The Casimir effect?

I've said it before, but it's worth repeating. The casimir effect is real, but it probably does NOT mean what most 'scientists' think it does (or want it to).

The Casimir effect, for those that don't know, is the effect that if two plates inside a vacuum are close enough together, they will attract each other with a force.

Now, to most this is proof of a quantum physics theory... and it may well be, but it could also be proof that what we call a vacuum is Nowhere Near as 'empty' as we think. It is.

If a vacuum consists of a soup of quad-trillions of loose 'strings' (to put it in terms Sheldon Cooper would get) you could easily expect a similar effect. In water, as soon as two plates get closer together than a molecule of water, the weight of the water outside the gap slam the plates closed. So, an alternate explanation is that the 'attraction' is the weight of the mass left inside the 'vacuum' and the gap is the 'size' of the particles too big to slip between atoms in the molecules of the plates.