Macroscopic Verification of the Casimir Effect **************************************************** Apparatus: One large bowl of hot vegetable broth, home-made by an excellent cook supplied with a rather mischievous sense of humour [the cook, not the soup], and consequently equipped with a number of small but vicious pale-green chilies [the soup, not the cook]. [Or maybe both, come to think of it.] One soup-spoon, one hungry scientist; one heavily-shielded ultramicrotome. Method: Dissect the chilies into slices sufficiently fine to avoid permanent damage to sensitive mucous membranes (approximately one micron thick is recommended), then distribute the slices uniformly throughout the broth. Supply broad-spectrum wave energy via vigorous miscegnation using spoon. Sample a random spoonful. Results: Observe that the entire complement of slices has counter-intuitively re-coalesced within the sample. Note how quantum-relativistic effects (which remain incompletely understood) ensure that the observation is delayed until approximately one microsecond after mastication has been completed, when the wave-function collapses, followed after a short interval by a substantial proportion of the apparatus. Conclusion: Eye-watering. References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_pepper Fred Lunnon