws of thermodynamics can be violated wholesale.  Second, your wording suggests that somehow things are allowed to happen because we don't understand what is going on.  That's wrong on two levels - physical reality, as yet, seems to operate no matter how well we understand it.  Either the thing is allowed, or it isn't, either it happens, or it doesn't.  How well we understand things is irrelevant to whether or not it happens.  On another level, I have to gripe at the "barely understood" thing.  That's a flag often waved, but it isn't nearly as true as folks like to state.  It seems like folks somehow talk about it as if it were digital - either we know everything, or we understand almost nothing.  Folks who work in the field, however, recognize that we understand a whole lot, and that still leaves lots of room for new knowledge.There is an argument that goes "we don't know how much we don't know, so what we don't know must be huge, and therefore what we know is insignificant".  That argument is logically flawed, and should be ignored.</blockquote>