Is QFT vacuum real?

A latest notable paper from CTP is from our director-on-leave, Bob Jaffe. You can read it at hep-th/0503158. Almost everybody cite the Casimir effect as the proof of reality of quantum ground state of standard model fields. Lately it has become a commonsense especially in the dark energy literature, as an aspect deepening the problem.

Jaffe shows in his paper that you can formulate the Casimir effect without giving any reference to the vacuum energy. Hence it gives no further insight than any other one-loop effect in QED like the Lamb shift.

It makes sense to me and I won't refer to Casimir effect in this context anymore. But as he says in the end, this does not help much, because symmetry breaking condensates, like Higgs, are still there.