Vacuum has friction after all

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927994.100-vacuum-has-friction-after-all.html

"A BALL spinning in a vacuum should never slow down, since no outside forces are acting on it. At least that's what Newton would have said. But what if the vacuum itself creates a type of friction that puts the brakes on spinning objects? The effect, which might soon be detectable, could act on interstellar dust grains.

In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle says we can never be sure that an apparent vacuum is truly empty. Instead, space is fizzing with photons that are constantly popping into and out of existence before they can be measured directly. Even though they appear only fleetingly, these "virtual" photons exert the same electromagnetic forces on the objects they encounter as normal photons do.

Now, Alejandro Manjavacas and F. Javier García de Abajo of the Institute of Optics at the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid say these forces should slow down spinning objects. Just as a head-on collision packs a bigger punch than a tap between two cars one behind the other, a virtual photon hitting an object in the direction opposite to its spin collides with greater force than if it hits in the same direction.

So over time, a spinning object will gradually slow down, even if equal numbers of virtual photons bombard it from all sides. The rotational energy it loses is then emitted as real, detectable photons (Physical Review A, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.82.063827)."

but photons don't just bombard from one direction. Can it be likely that they bombard at any direction at any time, thus cancelling and balancing the forces out on the spinning object.

I'm just thinking that the opposite can increase the speed of an spinning object, but in nature, everything balance out at the end.

an energy sorce placed at one angle to such an spinning object can perhaps attract more force to one side of a spinning object. Resulting into something.

Should it be better to spin a object within a vacuum, and in darkness, and at a point from where the big bang originated, as to get an equal gravitational pull?

It's about the effect of virtual particles, not real ones, so darkness does not escape the effect (if it is real). It is assumed to be in a vacuum, also. As for gravitation, allowing the object to be in free fall should be sufficient, since variations of normal gravitational fields are tiny over the dimensions of a small object. A constant gravitational field is the same as no field at all (to an object in free fall).

This is not the only effect that slows down a rotating object in a dark vacuum, if my understanding is correct. The emission of gravitational waves will also slow its rotation down towards zero over a very long time. It would be interesting to compare the magnitude of the two effects for objects with different parameters.

Reply to fireballz:

Photons bombard from all directions but it is a random process.The life a virtual particle pair is about 10 to the -34 seconds and they appear randomly.It is possible that at a certain time the frictional forces cancel each other out but I think there is a very low probability of that happening...in other words in the vast majority of the cases particle impacts slow down the spinning ball.

According to the above it doesn't matter were you place an energy source the ball will slow down.At least this is what I think...