That’s interesting! My first, hasty reading of that was that the work would be done by the deceleration, but that must be wrong also, as the frame becomes inertial at the end of the acceleration, even at the full speed. So, I am still unsure where the work is done, but as far as I understand, this confirms my intuition that if some particles are brought back, the observer provides the energy needed for those particles to “become real” in the frame of reference of those waiting at home.

Thank you for the correction (and the confirmation of the rest).

You do make some good points, but also seem to have misunderstood a couple of fundamental things. I’ll share my understanding, whatever it’s worth. Basically every sentence below could be appended with “if I understand correctly”, but I’ll omit those as redundant.

There is an actual disagreement among physicists about whether things like virtual particles are “real” or just a notational convenience. However, the different notations are equivalent, and in a sense our models and notations is all that we humans have. There is no objective perspective to the world. But all this is philosophy, irrelevant to the actual measurable facts.

As I was taught on my first quantum mechanics course, any question about the interpretation of quantum mechanics can be answered with “shut up and calculate” (if asked by a theoretical physicist) or “shut up and measure” (if an experimental physicist).

But the consequences of the theory are measurable. The Unruh effect can be measured (an article was linked in another comment). Hawking radiation is an equivalent phenomenon and can also be measured (but IIRC hasn’t been at least yet). And one way to describe Hawking radiation is with virtual particles coming into existence at the event horizon, one half of the pair falling in and the other escaping. There the escaping particle is as real as a particle can be.

The gecko comparison doesn’t work. The reason for quantum fluctuation of zero-point energy not being harvested is not that it doesn’t exist, it is that such harvesting is fundamentally impossible by definition (despite what some pseudoscientific interpretations claim). There are multiple arguments for this, on differing levels of fundamentality. The virtual particles are not energy coming from nothing, they are manifestations of the energy that is already there. And that energy can’t be taken away from the vacuum, as it is already at the minimum level. That minimum just is non-zero. On a more practical level, any device, however optimized and whether manufactured or biological, would spend at least as much energy in the harvesting process as it would gain.

One might think that Hawking radiation goes against what I just said, but it doesn’t. It is an integral part of the theory that the black hole loses equivalent mass (i.e. energy) as it emits. So the virtual particles don’t create new energy. Still, they (or the same phenomenon described differently) are necessary for the mechanism of how that mass can escape the black hole. What I suggested in my original post, that the energy from the Unruh effect particles comes from the process of acceleration, is a similar idea (but a completely nonrigorous guess, so it might work differently).

The things I ran into were Nassim Haramein and his “International Space Federation” claiming to have combined quantum mechanics and general relativism and aiming to use that for harvesting infinite free energy from vacuum or something like that (and on the side also claiming that consciousness is a fundamental property of physics, of course).

There are about three practical ways to make measurements related to Unruh effect, I think. Black holes are one way, as Hawking radiation is an equivalent phenomenon. Another thing is studying some classical systems with equivalent phenomena, like sound waves in some fluids, IIRC. The third way is the particle accelerator approach used in the paper linked to in another comment. The experiment I suggested would be utterly impractical to actually perform, I think.

Yeah, Lynch seems to have published multiple related papers in the recent years. Superficially the science seems valid, but I haven’t spent enough effort to confirm. Nevertheless, I accept that this kind of evidence should be sufficient, but in some layperson sense it lacks the concreteness of my (impractical) suggestion.

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-easy-it-fudge-your-scientific-rank-meet-larry-world-s-most-cited-cat

When I read the title, I thought “Surely this Larry cannot be more cited than the famous F. D. C. Willard”. But then I read the article and it turns out that’s very specifically the record Larry broke.

I use xonsh.

Andre Geim got the Ig Nobel for this. He is the only person this far to have got both the Ig Nobel and an actual Nobel prize.

Well, Python is my main programming language, so things being made with it gives me a feeling that I can understand and control them. Sometimes this feeling is even right, for example with Qtile, which is also configured with Python.

Qtile, just because it’s Python-based.

Xonsh. For basic use (running CLI programs with arguments) it works like any other shell, and for other uses it has nice Python syntax (and libraries!). For example, I like not needing a separate calculator program, as I can do maths directly in the shell with an intuitive syntax.

I like Terminator for its mouse-controlled multiplexing. I also like the fact that it’s made with Python, although I haven’t utilized this fact in practice.