“Nothing” doesn’t exist. Instead, there is “quantum foam”
“Nothing” doesn’t exist. Instead, there is “quantum foam”
bigthink.com
"Nothing" doesn't exist. Instead, there is "quantum foam"
22 comments
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Ah good, so I can tell my therapist I'm no longer a nihilist but a quantum foamer.
This is great.
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Conceptually, the nihilists are right! Nothing does matter.
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Dammit.
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I hate and love this. Thanks 💜
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Matters to me.
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Quantum foam has been a mainstream thought for some time. It is referenced extensively in Michael Crichton's 1999 novel Timeline in which a sort of multiverse time travel is achieved by scientists using some vague method based on quantum science.
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Can quantum particles be blocked or contained or otherwise impeded from entering a vessel?
Are they truly just appearing and disappearing or do they just move so fast (like, faster than C) that it only appears that way?
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Nope, they actually appear and disappear. The idea is that even in vacuum there's a certain amount of background energy and that energy can randomly turn into matter-antimatter pairs in what is basically the inverse of matter-antimatter annihilation.
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What is the ontology of a concept or idea? If nothing doesn't exist materially but strictly conceptually, does it not exist or is there a different term one should employ to refer to it? 🤔
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It's that they're using a more normal people term. They probably wanted to say vacuum.
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I think Wikipedia articles about zero-point energy and quantum-foam explain this well.
Btw, wasn't there an experiment with a laser vibrating a nano-particle with nearly lightspeed, separating the particle & anti-particle pair before annihilation, creating matter from nothing?
Ah, btw, Casimir effect.
22 comments
Okay, so, like, that's punchier writing than the actual truth, but how am I supposed to buy anything else about physics in the article after that? The level of oversimplification of relatively commonly known concepts does not give me confidence that the rest won't be pop sci drivel.
Luckily you can check out the author’s bio right from the article:
Okay well maybe I'll circle back to it, then. Maybe bad science writing has made me a little cynical.
Oh snap, so this guy is on the faaaaaaaar side of the bell curve wearing the hood and agreeing with me. Well played.
The guy just invents particles and you think we should trust him?
j/k
The concepts are basically right arent they?
I mean, they're both at least illustrative I guess. In the case of particles and waves I may be quibbling a bit over the distinction that something is a particle or a wave versus exhibiting the properties of one or the other.
In the case of Schrodinger's cat, the thought experiment suggests that if the life or death of the cat is tied to the collapse of the state vector, an eigenstate of the two implies simultaneous life and death. But the varying interpretations of this problem aren't so straightforward as 'both dead and alive', and it's kind of misleading to just leave it at that.
Personally, I find it odd that they'd discount the cat's own awareness of the state vector's collapse. Obviously when the atom decays and kills it, it's going to know before you are regardless of the presence of cardboard.
It just seems like a lot of kind of imprecise throw-away mentions of more complex ideas for one sentence. But again, maybe I'm being cynical.