What does nothing
contain?
On the Earth, a single cubic meter of
air isn't very much. It's roughly a
thousand lungfuls. And yet, compared to
the cosmic average, it's one of the
densest regions in the universe.
The largest creatures to swim through
this volume are the bacteria, drifting
with the winds and searching for a home.
Although some spend their entire lives
airborne, joining the bacteria is
microscopic detritus. Skin, snot, and
saliva exhaled and expelled from
creatures around the world. All the
complex molecular arrangements that our
human senses reduced to smells. And then
there is the air itself. Diatomic
nitrogen and oxygen, carbon dioxide,
water vapor, a host of less common
molecules like methane and ozone. But
that is still not all. Roughly every
second, a cosmic ray passes through that
cubic volume. Produced by some high
energy process in the distant cosmos
like an exploding star or collapsing
black hole. This particle will have
sailed unmolested for billions of years
only to meet its final end colliding
with some unlucky air molecule. There is
also radiation constant and ubiquitous
of wavelengths up and down the
electromagnetic spectrum. The visible
light from the sun shining above, the
infrared heat from the ground below, the
stray X-ray and gamma ray coursing in
from the wider cosmos, and the sloshing
microwave and radio waves carrying
messages and signals from one side of
the globe to the other. That's without
mentioning the particles that almost
never make their presence known. The
thousand trillion neutrinos, the
everpresent dark matter.
And so what would happen if you stripped
all of that away? What if we managed to
remove every single molecule, atom,
particle, and photon of radiation? Could
we make absolutely nothing? Not just
emptiness, not just a vacuum, but pure
nothingness.
The journey to discover the answer to
this question is a strange one. One that
will take us from simple vacuum pumps to
the beginning of the universe, from
ancient philosophical ponderings to the
bleeding edge of theoretical physics.
And this is because the question can
nothing exist has a twin.
Why are we here?
The Dextra robot, part of Canada's
contribution to the International Space
Station, is operated remotely from
Earth. Named Dextra because it is
Dextrous. Controllers at the Canadian
Space Ay's headquarters in Quebec can
guide its two multi-jointed arms using
live video, eliminating the need for
spacew walks and allowing the astronauts
a bit of time off. Sometimes it's useful
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The year is 1654 and Otto Vongerka is
gently dabbing the sweat from his brow.
Standing before the emperor of the Holy
Roman Empire himself, he raises his hand
and gives the signal. Everything rests
on this moment. There is a loud
winnieing and dust billows into the air
as his two teams of horses heave into
action, pulling in opposite directions
and straining the ropes that connect
them. The two sets of eight are evenly
matched and very little progress is made
as the struggling beasts strain and
sweat digging their hooves into the
dirt. But no matter how hard they
struggle, absolutely nothing happens.
Otto smiles. It's all going according to
plan.
Otto Vongerka was the Burgermeister of
Magnabberg, a city in what was then the
Holy Roman Empire. In addition to his
attempts to help his home recover from a
brutal sacking 20 years before by
Catholic forces, he was also intensely
curious about the latest philosophical
thinking, including the increasing
popularity of the new heliocentric model
of the universe. And this was connected
to his experiment by a feature of the
old geocentric model that had the earth
at its center. In that model, the
universe contained no voids. The earth
had instead been surrounded by a nested
series of crystalline spheres that
carried the objects of the heavens with
no gaps between them. Beyond that was
heaven itself.
Yet in the heliocentric model, the
planets themselves were physical bodies
that moved through something. And what
that something was wasn't exactly clear.
It wasn't air. Otherwise, we should all
feel the rush of wind as the earth moved
with great speed.
And so then what was it? Could it be
nothing?
Indeed, the question of whether nothing
was even possible and by extension a
vacuum had long baffled scientists and
philosophers.
Ancient Greek schools had not managed to
reach consensus. On one side had been
the atomists led by figures such as
Democrus who divided the universe into
two basic components.
The atoms and the void.
The atoms combined in a multitude of
ways to make up reality, creating
everything from skin and sweat to light
and air to emotions and thoughts. The
void, however, was pure emptiness. The
stage, so to speak, through which the
atoms moved, giving the universe its
basic foundation.
But opposing the atomists was another
line of thinking led by none other than
Aristotle himself. Aristotle, like his
mentor Plato, outright rejected the
concept of the void and the vacuum. The
vacuum could not be ascertained by the
senses. You couldn't smell it, see it,
or touch it. And so, if you could not
encounter something, could it truly
exist? And if that argument wasn't
enough, air expanded to fill every
volume of space and container. If you
tried to create a vacuum, air would
simply rush in to fill it. In other
words, nature abhored a vacuum.
In Muslim and Western traditions, this
authorative voice of Aristotle had
echoed throughout the centuries with the
horror vacui, the abhorance of the
vacuum becoming the accepted wisdom. And
so by 1277, as French Bishop Etien Toier
began his pope approved quest to put the
mystery to bed once and for all, the
very idea of a vacuum seemed an affront
to all that is holy. His investigations
had been set off by a simple theological
debate taking place within the
University of Paris.
Could God create a vacuum? After all,
the Almighty was almighty and was
capable of doing anything. but vacuums.
Nothing simply could not exist. Could
God create something that could not
exist?
One side argued that God was capable of
doing anything, even the logically
impossible, with the other countering
that argument. God had set the universe
in motion, but even he had to play by
its rules. And so, in response, Toier
had issued a list of condemnations to
silence faculty and get them back in
line.
There was no limit to God's ability,
Tomier said, and he could create a
vacuum if he wished. Aristotle was
wrong. And that was the end of that.
At least it would have been had the
faculty not ignored him. The professors,
silenced in one line of thinking,
ingeniously hatched another question in
its place. If it was possible for God to
create a vacuum, then perhaps they are
permitted to exist. So, could we create
one for ourselves?
And roughly 300 years after Tomier's
condemnations, the polymath scientist
Renee Dart provided the framework for
just such a vacuum.
Best known for his dictim, I think,
therefore I am, Dart also invented
something taught to every modern school
child. The coordinate system, an
arrangement of perpendicular axes that
can be used to reference position,
movement, and extent. A handy
mathematical and geometrical tool, the
Carteesian coordinate system became the
launchpad for physics, creating the
foundation for the Newtonian mechanics
that would appear half a century later.
And it was also the mathematical
embodiment of nothing, of empty space.
If you removed everything from the
universe, then the coordinate system
remained.
Perhaps the vacuum was possible after
all. And less than 5 years after
Dicard's death, physical proof would
finally be provided by Otto Vonger and
16 horses.
Otto had suffered through much to be
here. in the sack of the city 20 years
before he had lost everything he owned
as almost 90% of the entirety of
Magdabberg was raised to the ground and
he would strive for decades to liberate
his home from imperial control but he
was also a keen scientist and perhaps
most importantly a brewer and had become
interested in the pumps used to remove
water from barrels.
He devised a mechanical system for
pumping air out of a sealed chamber. the
world's first working vacuum pump.
Endeavor the clever politician had
advertised this new invention as a
showcase of his recovering city's wealth
and ingenuity. And so after sending out
the appropriate feelers, he was invited
to demonstrate his invention before
Emperor Ferdinand III.
Otto had taken two hemispheres and
sealed them together and then used his
invention to remove the air between
them. To prove that the spheres held
only vacuum between them, he then had
the teams of horses pull on the opposite
sides. Despite their enormous strength,
they could not overcome the pressure of
air surrounding the spheres. Clear
evidence that there was something less
than air, the vacuum inside.
Sadly, despite the impressive
demonstration, Otto failed in his quest
to liberate Magnabberg. But the
experiment itself would have longlasting
consequences.
And several decades later, it would be
legendary scientist Isaac Newton who
would weave together all these disperate
strands of thought into a unified hole.
He would borrow concepts from the
ancient atomists that individual objects
move freely. He would take from
Aristotle noting that air always rushes
in to fill a void. He would take
Decart's coordinate system and its
insistence on the existence of space.
And he would take Otto's demonstration
of the existence of the vacuum. He took
all of that and created a theory for
motion now known as Newtonian mechanics
where objects only accelerate with the
impetus of a force.
In this theory, there was an entity
space that existed with absolute
dimensions. The stage on which the
players played their parts. Within that
space, everything moved. There was a
force that he called gravity that
dictated the motions of all heavenly
objects. The planets were surrounded by
a vacuum, by a total removal of all the
air that was held by gravity to their
surfaces, which allowed them to move
effortlessly without friction, without
resistance, without slowing down.
The vacuum was real, and indeed most of
the Newtonian universe was void.
But Newton's insights, as brilliant as
they were, opened up a new question.
Since it was possible to remove
everything from a volume of space,
leaving only space itself behind, what
then was responsible for carrying the
force of gravity? How did light get from
the sun to the Earth? How could these
forces possibly be transmitted across
vast distances of nothing?
Newton shrugged. Indeed, in his
treaties, he explicitly left that
challenge to future generations,
famously stating, "I have not as yet
been able to discover the reason for
these properties of gravity from
phenomena, and I do not feain
hypothesis.
It would be up to those who came after
to finally resolve the question to
finally feain hypothesis.
And so now we can return to our cubic
meter of air. By Newton's time, it was
clear, both from theory and experiment
built up over centuries of inquiry, that
it was possible to create a vacuum, a
box without air, a box without material.
But could it really be that simple? Was
there anything left behind?
There are these two young fish swimming
along and they happen to meet an older
fish swimming the other way who nods at
them and says, "Morning boys. How's the
water?" And the two young fish swim on
for a bit and then eventually one of
them looks over at the other and goes,
"What the hell is water?"
In 2005, the iconic author and thinker
David Foster Wallace started a
commencement speech with this simple
story. His intention was to highlight
the importance of awareness and
mindfulness in the modern world. That
our very existence is something we often
take for granted. But this aquatic scene
also acts as a simple metaphor for an
idea that it existed for centuries
within physics. the ether, a mysterious
background substance that filled the
entire universe. And to understand the
meaning of this idea and its rise and
fall within science, we have to go back
to the early 1800s and the sinking of a
ship.
The HMS Minotaur was the pride of the
British fleet. Its crew had sailed
through three wartime tests, fighting in
battles against the forces of Napoleon
on the Nile, at Trafalga, and in
Copenhagen.
But on December the 22nd, 1810, it
finally met its match.
Caught up in a storm off the Dutch
coast, it became separated from its
companions. Blinded by the cloud-covered
nighttime sky, the ship ran a ground.
And shortly after, the Minotaur
floundered and turned over, succumbing
to the sea.
All told, 570 sailors lost their lives
that fateful morning off the Dutch
coast.
While Napoleon welcomed the disaster
that befell his enemy, he knew well the
costs of hidden dangers off the shores
of France to his merchant fleet, which
was vital in keeping his war of European
conquest alive. And so he turned to his
core of engineers and scientists to
devise a solution.
Lighouses had been used since antiquity
to alert sailors to hidden threats below
the waves and mark prominent locations
on coastlines. But in the modern era,
with hundreds of ships pllying the
world's oceans, the feeble light of
existing designs simply wasn't enough.
And so the role of resolving this
growing problem had fallen to the young
engineer Austinine Jean Frenel. He would
turn out to be the perfect choice.
By that time, the scientific prodigy had
already conceived of a revolutionary
advancement in our understanding of
light. Prior to the 1800s, most
scientists believed in Newton's
corpuscular theory that light was made
of a stream of tiny particles. But
Frenell and his contemporaries were
beginning to view light in terms of
waves. With a wave theory of light, they
could explain defraction in a way that
particles simply couldn't. And armed
with this newfound knowledge, Frenel set
to work making a better lighthouse.
Within a century, more than 10,000
lighouses were equipped with his lens,
justifiably earning it the name the
invention that saved a million ships.
But Frenel's accomplishments weren't
just practical. They also rippled
through the 19th century in scientific
circles. He had conclusively
demonstrated that light was a wave. But
a wave of what exactly? If light was a
wave, what was waving?
The answers would start to come just a
couple of decades later from quite the
unlikely source.
Many scientific revolutions have their
origins in universities.
Down the centuries, countless geniuses
have come out of Oxford, Cambridge, and
further a field and gone on to use that
training to change our understanding of
the way the world works.
But sometimes, sometimes someone seems
to appear as if from nowhere.
Thomas Edison attended school for only a
few months being taught to read and
write by his mother. Nicola Tesla never
attended university. And even though
Charles Darwin did go to Cambridge, he
studied theology.
And then there is Michael Faraday.
Unlike Frenel and his lighouses, Faraday
was an unlikely scientific
revolutionary. The son of a blacksmith,
he had no formal training. learning what
he knew by reading all the books he
could find in his day job as a book
seller. But despite this, he had an
unparalleled knack of physical intuition
and insight. And what he lacked in
rigor, he more than made up for in
imagination.
Indeed, for that reason, a century
later, Einstein would keep a portrait of
Faraday on his wall alongside Newton.
And so from humble beginnings, Michael
Faraday introduced something altogether
new to the world and in doing so would
totally change our understanding of the
idea of nothing.
Faraday was part of an international
group of scientists who were just
beginning to unlock the mysteries of the
electric and magnetic forces.
The Frenchman August Koulong discovered
that two charged spheres attracted or
repelled each other. The Italian
Alessandro Vultar found that he could
store and discharge electric energy. The
American Benjamin Franklin uncovered the
true identity of lightning, proving that
it was the same sort of electricity
appearing in some animals and
laboratories. And most remarkably,
Faraday himself along with others found
a strange connection between electricity
and magnetism. Changing electrical
currents could create a magnetic field
and the movement of a bar magnet through
a coil could induce a current. But these
new discoveries opened up a host of
troubling questions echoing those of
Newton centuries before to which he
never dared propose a hypothesis.
How did gravity and electricity and
magnetism transmit themselves? If there
truly was a vacuum between two electric
charges, how did they feel each other's
electric force? And this was where
Faraday came up with something totally
new. It was not a force or a wave or a
particle or even a phenomenon. It was an
idea, the field.
Faraday imagined that a solitary
electric charge was not alone.
Instead, it was surrounded by an
invisible indelible field. Lines of
force emanating from the charge. And
alongside the electric lines of force
with the magnetic ones. Indeed, if you
take a bar magnet and sprinkle iron
filings around it, you can see these
lines for yourself, punching from the
north end of the magnet before curving
back around to the south end. But to
Faraday, these lines weren't just
imaginary objects to help visualize the
forces. They were physical objects in
and of themselves.
And the mathematical expression for
these lines is the field. In simple
terms, a field is a mathematical entity
that is values at every point in space.
If you look at a map of the weekend
weather forecast, you're looking at a
field. In the case of electricity and
magnetism, however, the field must be
more complex, describing not just
magnitude, but also direction, like a
wind map of an approaching storm.
Others, however, bolt to this suggestion
of the thought that something could
exist, the fields of electricity and
magnetism, in the vacuum of space. And
this included one James Clark Maxwell, a
Scottish mathematician and physicist.
But then Maxwell would have his own
revelations and would not only come to
accept Faraday's genius, but embrace it.
What's the go of that?
In later years, it would be said that as
a child, James Clark Maxwell would be
heard to utter this phrase whenever he
found something he didn't understand,
following it up with a slightly more
intense, "What's the particular go of
that?" And this intense curiosity would
follow him into adulthood. Indeed,
Maxwell's motivations as a scientist
were simple. When he encountered a new
problem, he couldn't relax until the
problem was solved.
And so it would be Maxwell, this
insatiably curious Scott, who would take
the baton from Faraday and further
revolutionize our understanding of the
world. Indeed, it was not only Faraday
and Newton that Einstein gave pride of
place on his wall. Maxwell was the third
and final image.
He was the great unifier of physics,
realizing that electricity and magnetism
were actually two sides of the same
coin.
He saw that there was in reality only
one force, electromagnetism, that
manifested in different ways depending
on the circumstances. And Maxwell took
these new tools, a set of what would
become just four equations that neatly
summarized an entire century's worth of
scientific progress and discovered that
the combined field, the electromagnetic
field, could support waves of
alternating electricity and magnetism.
Having done this, it was a simple enough
calculation to find the speed of those
electromagnetic waves. And it was in
that moment that he encountered
something truly remarkable. The speed of
those electromagnetic waves was
identical to the speed of light.
Maxwell had found light itself within
his equations. Light was an
electromagnetic wave.
three disperate properties of the
universe, light, electricity, and
magnetism. They were all so different
from each other that for millennia we
had assumed that they were simply
unrelated phenomena. Yet Maxwell,
employing Faraday's fields to their
fullest possible extent, found that they
were all fundamentally the same.
And yet, despite the power of this
approach, Maxwell did not fully accept
all of Faraday's reasoning, for he did
not think that lines of force could leap
across the vacuum of space unsupported.
Instead, Maxwell's insights revived a
much older idea. And it is here we must
return to the ether.
The ether is a concept stretched back
into antiquity, believed by the ancients
to be the quintessence, the fifth
element, the purest possible rarified
air that only the gods themselves could
breathe. And as scientific astronomy and
cosmology came to the four, there were
various attempts to fill the vacuum of
space beyond the confines of the earth
with this ether. this substance that was
lighter than air and allowed for the
free movements of the planets. However,
after Otto and Deart's discoveries,
ether theories started to dwindle in
popularity. Perhaps nature did not
abhore a vacuum after all. But with
Maxwell's revelations, the ether came
roaring back to prominence. This time as
the medium through which electromagnetic
waves and therefore light could
propagate. After all, sound waves travel
through air. Ocean waves travel through
water. Electromagnetic waves couldn't
simply travel through vacuum. If you
emptied out everything from a volume of
space, there had to be something left.
And so, two American scientists set out
to find it.
In the late 1880s, Albert Mickelson and
Edward Molly created what is now known
rather unimaginatively as the Mickelson
Molly experiment. Like most famous
science experiments, the idea behind it
was simple, but the execution had to be
perfect. They developed a device to
measure the speed of light in various
directions. Mickelson and Molly
carefully set up the experiment so that
the straight-on beam lined up with the
direction of the Earth's motion around
the sun. The light traveling in that
direction would be boosted by the speed
of the Earth. Light traveling in the
other direction would not receive such a
boost and would be more sluggish as a
result. The logic was that over the
course of a year, Mikkelson and Moley
should measure variations in the speed
of light. And to put it simply, they did
not. It was perhaps the most famous null
result in all of physics. The speed of
light stayed constant. There was no sign
whatsoever of the ether.
Within only a few years of their
experiment, the ether hypothesis simply
faded away. And soon after, Albert
Einstein would reconcile the constancy
of the speed of light, the lack of
evidence for the ether, and Maxwell's
equations by revolutionizing Newton's
concepts of time and space with his
special theory of relativity. There was
no background to the universe. He said,
no absolute space and time.
So over half a century after Faraday had
opened the question up again, it looked
like space was well and truly empty.
Light, radiation, electricity, and
magnetism could all be transmitted
across the vacuum, the void, without
requiring any medium. No matter, no
ether, no lines of force,
nothing. Out of space was nothing but
vacuum. And voids weren't just possible.
They were the rule. And that seemed to
be the end of it.
But of course, it wasn't. For alongside
Einstein and his relativistic revolution
came another upheaval. Quantum physics
was ascending, and it would have much to
say about the nature of the vacuum, the
nature of nothing itself.
But before we enter into that brave new
world, let us revisit our box.
It seems both emptier and more crowded
than before. We've successfully created
a vacuum, removing all the particles and
radiation from it. We've also removed
the ether, the substance that physicists
once believed filled up the vacuum of
space. Yet, the addition of
electromagnetic waves and fields muddy
the picture somewhat. And so, is there
anything left to remove? Or is this the
end of the story?
You can probably guess the answer to
that.
History is littered with estimates that
turned out to be a little off.
For the 1400s, astronomers and map
makers were well aware that the Earth
was round. But what they didn't know was
its precise circumference.
The best early guess had come in the
second century when Tommy had used an
underestimate of the distance between
roads and Alexandria to arrive at a
circumference of 180,000 stadia. But
with more correct estimates coming
later, Europeans eventually largely
agreed that Tommy was wrong and that the
Earth was larger
except for Christopher Columbus. He
believed that Tomy's calculations were
correct and that it would be feasible to
cross the Atlantic Ocean and reach Asia
in just a few months span. He was of
course wrong. And if it weren't for the
Americas, he and his crew would have
died in the middle of the ocean.
That fateful voyage rested on a
miscalculation of roughly 25% and had
earthchanging consequences. But that is
nothing compared to the greatest
discrepancy in science. One with
possibly even greater ramifications,
especially for our understanding of the
concept of nothing. A theoretical
estimate hundreds of trillions of times
larger than its measured value.
And the origins of that miscalculation
lie with the early 20th century British
physicist Paul Drack.
Durag's special genius can be neatly
expressed in a quote by someone who knew
him well, J. Robert Oppenheimer, father
of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer was
writing a letter of recommendation for a
talented colleague. And he wrote simply,
"He is a second Draq, only this time
human."
Indeed, Dra was known for two things.
His intimidating intellect and his deep
introversion.
Like Maxwell a generation before him,
Dra accomplished what few physicists
could. He unified. Maxwell had brought
together electricity and magnetism and
in doing so had discovered the physical
basis for light. But Drack did something
even more fundamental. He brought
together quantum mechanics and special
relativity. And in doing so, he
discovered that there was more to the
vacuum than we could ever have imagined.
In his calculations, Durac had seen
something strange. Two complimentary
solutions. One solution was the world of
the familiar, describing the behavior of
known particles like the electron. But
the other solution contained particles
exactly like them yet with opposite
charges. He saw in his equations that
interactions could produce equal amounts
of matter and this new antimatter. to
Draq. This conjured the image of a vast
and infinitely deep sea of matter, one
that all of normal physics sat on top
of. When you emptied out a box of all
its contents, Dak imagined, you would be
left with this invisible sea. This
matter would not normally be visible
because it had states of negative
energy. But occasionally, a process
could pluck one of those bits of matter
out of the negative ocean and give it
positive energy.
Today however most physicists don't view
the universe exactly through the lens of
direct sea of negative energy particles.
Although the basic picture does remain
with a twist.
Things on a very small scale behave like
nothing that you have any direct
experience about. They do not behave
like waves. They do not behave like
particles. They do not behave like
clouds or billiard balls or weights on
springs or like anything that you have
ever seen.
So said Richard Fineman in 1965 at the
beginning of one of his famous lectures
on quantum mechanics. And indeed by the
1960s physicists including Fineman
himself had ascertained something very
important. Particles were indeed much
different than previously thought.
For as quantum physics advanced, it
turned out that particles could appear
and disappear at will if there was
sufficient energy involved. But where
did these particles come from? And where
did they go? There was only one answer.
The fields.
In quantum field theory, the modern
incarnation of Durac's original forays
into unification, particles are not
fundamental entities at all. Instead,
the fields have primary physical
importance.
There is one field of every kind of
particle. The photon has a very
well-known field. The field first
identified by Michael Faraday and honed
to perfection with Maxwell's work, the
electromagnetic field. And that field is
joined by others. One for the electron,
one for the top quark, one for each
neutrino, and so on. Indeed, in the
current standard model, there are 17 in
total, though there may be more.
These fields fill all of space and time,
overlapping one another like oil and
vinegar soaked in the same piece of
crusty bread. When portions of the field
vibrate and excite to higher energy
levels and start to travel, we recognize
it as a particle appearing as if from
nowhere. And when the same patch of
field loses energy, the particle seems
to disappear.
Particles appear to transform into one
another because the fields can vibrate
and energize each other. When one field
vibrates another, it looks to us as if
one particle has disappeared and another
has taken its place.
It was a sea just like Durac had
supposed. But rather than a sea of
particles, it was a sea of fields. And
importantly for our understanding of
nothing, the fields are never quite
calm.
They are always constantly incessantly
vibrating just not at the level for us
to perceive as a particle. In its
original conception, spacetime was an
empty stage, a blank canvas for all the
actors of the universe to play their
parts. But when united with quantum
mechanics, something comes alive. Any
place where you have spacetime, anywhere
that is has quantum fields.
And so nothing is ever truly vacuum
because the vacuum itself is now imbued
with a ground state energy that cannot
be reduced. If you remove all the
particles and radiation from a box,
you've only eliminated the most
energetic vibrations. Countless more
remain. the quantum fields that make up
the most basic unit of physical reality.
And it's not just a little bit of
quantum fields, a tiny amount of energy
hiding in the background vacuum of the
universe. It is infinite.
Strictly speaking, by a full measure of
the quantum fields, there are an
infinite number of vibrations at all
scales embedded within them.
But perhaps most importantly, in
physics, only relative differences
matter. If you drop a plate, for
example, what matters is the distance to
the kitchen floor at your feet, not the
height of your apartment off the ground
or your elevation from sea level. And so
all particle interactions happen on top
of this infinite sea of vibrations, just
as DAC imagined it. And this means that
as long as we are extremely careful with
our calculations, we can still make
useful predictions with quantum field
theory. At least that was the idea.
Because on the other hand, maybe it's
not infinite. And we've been getting it
all wrong. Very, very wrong. The most
incorrect anyone has ever been.
In the late 1990s, two teams of
astronomers set out to measure a
critical property of the universe, its
rate of deceleration. The cosmos has
been expanding from the big bang for
billions of years. But the gravitational
attraction of all of its matter, the
combined weight of all the stars and
galaxies should slow down that
expansion. measure the deceleration. The
logic was and the astronomers believed
that they could get a handle on
measuring the total matter contents of
the universe.
The supernova cosmology project led by
Saul Pearlmatter at Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory and the highed
supernova search team led by Adam Rice
of the Space Telescope Science Institute
and Brian Schmidt of the Australian
National University got to work
measuring the brightness of distant type
1A supernova using them as reliable
gauges of the expansion history of the
universe. And for the first time, they
provided a precise measurement of the
weight of nothing.
To their surprise, they were able to
measure a change in the expansion of the
universe, but in the wrong direction.
They saw acceleration, not deceleration.
When Brian Schmidt tells the story of
their discovery, he often shares the
tale that his team stared at their
results in shock. Some were excited,
others were in disbelief, and still
others felt that we had a long way to
go. While I shared in the skepticism, I
also felt that it would be wrong not to
publish a result just because we did not
like it.
Yet, after months of effort, the data
refused to budge. And so, they sent a
nervous and fertive email to their
counterparts. Are you seeing what we're
seeing? Indeed, they were. And it was
the first evidence for dark energy. a
mysterious substance that appears to be
tearing the cosmos apart at the seams.
And the simplest explanation for dark
energy is that it's due to the effects
of all the quantum fields.
In essence, at supergalactic scales, the
vibrating quantum fields actually
produce an anti-gravitational effect.
And this means by measuring this rate of
universal acceleration, we can calculate
how much energy is contained in the
vacuum. We can use the entire universe
to measure the weight of the subatomic.
And that is not all because we can then
compare this value to expectations from
theoretical calculations.
While the vacuum might contain an
infinite amount of energy, you can use
simple physical rules to cut short the
runaway infinities, producing a large
but finite result. And it is here where
the problem lies. It is here we find the
most incorrect answer in all of physics.
The results between the theoretical
calculations of the vacuum and the
observed measured value from the
acceleration of the universe differ by
more than 120 orders of magnitude.
Indeed, by measuring the speed of the
acceleration of the universe, it turns
out that there isn't that much energy in
the vacuum at all. Roughly the
equivalent of the mass energy of a
single proton in every cubic meter of
space. And yet even that that enormous
discrepancy is not the biggest issue.
The bigger problem is that whatever its
measured value is, it is clearly not
zero. There is a fundamental entity, the
field in the vacuum, and it has a
fundamental energy. The natural amount
of energy in the vacuum is infinity. And
so in a way, it's not hard to envision a
process that suppresses and cancels out
that infinite energy. But it's much much
harder to make that energy reach nearly
zero, but not exactly so.
The vacuum has a tiny amount of energy,
and we don't know why.
And so to return to our core mission,
are we now any closer to nothing? We've
taken everything out of the box. There
is now nothing inside it left. Somehow
not even the quantum fields. But what if
we were to remove the box itself to make
it so that nothing, not even the
properties of the universe that allow
for boxes to exist is there.
The constants of nature like the speed
of light or the strength of the energy
of the vacuum, that oddly tiny nonzero
number appear to be fundamental to the
inner workings of the universe. Indeed,
they are part of reality itself.
If you were to empty a box of all its
contents, the constants of nature would
still be there, ready and waiting to
refill the box a new if the right
conditions were met.
So if our mission is to truly achieve
nothing, truly remove everything in the
universe, could it be possible to
eliminate not just material objects and
exotic quantum fields, but the constants
of nature themselves?
Can nothing, true nothing, exist?
Science and religion have often gone
hand in hand, and men of the cloth have
often contributed to scientific advance.
Capernacus held a doctorate in Catholic
cannon law and launched the scientific
revolution. Gregor Mendel was an
Augustinian frier who kickstarted the
modern study of genetics by breeding pea
plants and observing the results. And
Angelo Seeki was an Italian priest who
was one of the first to conclusively
state the sun was a star.
And yet the young Gorge Lamemetra hadn't
always intended to become a priest. He'd
been a soldier in World War I, but the
story goes that the artillery manual for
the Belgian army had a mathematical
mistake in one of its instructions. He
pointed out the error to his superior
officer who didn't appreciate the
correction. Lmetra was marked for
insubordination, putting a stop to his
ambitions to advance within the armed
forces.
And so it would be after the war he
turned to religion, joining a seminary.
And perhaps it was his religious
education that allowed the metra to see
something truly special hidden within
the equations of Einstein's general
relativity.
In 1927, Lmetra found just like Einstein
did that relativity naturally predicted
a changing evolving universe. But while
Einstein had rejected that conclusion,
inserting a cosmological constant into
the equations to maintain balance,
Lmetra let the equations simply be, and
he argued that we lived in an expanding
universe.
2 years later, Hubble would observe the
recessional velocity of galaxies,
confirming Lmetra's prediction. But what
did it mean to live in an expanding
universe? Lmetra had an answer. the
primeval atom, a state of incredible
density and energy from which the
universe emerged long ago, the precursor
to the big bang.
However, most of Lmetra's colleagues
disparaged his results, considering the
idea a bit too close to the biblical
story of Genesis. The physicists Sir
Arthur Readington stating blankly, "The
notion of a beginning of the present
order of nature is repugnant to me." And
Einstein himself referred to Lmetra's
physics as atrocious.
But in time, the evidence would win the
day, and Einstein would become one of
Lamemetra's biggest champions. Prior to
the development of the Big Bang theory,
the universe had a simple story. It
existed, it was, it forever would be.
But the big bang, the metra's primeval
atom, had a challenge. In an expanding
universe, the cosmos has a finite age.
It has a birthday. It has a creation.
But it isn't really a beginning. It is
simply the opening story of this chapter
of the universe. And it's a story not
fully told. We can calculate there's
been roughly 13.8 billion years since
the Big Bang singularity. a finite
amount of time. But our mathematics
breaks down in the primeval atom at the
singularity itself, producing
irreconcilable infinities that no known
trick of mathematics can circumvent.
And so it's natural to ask, where did
the singularity come from?
Let's return to our box.
We've removed all the particles both
visible and dark. We've removed all the
radiation. Indeed, let's suppose we take
it further and we are somehow able to
eliminate even the quantum fields from
the vacuum itself.
What remains? Is this nothing?
In the language of general relativity,
the box still isn't empty. That's
because there is still spaceime. the
stage.
Spacetime is a dynamic entity in its own
right, imbued with as much physical
meaning and significance as any planet
or particle. In an idea going all the
way back to Dekart and his coordinate
system, space remains even in an empty
volume. And hence in that volume there
is still something rather than nothing.
But the big bang is the origination
point for everything for the entire
universe. Space itself has a start at
the primeval atom. And so before that
singularity, did space even exist?
The answer to this question currently
resides outside of known physics and in
the realm of quantum gravity. Though
there have been some brave ventures into
this unknown land, eternal inflation,
the multiverse, the big bounce,
conformal cyclic cosmology, no boundary
proposals. But though these theories may
explain the origins of the big bang,
they do not explain why the big bang,
the universe, is the way it is.
If you take a box and eliminate
everything, even the very identities of
space and time itself, there is still
physics.
In particular, there appear to be
fundamental constants of nature that
defy explanation and origin. Specific
numbers that can only be measured,
properties of the universe that we
cannot explain through physics itself.
We must go out and measure these
properties, then incorporate them into
our theories. Some of these constants
are very familiar like the speed of
light. That speed simply is. It's just
how fast light travels in a vacuum. We
have no way of predicting that value or
deriving it from some more fundamental
theory. Yes, in 1865, Maxwell discovered
the speed of electromagnetic waves, but
that was by combining two other
constants. the permitivity and
permeability of free space which gives a
measure of how easily electric and
magnetic forces propagate through vacuum
and the same holds true for the
gravitational constant. Gravity has a
certain strength full stop. Other
constants detail the subatomic
interactions that govern the quantum
world such as the rest masses of the
various particles and the strengths of
their force couplings to each other. And
of course the amount of dark energy is
another such constant. The vacuum has a
certain amount of energy to it, very
small but not zero. And we have no
mechanism for predicting it. If many of
these values changed even by a small
amount, life as we know it would be
impossible. Our universe would be
entirely unrecognizable.
And so how and why is this the case?
As with many deep issues in cosmology
and advanced physics, the answer may lie
in some form of multiverse.
Perhaps different big bangs get
different values for these constants and
perhaps even different physical laws
altogether. We just happen to be inside
this universe because this universe is
the only kind that can make us possible.
But all of these attempts to explain the
values of the physical constants contain
a fatal philosophical flaw. They don't
solve the problem. They only move the
goalposts.
They may explain why the constants have
a particular value, but they don't
explain why the constants exist in the
first place. There is always some set of
laws of physics that explains how our
universe came to be. But there is never
any explanation for the laws of physics
themselves.
This is true even in the case of the
multiverse or the string theory
landscape which contrive through some
process to generate our familiar laws of
physics and properties of the universe.
Of course, that process itself must obey
some other law, one not yet known to us
to govern its behavior and evolution.
And those theories cannot explain
themselves either. And so it goes on and
on and on. If string theory is true,
then why are there exactly this many
dimensions? Why are there strings? If
eternal inflation is correct, then what
created the inflation fields? If the
universe had a creator, who created the
creator?
Indeed, even in the most extreme
physical idea you can take that our
universe was born from total nothingness
in a burst of some unfathomable quantum
machination, you must explain the
existence of the quantum laws that could
produce such a process in the first
place.
For example,
in 1973, physicist Edward Tryion wrote a
paper speculating that the entire
universe may simply be a subatomic
quantum fluctuation blown up to
spectacular scales. That if the universe
had an overall zero energy, it could
simply be a temporary borrowing of
energy from the quantum foam.
But where and why, he couldn't answer.
I offer the modest proposal that our
universe is simply one of those things
which happen from time to time. Indeed,
in a review of Lawrence Krauss's 2012
book, A Universe from Nothing, which
speculated something similar, the
physicist and professor of philosophy,
David Albert, summed up the problem. The
fact that particles can pop in and out
of existence over time as those fields
rearrange themselves is not a wit more
mysterious than the fact that fists can
pop in and out of existence over time as
my fingers rearrange themselves. None of
these popping amount to anything even
remotely in the neighborhood of a
creation from nothing.
And so absolute nothingness is not just
the creation of a vacuum as Aristotle
railed against and Otto Vongerica
demonstrated. It is not in the lack of
the ether which James Clark Maxwell held
on to so he could preserve the
propagation of electromagnetic waves and
Mickelson and Moley found no evidence to
support. It is not in the taming of the
roing quantum fields first envisioned by
the mathematically untrained Michael
Faraday and given new life by the
mathematical giant of Paul Dak. It is
not in the evisceration of space and
time itself. An entity created by Rene
Deart and given a birth in the big bang
by Gor Lmetra. Absolute nothingness is
the complete and utter destruction of
physical laws of the constants of nature
of reality itself.
What would it mean if everything,
literally everything, even the
underpinnings of reality, ceased to
exist?
What if we took our box and erased the
ability to create boxes to have anything
at all? Is that possible?
Perhaps it is.
Perhaps there is a state of
non-existence so total and complete that
even the term state doesn't make sense.
An aspect of unreality that our feeble
minds cannot yet grasp as our
experiences are too far rooted in the
sensory world. But if that were
possible, then we must return to the
arguments of Aristotle. If we cannot
measure it, study it, ascertain it, or
even comprehend it, then absolute
nothingness cannot exist because it goes
against the very definition of
existence.
And so in a debate that began over 2,000
years ago in ancient Greece, we are
forced to ask again and again and again,
can nothing exist.
tell us what you think. Thanks for
watching and we'll see you next time.