I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sails shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.
John Masefield
The attractive force between the two ships arises in an analogous way to the force of attraction between the Casimir plates although there is no quantum physics or zero-point fluctuations of the vacuum involved – ships are too large for those effects to be big enough to worry about.
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