The reporting is poor, and people are right to diss it. But having written extensively for semi-technical audiences, the kinds of criticisms being levelled here are out of place. In this kind of article or publication there's no point in splitting hairs in the title over the difference between vacuum and "nothing". People who won't appreciate the difference will get turned off by what they see as excessive nit-picking.

You need to get people to read. There's no point in having a fantastic finish if no one gets there.

About the article, I think the phenomenon itself is amazing. The Casimir effect is remarkable enough - completely at odds with classical physics and yet trivally predicted by quantum physics, it's a great piece of evidence for how weird the world is. To see it demonstrated using time as one of the dimensions is brilliant.

OTOH, sp332 seems to have found the same story from another source, and in the discussion there people are suggesting that the quantum explanation is out of place and/or unnecessary, because it's more-or-less just like an antenna. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3511341

Then people just pick holes in the writing. I find that sad.

I think you make an excellent point, which I take to be: let's all just apply our popular-science-filter to the article and talk about the content, not the words. I still think there's value in someone providing an explicit translation. It may help to set the tone of the discussion by just stating up front "Yes, the writing is poor. Here's what they should have said. Now that we've established that, let's talk about the content." When I've submitted stories and I wanted the discussion to go in a certain direction, I've tried similar framing. (Although the stories didn't go anywhere. Ah well.)

With that said, can you provide more of an intuition for the Casimir effect? Specifically, a better intuition for why is there are less fluctuations between two plates than outside of them? Is it simply because there's so little space between the plates, and hence less space for fluctuations? The wikipedia article doesn't really provide this level of intuition.

Firstly, IANAQP, but here is my intuitive understanding.

When playing a bugle, high notes are all close together in pitch because with short wavelength, adding one makes a proportionally small change. Playing lower notes, the notes are further apart - there are effectively fewer notes in the lower ranges because adding one extra wavelength makes a big difference to the pitch.

Similarly the wavelengths of particles between the plates. When the plates are far apart, pretty much every wavelength can appear between them, so things are the same inside as out. When the plates are close together, fewer particles/waves can appear between because their wavelength must divide the distance, while the ones outside are still unrestricted. Then there are simply more of them, resulting in a higher pressure.