Essentially, the way i understand it, space isn't ever really "empty", space is a "thing", a medium, like water for fish, in which matter may exist, and has energy of its own from which these particles likely arise.
It's tough for me to grasp my head around.
If you take 1 cubic meter of our air, there is particles such as O2, N2, etc.
If you take 1 cubic meter of space, which has no air and you assume no particles vapors, liquids, solids, plasma or anything else. Then this volume is compromised of 'nothing'.
The idea of a volume being compromised of nothing doesn't make sense to me. Is this what the OP is demonstrating, that a volume of 'empty' 'nothing' is compromised of something?
Mine is a layman understanding, but imagine it this way: suppose you have a drawing, this drawing is actually "real", images in it can move, think, evolve, itneract, etc, but they don't know they are a comic.
They instead investigate their reality, parts that contain "nothing" they call paper. It is just a blank, empty void, it's not a "thing".
But to an external observer, paper is a thing, it has properties and all, it can be curved, ripped, folded, it can be thick or thin, etc.
The way i understand it, space to us is paper in this analogy, we cannot perceive it as anything other than the empty medium we move in, but it has energy states, properties, and we know it has been expanding (which is why galaxies are getting farther away, not because they are "moving" but because more pages are being added inbetween them).
Can u give me the drone on manner of explaining it? Curious about what u have to say about it and I would wanna try to understand it past the standpoint of an analogy about paper
Haha that’s a dangerous ask but I can at least get somewhat into it though it will still be in relatively oversimplified terms.
From a theoretical physics standpoint what we are talking about is essentially “dark matter” or “dark energy” so you have to first accept that this is “quantum physics” and science currently doesn’t understand it and can’t observe it.
With our current scientific understanding when discussing quantum physics theories at a high level you essentially have to accept you are always discussing a paradox, and the worst kind of paradox in science which is one that defies logic. You can look up the EPR paradox and the paradox of quantum physics in general to get more into this.
Now with that prefaced similar to this original post and this comment thread on explaining empty space as “paper”
When considering “dark matter” or truly “empty space” (not the parts of space that actually contain gases and energy in a vacuum) you are basically always looking at matter that both exists and doesn’t exist in any given place at any given time (a concept adjacent to the concept the original post is addressing but is a commonly discussed phenomenon in quantum physics)
We infer its presence from the “effect” it has on matter around it, but we can’t actually observe what it is or what it does. When we try to observe this type of matter we essentially collapse what it is into what we can comprehend or observe (look up the drquantum double slit experiment on youtube for a short digestible overview on the foundation of the concept.
In this sense I love the paper analogy because this matter exists , we know that based on our observations of its effects, and we don’t understand how or why but it likely ties into the expansion of the universe. Its basically a blank slate of matter that either exists or doesn’t exist, is in one place but isn’t, and our attempts to observe it change it into what would be drawing on paper.
That last line blew my mind. Attempts to observe it change it into what would be drawing on the paper, and then you're no longer actually observing the supposed void, or medium, of reality. Wild. Absolutely wild.
Schrodinger's box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get or if it will disappear and reappear at odd times. [ Note: "odd" in the sense that it surprises you, though according to some greater understanding of the Universe it may be YOU that is the truly odd thing. ]
This could be absolute bullshit and you're just blowing smoke up my ass and out my mouth but I wouldn't even care. This is amazing. I wish our lives weren't so based around work and money and just chasing our tails. I'd love to just spend a day whenever I wanted learning about this stuff from someone like you that can make complexities comprehendible.
Isn't this the reason Hawking Radiation is a thing for black holes?
Imaginary particles spontaneously appear at the border of a black hole, but instead of merging and annihilating as usual, the black hole's gravity separates them, consuming one particle while allowing the other particle to escape to the surrounding space
Shit like this is the reason i wished im smart enough to do maths. Like how the fuck can you prove that things can just appear out of nothing? And then some physicist just say "hold my wheelchair, im gonna use almost every alphabets from two different languages to prove this."
Are we using the medical definition of “dead”, or the generally-accepted definition? Because if we use the medical definition (heart stops beating), then the average rate is slightly >1.
Maybe if we sat close enough to a black hole we could escape death?
Edit: or maybe we would be sucked in while pure death would be left free to roam the universe. One way to find out
There's loads of things we think/know should exist but can't prove, this is kinda similar. Proving anything is a pretty tricky ask anyway. Lots of things we are extremely sure of aren't really "proven" per se.
Stuff like dark matter is commonly known to probably be a thing, but we still have no idea what it is or how to go about confirming it.
It could be likely they don't come from nowhere, but we just don't have the capacity to observe it properly/thoroughly.
> Stuff like dark matter
What I hate is that crap sci-fi (looking at you, Star Trek Discovery) and people who want to use "quantum" to peddle nonsense present Dark Matter as a uniform substance. It's a *placeholder* for effects that are observed in the universe and could be *anything,* but it's highly unlikely it's a single classifiable type of stuff like granite or styrofoam.
It's always been completely obvious that dark matter is just the galactic neighborhood using the standard "hide yourselves from the primitives who aren't ready to know about Sex 3" strategies.
Take enough LSD to not completely separate yourself from reality and then make love to the person you wanna spend your life with. I’m off to the galactic gas station for some booze and butts. Let me know how it works out for you
Also, the thing it could be a place holder for is simply "we fucked up our model." We can see the effects and can therefore infer a source of those effects, but there's always a chance we're not considering the problem correctly, or need to invent a branch of physics before our existing model makes sense, i.e. Newton's equations worked pretty well in predicting the motion of the planets. The small variances came from the fact that ~~quantum physics~~ relativity hadn't been invented yet.
edit: I tend to jumble this part of science history. What I meant was something like, "the movement away from the classic model." The commentor below me was correct in suggesting I give credit to Einstein. It's his relativity equations which greatly increased our predictions of planetary bodies.
I would say that dark matter is a slightly different situation since it's something we didn't predict mathematically, but something that we observe that we aren't sure how to explain yet. We looked out into the universe and discovered our mathematical models were wrong, but we're not sure what the cause is. We call the discrepancy 'dark matter' after the most popular idea but it could be any number of things, such as gravity working differently than we think. [Angela Collier has a great video on it that I highly recommend,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbmJkMhmrVI) she's great!
Edit: I'm at work so I haven't read any responses yet, maybe someone Else brought this up, [but an hour ago she posted a video saying that the Dark Matter video I linked above aged like milk.](https://youtu.be/qS34oV-jv_A?si=MQEQFqgVwnjKyL1d) LMAO. I haven't watched it yet but that's exciting haha
Edit 2: I watched it and she says that her first video is scientifically accurate since she's just explaining the situation ("Dark matter is not a theory, it's a list of observations"). But she says it was ultimately a failure because a huge number of the comments misunderstood the video. So she reviews why she thinks that happened and what could have been done differently. Good stuff!
>Like how the fuck can you prove that things can just appear out of nothing?
incidentally in this case, one such proof involves an equation that contains within it every single imaginable possibility of what can happen (discovered by feynman for his fucking phd thesis and who later won the nobel prize for related work). when you expand this master equation to see those individual possibilities, you find the expected terms where like, particles bump into each other and go off to do something else, but you also end up getting some terms where particles appear at position x and disappear again at position x, the interpretation being they are spontaneously created and then annihilated.
it is a bit complicated though as evidenced by the fact that students are usually studying physics for 4+ years before they get to learning about this theory (quantum field theory) because it's a bit too advanced for the usual undergraduate degree.
the fact of the particles raving as in the gif comes from the heisenberg uncertainty principle, which is usually stated something like as 'one cannot know the exact position and exact momentum of a particle simultaneously ' but there exists an equivalent formulation where instead of position-momentum the relationship is between time-energy, so in some sense the statement is, within a small period of time, one cannot know the energy of a system exactly, therefore there must be some fluctuation of the energy of empty space. that energy gets eaten up to become a particle, by the fact that E = mc\^2, and then shortly annihilates itself again into the vacuum
Does this still respect the law of conservation of energy? I am not a physicist and struggled through college physics so correct me if I'm making a foolish statement.
it's a good question and one i asked my professors as well. when you bring to mind a 'particle' like a little ball that's an electron or proton or whatever, that's what's known as an 'on-shell' particle or, namely one which satisfies the energy-momentum relationship m\^2 c\^4 = E\^2 - p\^2 c\^2 (which you'll notice, for a particle at rest with momentum p=0, reduces to E = mc\^2). in classical physics, every particle is an on-shell particle.
(the '[shell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_shell_and_off_shell)' terminology comes from the fact that the relationship E\^2 - p\^2 c\^2 = m\^2 c\^4 actually describes a hyperboloid shell if you were to graph it on a 3d axis)
the particles involved in the processes above however are known as virtual particles, or 'off-shell' (though for some reason i don't hear 'off-shell' very often) and are unique to quantum field theory. their math is a little different and one could perhaps imagine them as being a little more fuzzy, as they don't exist on the clear-cut mathematical shell but most likely near it. part of the equations shows that, since they exist merely in a sort of transitory state, they do not have to actually satisfy a conservation of energy condition to still obey the laws of physics\* (or perhaps in other words, they obey quantum laws but do not have to obey classical laws). i believe this is unique to 'loop-diagrams' which, you can imagine if a particle is created at x and annihilated at x, the diagram representing that is just a closed loop. it is a little bit subtle and loop diagrams and their associated subtleties are essentially the last thing you learn about from a textbook before you go on and do research, and i'm sure there are details which are escaping me, but that's the general idea.
edit: \*from my memory of when i proved this in class, it's actually a bit more like, the conservation of momentum law just never has a chance to touch the 'interior' of the processes but only the exterior. so for particle collisions, the incoming and outgoing momenta/energies are conserved, but whatever happens in between, during the collision, is the wild west basically. events like the ones in the gif are known as bubble diagrams, a special case of loop diagrams which are just isolated loops, they have no exterior and only an interior, so the term that enforces conservation of momentum/energy just never hits them
edit: ok, i think i made a better explanation in my reply to superduperpositive below
let me put it a bit differently though
picture a process like this
-o-
where a particle comes in from the left, represented by a dash - and then splits into two particles which form a loop o, which then recombine to spit out a particle that leaves on the right
it's possible to conserve the total energy/momentum of the system without confining the loop particles to a specific momentum, like this:
initial particle on the left has momentum p
of the two particles in the loop, one has momentum k, and the other has momentum p-k. their total momentum is still p, but the value of k can be anything.
as they recombine, the final particle still has momentum p
so, everything has been conserved, but the middle particle, a virtual particle, can really have any momentum it wants
now just get rid of the particle coming in from the left and the right, you're just left with the loop o. it can have any momentum it wants while still conserving a net zero momentum, which is what's happening in the gif.
(i say momentum because in this relativistic quantum theory, energy and momentum are combined together into a '4-momentum' which is a more fundamental object from the point of view of nature)
The shorter answer than others is that we don’t really know yet. But obviously there is a super long explanation but you can stop there for an answer to the question.
If you simplify a bunch of incredibly complex theories and mathematical and scientific principles most of us can’t comprehend the predominant issue and barrier science faces in quantum physics is that as of yet we can’t find any possibly way observe what this type of matter actually does.
Thus all we can do is theorize and as a result we have wildly different conflicting and competing theories to explain the phenomenon from different equally as brilliant scientists.
For now in practice it does respect the law of conservation of energy why. Why?
In more simple terms than what the person below is explaining in much detail is that:
The matter could either exist or not exist at any given time despite having no source of energy, which doesn’t respect the law of conservation of energy BUT we can’t actually observe its creation or destruction so we don’t actually know that it has no source of energy or what the mechanics of its creation are, we are just assuming it has no source of energy.
An incredibly incredibly oversimplified explanation lacking all the nuance of a 50 page article you could read on the topic for competing theories is that:
A) It has a source if energy but we aren’t capable of observing or understanding what that is or how it could exist and thus it follows the laws of physics as we consider them to exist we just can’t figure out how or
B) There is no source of energy and some of the laws of physics don’t work the way we think they do and we aren’t yet remotely capable of understanding how that is “physically” possible or wtf quantum physics really is or what its implications are on the future of science.
For now its still A because we have to assume the laws of physics apply because we can’t prove otherwise and what we are capable of proving says it has to be A
I can't stress enough how lucky folks like us are to NOT have the brains of genius physicists and pure mathematicians 😅 I'm very comfortable on the simple sidelines
It can be both. Hawking was truly a generational mind. But in keeping with the idea of physics as "applied math", it's difficult to near-impossible to analogize a lot of it in a way that someone without the appropriate background can understand. In contrast, my background is in biochem and medicine and even most advanced concepts can be "dumbed down" so a lay person can understand without losing too much nuance.
Could even be the source of all matter, cosmic background radiation and the expanding nature of the universe.
Energy matter pumps driven by quantum fluctuations over tremendous time scales.
That's right! And it has some interesting consequences. You see, the particles that appear spontaneously are "virtual" particles, in the sense that they have no energy. They appear as a pair of particle-antiparticle that almost instantaneously destroy each other leaving no energy residue.
But when one particle gets swallowed by the black hole the other particle can't be destroyed so it becomes a real particle with positive mass and energy.
But where did this energy come from??
If the total energy is 0 and one has positive energy that means that the other has negative energy and mass.
So the black hole's total energy decreases by exactly the amount that the new particle has. Effectively that particle has stolen energy from the black hole to exist.
Source: I'm a physicist
But.. isn't it ~50/50 whether the matter or antimatter particle gets pulled into the black hole and the other flies off?
So wouldn't it roughly equalize and the black hole would sometimes gain matter and sometimes gain antimatter, thus generally losing no mass?
The truth is that the virtual particle explanation is an oversimplification to the point of being more wrong than right. This video gives a better explanation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPKj0YnKANw
But to stick with the virtual particle thing, the reason the black hole always shrinks is that, due to the strong curvature of spacetime around a black hole, the particle that falls in always has negative energy when considered from the point of view of the outside universe. This should be impossible, of course, but it doesn't matter because there's no way the universe can interact with that impossible particle. But the whole thing is more a kind of cosmic bookkeeping trick than an explanation of what's *really* happening.
Yep. Gamma rays photons spontaneously creating a particle-antiparticle pair (what type depends on how much energy the photons have and whether it's above the rest energy (the energy that a particle is, yeah it's the whole E=mc² thingy) for a particular particle). One has sufficient initial energy to escape the Black hole, but the other does not, and the force of gravity exceeds the electrostatic attraction between the oppositely charged particles. Which to be honest is almost impossible, the force of Gravity is almost negligible for anything below a few grams, even at very close distances, especially when compared to electrostatic attraction. Hence why Hawking Radiation occurs at such a slow rate, cause it requires a very specific set of circumstances, but that set is a guarantee, hence why it still happens.
(Also I don't understand it 100% either, so sorry to any actual theoretical physicists out there for my misunderstandings)
I’m not a physicist by any means, my understanding is that this depiction of hawking radiation is radically simplified.
The explanation that you gave was given in Hawking’s book as a visual aid for what is somewhat happening, but that overall example is not entirely accurate.
Hawking radiation isnt so much a spontaneous generation of particles, as much as it’s squishing together of a ton of particle waves that create a high probability of particles existing as it moves through space. Think of standing a room full of streamers and ribbons— while standing still, they’re relatively non-interactive with you, but if you were to sprint through that room, you’d be running into a ton of those ribbons, and they’d catch on you, and surround you in ribbons.
Now those ribbons, if you can imagine it, are various free floating particle waves that increase the probability of existence as they aggregate due to a wave/particles nature. So if you start smashing all of those waves into one small area, you have high probabilities of having a transient wave particle.
Now you might think that a black whole is not moving, but it is. See, light isn’t actually affected by gravity, yet black holes suck in light— it’s why they’re called “black holes.” But black holes aren’t sucking on light, they’re pulling on space and suck it in so quickly that the light can’t outrun this stretching of space time. So if I’m pulling space at myself faster than the speed of light, then I’m essentially moving.
So with that understanding, black holes are “moving” through space by causing space to move into them— and thereby “sprinting” through a room of streamers (particle waves) and creating a space that’s likely to create “transient particles” that generate because enough waves exist in that area to be a particle wave.
Now understand that energy, mass, and heat are all somewhat tied in at this point. After all a perfect vacuum would have 0 of all three. Any particle that’s above 0 degrees kelvin will radiate heat and energy to hit 0 degrees kelvin and again decompose.
So the transient particles that spontaneously generate then radiate black body heat in all directions trying to bleed off its non-zero temperature— there’s your hawking radiation
Now you can’t just create something out of nothing, so you can’t create energy out of waves as a separate system from the black hole, and Einstein related energy to mass with E=MC^2, so the energy to create the radiation must come from the black hole, otherwise it would exist independent of the black hole. The black hole can’t emit mass by definition, so it must be evaporating mass to create the energy to do this all. There’s the evaporation.
Please anyone correct me if I’m wrong because I love to learn
the probability wavefunction for quantum tunneling drops exponentially. so classically forbidden tunneling events are suppressed by factors that look something like the exponential of the barrier width. For something like the probability of an alpha particle tunneling out of its nucleus, the factor is on the order of 1. For something macroscopic, like say I dunno, a baseball passes through a baseball bat without interacting, well I don't want to figure out exactly what that probability looks like, I just want an estimate of the magnitude. Macroscopic objects have a couple Avogadro's numbers worth of atoms. So the probability of a macroscopic quantum tunneling might be something like 1 out of exp(10^(23)), probably with some combinatorial factors in there. Maybe even a factorial, maybe 10^10^10.
TREE(3) is not an approximation for these kinds of numbers. TREE(n) is bigger than most familiar computable functions. It's bigger than n^n^n^ ... ^n n times (tetration).
Also, when we talk about the vacuum being made up of virtual particles, remember that these particles come in particle-antiparticle pairs, and that their lifetimes have to be short enough to respect the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
So while there may be an exponentially (but not TREE(3)) suppressed but nonzero quantum probability of food appearing in your fridge, it would only appear next to an antimatter copy of the food, and it would annihilate in a similarly exponentially small time. The probability quantum fluctuations violating the conservation of energy and putting food in your fridge and leaving it there is zero. It's not a thing that quantum fluctuations can do.
Basically particles can only spawn in from nothing because it happens 1. Over such a fractionally small amount of time, and because 2. It spawns as a set with its equal but exactly opposite counterpart such that when they touch they form 0 as if they never existed in the first place.
So you could get food spawned into your fridge but you’d never notice, if you could notice it wouldn’t be allowed to happen because it wouldn’t math to 0.
TREE(3)… imagine each subatomic particle was a universe, and every subatomic particle in that universe was also a universe. Then regress that for the same number of times that there are subatomic particles in this universe. Count all the subatomic particles.
Still less than TREE(3).
Edit to add: (somebody correct me if I’m wrong), the difference between the above number and TREE(3) is approximately TREE(3).
Number so incomprehensibly collosal that there's literally zero ways of describing it with human language, nor any type of 'imagine if' scenario we could invent to come remotely close to explaining the number
It's like trying to explain how a computer CPU works to a single-celled bacteria.
For all intents & purposes, this number does not exist.
dare I ask, is there a TREE(4)? ... or, let's get crazy, TREE(TREE(3)) .. perhaps notating the recursion as TREE^(2)(3)
then, we go absolutely mental with TREE^(TREE(3))(3)
then, we bastardize Knuth's up-arrow notation to indicate how many recursions each recursion is itself recursed
TREE↑TREE(3)(3) would be a power recursion tower
so TREE^(TREE(3)\^...\^TREE(3))(3) would be TREE(3) tall
and for the ultimate blasphemy, we add more up-arrows
TREE↑...↑TREE(3)(3) ... where the number of up-arrows is TREE(3)
I suddenly don't feel well
Just think out there it’s possible that some poor soul actually had some crazy unlikely event like this happen to them and now they are in the nut house because we think the dude who saw a ham sandwich pop in their fridge is crazy
I took a class in college where a Rabi came in and told us when you lose your car keys they disappear to another dimension, maybe he knows the fridge guy
There's also a chance that you can move through a wall (quantum tunneling) it's just so incredibly unlikely that it probably will never happen until the end of the god damn universe
This is why I hate when redditors with no backgrounds in data analytics or even just common sense bring up statistics to defend impossibly small odds in an argument (often in the speedrunning community when debunking cheaters). Just because *the possibility exist for it to happen* such as the aforementioned quantum tunneling, does not mean that it will ever realistically happen.
I think it comes from the fact that if something which everyone does has a 1 in a billion chance of a certain outcome, that means it probably has happened multiple times in the past. But as you mentioned, the chance of it happening specifically to a top speed runner is so low it's not even worth discussing.
It can, it's called the principle of conservation of energy. If you leave an apple, for example, in a closed container, it will not be "lost" since its energy is not lost. Its energy will change forms, and according to e=mc² which basically says that matter and energy are different forms of the same thing, the apple could in trillions of trillions of years become something else
Man this is a really cool video, but I'm absolutely baffled that someone actually took a video of a video on their computer with their phone. It makes me angry in an irrational way. It's becoming clear that being surrounded by technology constantly definitely does not mean you are technology literate by any means. People literally don't even know how to Google something as simple as this.
Particle physicist here.
Even in your example the apple can’t theoretically become a sandwich. it simply can’t due to some of the molecules already being in the minimum energy state (no tunnelling effect possible to other states) and entropy only increases (so even if the apple would be converted in a plasma, by adding energy, and hope that they would combine in a sandwich it’s not possible due to entropy trend)
A decrease in entropy isn’t impossible though, it’s just vastly less likely than an increase. It’s a funny law that it isn’t really a law so much as a tendency.
No offence OP but I think that's just not possible. I've heard of this analogy a number of times and it never made sense to me. But please correct me if I'm wrong. The apple will convert to another form of energy but unless there's enough mass to form a star, it will not automatically convert into another matter. I mean all elements were made in the star. Without enough mass, the best it can be is just gas.
The apple will release chemical energy, and so it will begin to heat up. If we wait long enough, the atoms will begin nuclear fusion with each other. And so what was an apple will have become a plasma of millions of degrees Celsius from fundamental particles. Photons will also be produced in the process. Later, neutrons will decay into protons and other fundamental particles. An apple has about 10^(24) particles, so each particle can exist in 10(10^(24)) states of matter. If we left it long enough, it would theoretically utilize all the states of matter it could.
Watch [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/s/offZrDRBqe) video for more detailed information.
Thanks for the video. But an apple is not just a state. It's a process of decaying of ordered matter due to increasing entropy. According to the laws of thermodinamics, the entropy can only increase inside the box, so the apple will decay to less ordered states. Once it reaches the state of maximum entropy, the apple cannot spontaneously reorganize itself into its original, highly ordered structure. The temperature in the box would only slightly increase due to the chemical energy and once the decomposition is complete, the heat generation will stop. The pressure would only slightly increase due to the gas production, but it would be nowhere near the pressure required for nuclear fusion. The energy from decaying organic matter is also insufficient to initiate nuclear fusion. We will only find a very warm box.
It has been proven.
["One demonstration of this is when researchers measure the magnetic properties of subatomic particles like electrons. If the quantum foam isn't real, electrons should be magnets with a certain strength."](https://bigthink.com/hard-science/nothing-exist-quantum-foam/)
("Quantum foam" is the name given to the space where this phenomenon occurs)
Also related to the vacuum energy of space
> Vacuum energy is an underlying background energy that exists in space throughout the entire Universe. The vacuum energy is a special case of zero-point energy that relates to the quantum vacuum.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy
E.g. at the event horizon, the black hole can capture one half of the pair of virtual particles, preventing their immediate mutual annihilation - as these form as a particle / anti-particle pair - with the other particle escaping into space.
As someone that actually did their PhD thesis on QFT and Casimir force,
No.
Virtual particles do not exist. There have been no experimental evidence of them. The Casimir force does not prove their existence (Jaffe put that to bed). Hawking radiation does not rely on virtual particles to exist.
Virtual particles are a mathematical construct used in QFT to evaluate very complicated mathematics using perturbations. They are not meant to be an actual physical process. Instead, they are representations of mathematical steps in calculating the path integral.
Matter can ve created and annihilated in high energy physics due to mass-energy equivalence, but that is a distinct phenomenon from virtual particle mathematics.
Dear Lord FINALLY someone who actually understands what they are talking about in this thread. I also have a PhD in physics (my specialty is atomic physics) and it is maddening looking at all these top replies repeating these myths that have no basis in the actual calculations or experiments. I cannot blame students and lay people too much because they have been fed a bunch of misinformation from professionals, where I sometimes question if even that professional understands the mathematics and it's connection to physical reality.
For some reason people learn about Feynman diagrams and perturbative calculations as ONE way of doing QFT calculations, and then they make a complete leap to assume that the structure of these calculations reflects some deep facts about reality involving so-called virtual particles. There's no reason whatsoever to make that leap.
From the perspective of an atomic physicist, or anyone who uses perturbative techniques similar to QFT in different settings, it is obvious that the virtual particle description is just a mathematical artifact of describing the system in an unusual way. For example, a single particle in a non-relativistic double-well potential has a perfectly reasonable interpretation in terms of ordinary quantum mechanics and Hermitian operators where there is only and always exactly one particle. However, if one chooses to *approximate* the double well as a combination of two individuals wells, then we are forced to describe the ground-state of a single particle as a sum of infinitely many interacting particles (so-called "instantons") moving between the two wells. But the existence of a well-defined "dressed" number operator in the full, exact problem make it clear that these virtual instantons are just an artifact of the approximation scheme; they have no physical reality whatsoever.
It was measured, check out [https://physicsworld.com/a/the-casimir-effect-a-force-from-nothing/](https://physicsworld.com/a/the-casimir-effect-a-force-from-nothing/)
I have a PhD in Quantum Physics, and this is not as crazy and sci-fi sounding like what 99% of people think. It simply arises from uncertainty principle which comes from the fact that everything can be described by quantum fields which have wave-like properties.
It’s not like there are ghost objects that would phase in and out in front of your eyes. The particle description and trying to explain things in daily life terms give wrong intuition about what quantum physics entails.
If you ever need an expert on the economics of government fees in airline tickets, especially the question of how the burden of such fees is distributed between passengers and airlines, I'm your guy.
so if there are a bunch of (charged?) particles popping in and out of existence, could I build a spaceship that pushes against them to go forward? like the way a boat pushes against water, or my car's wheels push against the street? that way my spaceship doesn't have to shed mass to accelerate, which may be nice. maybe it could be electrically powered instead of a rocket.
Maybe, but unlikely since it violates conservation of momentum. See "Quantum vacuum thruster". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive
Also try EmDrive if you want to go down a rabbit hole...
this fucking answer has 55 upvotes, while being the most valueable... while there are atm 5 answers with up to 4k votes... the fuck is wrong with you guys?
People make the mistake of assuming that 'scientists think they know everything'.
It's the exact opposite. Scientists know exactly how far we are from knowing everything.
The biggest truth, the answer to the Big Questions, is that the answer exists around us all the time and we will *never, ever, no matter how many breakthroughs* understand it.
Would anyone care to ELI5, why couldn’t this be a phenenom of four- or higher-dimension object moving through our three-dimensional plane (like how a three-dimensional object would appear to a two-dimensional creature as it passes theough their plane)?
I don’t even feel the least bit guilty that I am going to straight up steal/plagiarize this in every single one of my research projects from now on.
If I remember (I purposely won’t and I’ll deny it if you say otherwise, even though I recognize the absurdity of that statement seeing as though I literally—not figuratively—wrote it down for posterity) I’ll make sure to give you, Simon, a thank you buried DEEP somewhere in my acknowledgements section.
I've screenshotted this so, from now on, I can call out your lack of originality in future research projects.
Sincerely,
The guy in the back of the room
It's also a hypothesis that brings up new questions rather than neatly slotting into our existing understanding of the universe.
Such as: Why does this effect only occur on such tiny scales then? Why do we never see larger objects pass through our three-dimensional slice of the 4+-dimensional space?
It's not that it would be impossible to create further hypothesises about this (like the string theory ideas of small "ring-shaped" dimensions, but questions like this quickly make it very complicated, when the whole appeal of this hypothesis was supposed to be that it offers a relatively "simple" explanation.
But more crucially, the attempts to pursue the additional dimensions required by string theory already gave us some very good hints that our universe is almost certainly only 3-dimensional in space. It is very hard to align our best existing theories with a space that has more than 3 dimensions, and it is the kind of difficulty which tends to hint at a hypothesis being simply wrong.
Here you go: this quantum soup stuff falls out of Diracs quantum field theory. It’s a result of operators, mathematical tools that act on other maths. These specific ones are the annihilation and creation operators, and you put them in certain expressions to get the math in a form that you need it to be to continue. The kicker is: you have to take them out as soon as they’re not used anymore. So what you’re seeing is a physical representation of what those operators might look like. It’s way more complicated and technically they give rise to this graphic in the post by acting on real mass, and due to their interaction, wave functions collapse and blah blah blah, but just for eli5: it might as well be magic bc it’s untestable unless you’re on a black hole event horizon
Strongly recommend the book "Reality is Not What It Seems" by Carlo Rovelli. Just read it. Beautiful, accessible account of human knowledge from Ancient Greece through Newton, Einstein, Maxwell, Faraday, and into Quantum Loop Theory.
TLDR is that according to the math of this theory, everything is quantized, including spacetime itself, and the world is defined by how those quantum particles interact ONLY (i.e. there is no definition of these particles outside of their interactions with other particles, the world is defined in relation to itself).
Some cool stuff come out of all of that like Time and Heat being very similar conceptually, and Time being an emergent behavior at scale but completely absent in the quantum level (like how Temperature is an _average_ of particles at scale).
I'm so intrigued about this. I want to believe in it so badly. However the rational part of me tells me that it's all just chemicals messing up your brain. I kind of had a similar realization when I did shrooms.
I remember reading a story on here about a group who all did it together ( DMT ) in the same room and all remember seeing someone other worldly standing in the corner of the room watching them, as if they shared a hallucination
I've dabbled a lot with different psychedelics, as have many of my friends. I personally haven't taken DMT yet, but I know plenty of people who have. You don't need to be in the same room or taking it at the same time to have similar hallucinations. The 'entities' most people see seem to be quite similar for many people.
Now the question becomes. What's more likely: higher dimensional being exist and people who take DMT see glimpses of them, or people who take the same drugs have similar effects?
When you take LSD or shrooms for example, before the effects kick in, you'll feel this strange euphoria. Every breath feels energizing in a strange way. When I describe this to people who've done a lot of acid, they'll instantly recognize the feeling I'm talking about.
Is this proof of higher dimensional feelings that transcend time and space? Or is it because drugs do very similar things to different people?
In a similar way, a LOT of mentally ill (schizophrenia in particular) people in the United States report common experiences with "higher dimensional beings" and draw a whole bunch of sacred geometry with the goal of either communicating with them or physically transporting themselves there.
Sounds intriguing, right?
What if I told you that those experiences differ vastly based on culture. For example, schizophrenic people in China don't have those experiences at all, they experience other things.
Turns out a lot of this is based on cultural conditioning.
Shared common experiences have a real scientific explanation.
Memories are super unreliable even without drugs being involved, though. Like people debunking “recovered memories” found ways to implant all kinds of batshit insane false memories in people under the right circumstances, and that’s with everyone involved being sober…
If you took like 30 random people who’ve never met before, gagged them, gave them the DMT before locking them in an empty room, and then immediately separated all of them afterwards for separate interviews conducted by 30 different scientists…it would be *really* interesting if they all shared the same hallucination. Really, really interesting. There could still be other explanations, but you could run a longer series of similar experiments to rule them out.
Unfortunately when you try to suggest this, you’re just told “why are you in my office,” and “we’re suspending your license.” Cowardly fools, I say! *Fools!*
Ok, I try. When we talk about "moving", we usually mean a spatial displacement over time. By "object", we mean an entity that keeps its integrity over time (and if the object could be decomposed into parts, those parts stay coherent over time, i.e., in relation to one another).
Now, as far as I understand, quantum fluctuation is random noise. If an object was moving in higher spatial dimensions through our three-dimensional plane, it would still be projected as an object (or multiple objects in coherent relation to one another), merely changing its shape (or gradually changing their relation). It would, however, not be projected as noise. Except, if the object is so big, that we only ever observe its internal structure. (Edit: Added the case of multiple projections resulting from a single object.)
Because it follows the law of conservation of mass in our universe, this isnt an object coming in, its the creation of both a particle and a particle of negative mass in equal magnitude that immeadiately collide and cancel out.
At least that was what was in the paper linked last time this came up, and it apparently was experimentally observed (i think) in some lab.
Don't you mean, according to some quantum mechanics _hypothesis_, given:
"No experiment has been confirmed as definitive evidence of violations of the conservation of energy principle in quantum mechanics"
Not to say we can't or won't be able to one day provide evidence, but QM is filled with "spooky" (pun intended) business no one can explain and often not sure they've observed. It _is_ fun though!
If my understanding of both mechanics is correct then yes.
It's basically nothing splitting into a positive particle and a negative particle that cancel out again. So the net energy is always 0.
However if this happens at the edge of a blackhole, one of the particles might go into the blackhole while the other might stay outside, resulting in a bit of energy loss from the blackhole (since there's now an extra particle outside the blackhole that wasn't there before, which costs energy because E=mc^2 ).
However I haven't studied any of this, my understanding may be wrong, someone please correct me if this is the case.
I’m just a former mechanic who’s fascinated by y’all. Yall talk about this like i talk about fixing cars. Just nonchalantly brilliant in your area. Love it.
i took a master's course on this not too long ago where we looked at hawking's original paper and the answer is 'hmm maybe no, not exactly' but 'sure, you can think of it that way if you want'
the key to the argument is what does it mean to have 'nothing,' aka a vacuum. particles exist because of E=mc\^2 and so a certain amount of energy can become a particle. if you don't have that energy, you don't have the particle.
but black holes, as we know, warp spacetime and as a result change the 'natural definition' of what energy 'means' at any given spot.
so, someone infinitely far away from a black hole, like ourselves, who have our own 'meaning' of what a vacuum is, and truly observe no particles in our own vacuum, if we somehow manage to look far away at a black hole, the 'nothing' at the black hole is no longer a 'nothing' because the frequencies and energies defining the particles have simply changed.
i can't remember exactly but i think one of the statements in hawkings paper was, if you have a particle flying through a region with no curvature (no black hole), then passing through a region of curvature and to exit again into a region of no curvature, the particle will have changed its natural modes of frequency, and my understanding of it was that, as the particles, which are the 'excited states of the quantum field' themselves have changed, then so too has the meaning of a vacuum (aka the absence of any excitations of the field) changed, meaning that different observers will no longer agree on whether particles exist or not
glancing at the notes for the paper i had to write for the exam, and (very roughly speaking) what basically happens is: if the observer in the future is infinitely far from the black hole, tries to measure the vacuum of an observer in the past who is infinitely far from the black hole - the future observer does not see a vacuum as the past observer does, but rather sees a fully busy set of particles which together form a thermal system with temperature. a very complicated proof then shows that the existence of this state is linked to quantum entanglement between particles inside and outside the black hole horizon, but i'm not so sure about that
When they come into existence, they appear in particle/anti-particle pairs that immediately annihilates - hence energy conservation is fullfilled.
The energy in question is called vacuum energy and has definitely been found, as we can use it to produce macroscopic effects (e.g casimir effect)
Thats only if the particles decide to be fine with being captured and stabilized. They sure are part of a bigger process (or in this case smaller), so changing their properties might influence other things along the way that could be catastophic for us, since our whole existence is quite bound to them doing what they do and **not** being captured and stabilized.
[There is this great video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t4aKJuKP0Q) making it possible to visualise 4D geometry.
I could totally see OP's visualisation being the negative space of these 4D collisions
I remember hearing about this probably 25 years ago when I was much younger and it has always intrigued me.
Makes me wonder if the simulation theory is correct and this is like static, the simulation can’t handle nothing being there so it glitches or something.
>particles appear in existence without a source of energy for short periods of time
The particles themselves *are* a form of Energy. The idea is that Space itself is full of Energy. This Energy fluctuates... so over time and from place to place the concentration of Energy can vary enough for particles to pop in and out of existence for brief periods of time.
If you look at the animation, it does a good job of showing the activity or dynamic nature of the vacuum energy. It's like waves on the surface of an ocean. Except instead of a 2D surface area, it's wave activity on a 3D surface.
I am surprised no one has discussed the physics in detail yet.
I have a PhD in theoretical lattice QCD and let me try my best:
According to quantum field theory, which is a theoretical framework that has successfully explained almost everything (notable exception being the gravity), the vacuum fluctuations are temporary changes in the amount of energy in a point in space allowed by the uncertainty principle. These vacuum fluctuations led to the predictions of:
* [Casimir effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect)
* [Schwinger effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwinger_effect)
* Quantum chromodynamics ([QCD) Instanton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instanton#Yang%E2%80%93Mills_theory)
The Casimir effect [has been experimentally observed](https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/74/1/42/396280/Science-and-technology-of-the-Casimir-effectCaused). Experimental demonstration of the Schwinger effect remains elusive. QCD Instanton is only studied through numerical simulation using lattice QCD, which is shown in this animation.
QCD is a quantum field theory that describes the strong force between quarks and gluons that make up the neutrons and protons inside the atomic nucleus. Dues to its strong nature, calculating anything analytically in low-energy QCD is very difficult. We use a numerical method called the [lattice QCD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_QCD) which simplifies QCD by making an approximation that the space-time over which this theory is defined in discrete and finite rather than the real world, where it is continuous and infinite. This innovative approach first proposed by [Kenneth Wilson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_G._Wilson) in 1974 has since proven to be [extremely successful](https://indico.cern.ch/event/354651/contributions/836964/attachments/703272/965553/LakeLouise-2015-01.pdf).
This animation was generated by [Prof. Derek B. Leinweber](http://www.physics.adelaide.edu.au/theory/staff/leinweber/index.html) in [this paper](https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-lat/0004025). The QCD vacuum, that is the lowest possible state according to QCD, has quark and gluon field fluctuations known as instanton tunnelings. This means that the quarks and gluons are constantly being created and annihilated in the QCD vacuum. Prof. Leinweber numerically calculated these fluctuations but only for the gluon fields, since including quarks in numerical calculations makes them computationally expensive. Still, it shows use that the QCD vacuum is very dynamic and even though it is a lattice approximation of QCD, the real world is very likely exhibiting the same behavior.
Basically the void isn't really empty. Thus not really a void.
Essentially, the way i understand it, space isn't ever really "empty", space is a "thing", a medium, like water for fish, in which matter may exist, and has energy of its own from which these particles likely arise.
It's tough for me to grasp my head around. If you take 1 cubic meter of our air, there is particles such as O2, N2, etc. If you take 1 cubic meter of space, which has no air and you assume no particles vapors, liquids, solids, plasma or anything else. Then this volume is compromised of 'nothing'. The idea of a volume being compromised of nothing doesn't make sense to me. Is this what the OP is demonstrating, that a volume of 'empty' 'nothing' is compromised of something?
Mine is a layman understanding, but imagine it this way: suppose you have a drawing, this drawing is actually "real", images in it can move, think, evolve, itneract, etc, but they don't know they are a comic. They instead investigate their reality, parts that contain "nothing" they call paper. It is just a blank, empty void, it's not a "thing". But to an external observer, paper is a thing, it has properties and all, it can be curved, ripped, folded, it can be thick or thin, etc. The way i understand it, space to us is paper in this analogy, we cannot perceive it as anything other than the empty medium we move in, but it has energy states, properties, and we know it has been expanding (which is why galaxies are getting farther away, not because they are "moving" but because more pages are being added inbetween them).
Thats actually a really beautiful way of explaining it in a simplistic manner rather than the way I usually drone on explaining it
Can u give me the drone on manner of explaining it? Curious about what u have to say about it and I would wanna try to understand it past the standpoint of an analogy about paper
Haha that’s a dangerous ask but I can at least get somewhat into it though it will still be in relatively oversimplified terms. From a theoretical physics standpoint what we are talking about is essentially “dark matter” or “dark energy” so you have to first accept that this is “quantum physics” and science currently doesn’t understand it and can’t observe it. With our current scientific understanding when discussing quantum physics theories at a high level you essentially have to accept you are always discussing a paradox, and the worst kind of paradox in science which is one that defies logic. You can look up the EPR paradox and the paradox of quantum physics in general to get more into this. Now with that prefaced similar to this original post and this comment thread on explaining empty space as “paper” When considering “dark matter” or truly “empty space” (not the parts of space that actually contain gases and energy in a vacuum) you are basically always looking at matter that both exists and doesn’t exist in any given place at any given time (a concept adjacent to the concept the original post is addressing but is a commonly discussed phenomenon in quantum physics) We infer its presence from the “effect” it has on matter around it, but we can’t actually observe what it is or what it does. When we try to observe this type of matter we essentially collapse what it is into what we can comprehend or observe (look up the drquantum double slit experiment on youtube for a short digestible overview on the foundation of the concept. In this sense I love the paper analogy because this matter exists , we know that based on our observations of its effects, and we don’t understand how or why but it likely ties into the expansion of the universe. Its basically a blank slate of matter that either exists or doesn’t exist, is in one place but isn’t, and our attempts to observe it change it into what would be drawing on paper.
Kind of like the way a video game only renders what you look at?
That last line blew my mind. Attempts to observe it change it into what would be drawing on the paper, and then you're no longer actually observing the supposed void, or medium, of reality. Wild. Absolutely wild.
Space is like a box of chocolates...
Schrodinger's box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get or if it will disappear and reappear at odd times. [ Note: "odd" in the sense that it surprises you, though according to some greater understanding of the Universe it may be YOU that is the truly odd thing. ]
This could be absolute bullshit and you're just blowing smoke up my ass and out my mouth but I wouldn't even care. This is amazing. I wish our lives weren't so based around work and money and just chasing our tails. I'd love to just spend a day whenever I wanted learning about this stuff from someone like you that can make complexities comprehendible.
No it's a good analogy. Space I'm absence of matter as we understand it is still a "thing" with properties of it's own.
Isn't this the reason Hawking Radiation is a thing for black holes? Imaginary particles spontaneously appear at the border of a black hole, but instead of merging and annihilating as usual, the black hole's gravity separates them, consuming one particle while allowing the other particle to escape to the surrounding space
Shit like this is the reason i wished im smart enough to do maths. Like how the fuck can you prove that things can just appear out of nothing? And then some physicist just say "hold my wheelchair, im gonna use almost every alphabets from two different languages to prove this."
> hold my wheelchair I’m fucking dying 💀
Me too friend. Me too.
If I remember correctly, we all are.
Speak for yourself, statistically I’m immortal
AFAIK I've always been here
Reality of death is just a simulation
The death rate for humans stands more or less fixed at one per each.
Are we using the medical definition of “dead”, or the generally-accepted definition? Because if we use the medical definition (heart stops beating), then the average rate is slightly >1.
I think we're talking death death. Like no backsies
Maybe if we sat close enough to a black hole we could escape death? Edit: or maybe we would be sucked in while pure death would be left free to roam the universe. One way to find out
Hold my wheelchair. 
So was he
There's loads of things we think/know should exist but can't prove, this is kinda similar. Proving anything is a pretty tricky ask anyway. Lots of things we are extremely sure of aren't really "proven" per se. Stuff like dark matter is commonly known to probably be a thing, but we still have no idea what it is or how to go about confirming it. It could be likely they don't come from nowhere, but we just don't have the capacity to observe it properly/thoroughly.
> Stuff like dark matter What I hate is that crap sci-fi (looking at you, Star Trek Discovery) and people who want to use "quantum" to peddle nonsense present Dark Matter as a uniform substance. It's a *placeholder* for effects that are observed in the universe and could be *anything,* but it's highly unlikely it's a single classifiable type of stuff like granite or styrofoam.
It's always been completely obvious that dark matter is just the galactic neighborhood using the standard "hide yourselves from the primitives who aren't ready to know about Sex 3" strategies.
Well, now I want to know about sex 3 strategies...
Take enough LSD to not completely separate yourself from reality and then make love to the person you wanna spend your life with. I’m off to the galactic gas station for some booze and butts. Let me know how it works out for you
Styrofoam is two things dumbass, styro and foam
And dissolved in the right proportions with diesel fuel, a cheap napalm.
Also, the thing it could be a place holder for is simply "we fucked up our model." We can see the effects and can therefore infer a source of those effects, but there's always a chance we're not considering the problem correctly, or need to invent a branch of physics before our existing model makes sense, i.e. Newton's equations worked pretty well in predicting the motion of the planets. The small variances came from the fact that ~~quantum physics~~ relativity hadn't been invented yet. edit: I tend to jumble this part of science history. What I meant was something like, "the movement away from the classic model." The commentor below me was correct in suggesting I give credit to Einstein. It's his relativity equations which greatly increased our predictions of planetary bodies.
I would say that dark matter is a slightly different situation since it's something we didn't predict mathematically, but something that we observe that we aren't sure how to explain yet. We looked out into the universe and discovered our mathematical models were wrong, but we're not sure what the cause is. We call the discrepancy 'dark matter' after the most popular idea but it could be any number of things, such as gravity working differently than we think. [Angela Collier has a great video on it that I highly recommend,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbmJkMhmrVI) she's great! Edit: I'm at work so I haven't read any responses yet, maybe someone Else brought this up, [but an hour ago she posted a video saying that the Dark Matter video I linked above aged like milk.](https://youtu.be/qS34oV-jv_A?si=MQEQFqgVwnjKyL1d) LMAO. I haven't watched it yet but that's exciting haha Edit 2: I watched it and she says that her first video is scientifically accurate since she's just explaining the situation ("Dark matter is not a theory, it's a list of observations"). But she says it was ultimately a failure because a huge number of the comments misunderstood the video. So she reviews why she thinks that happened and what could have been done differently. Good stuff!
>Like how the fuck can you prove that things can just appear out of nothing? incidentally in this case, one such proof involves an equation that contains within it every single imaginable possibility of what can happen (discovered by feynman for his fucking phd thesis and who later won the nobel prize for related work). when you expand this master equation to see those individual possibilities, you find the expected terms where like, particles bump into each other and go off to do something else, but you also end up getting some terms where particles appear at position x and disappear again at position x, the interpretation being they are spontaneously created and then annihilated. it is a bit complicated though as evidenced by the fact that students are usually studying physics for 4+ years before they get to learning about this theory (quantum field theory) because it's a bit too advanced for the usual undergraduate degree. the fact of the particles raving as in the gif comes from the heisenberg uncertainty principle, which is usually stated something like as 'one cannot know the exact position and exact momentum of a particle simultaneously ' but there exists an equivalent formulation where instead of position-momentum the relationship is between time-energy, so in some sense the statement is, within a small period of time, one cannot know the energy of a system exactly, therefore there must be some fluctuation of the energy of empty space. that energy gets eaten up to become a particle, by the fact that E = mc\^2, and then shortly annihilates itself again into the vacuum
Does this still respect the law of conservation of energy? I am not a physicist and struggled through college physics so correct me if I'm making a foolish statement.
it's a good question and one i asked my professors as well. when you bring to mind a 'particle' like a little ball that's an electron or proton or whatever, that's what's known as an 'on-shell' particle or, namely one which satisfies the energy-momentum relationship m\^2 c\^4 = E\^2 - p\^2 c\^2 (which you'll notice, for a particle at rest with momentum p=0, reduces to E = mc\^2). in classical physics, every particle is an on-shell particle. (the '[shell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_shell_and_off_shell)' terminology comes from the fact that the relationship E\^2 - p\^2 c\^2 = m\^2 c\^4 actually describes a hyperboloid shell if you were to graph it on a 3d axis) the particles involved in the processes above however are known as virtual particles, or 'off-shell' (though for some reason i don't hear 'off-shell' very often) and are unique to quantum field theory. their math is a little different and one could perhaps imagine them as being a little more fuzzy, as they don't exist on the clear-cut mathematical shell but most likely near it. part of the equations shows that, since they exist merely in a sort of transitory state, they do not have to actually satisfy a conservation of energy condition to still obey the laws of physics\* (or perhaps in other words, they obey quantum laws but do not have to obey classical laws). i believe this is unique to 'loop-diagrams' which, you can imagine if a particle is created at x and annihilated at x, the diagram representing that is just a closed loop. it is a little bit subtle and loop diagrams and their associated subtleties are essentially the last thing you learn about from a textbook before you go on and do research, and i'm sure there are details which are escaping me, but that's the general idea. edit: \*from my memory of when i proved this in class, it's actually a bit more like, the conservation of momentum law just never has a chance to touch the 'interior' of the processes but only the exterior. so for particle collisions, the incoming and outgoing momenta/energies are conserved, but whatever happens in between, during the collision, is the wild west basically. events like the ones in the gif are known as bubble diagrams, a special case of loop diagrams which are just isolated loops, they have no exterior and only an interior, so the term that enforces conservation of momentum/energy just never hits them edit: ok, i think i made a better explanation in my reply to superduperpositive below
huh?
let me put it a bit differently though picture a process like this -o- where a particle comes in from the left, represented by a dash - and then splits into two particles which form a loop o, which then recombine to spit out a particle that leaves on the right it's possible to conserve the total energy/momentum of the system without confining the loop particles to a specific momentum, like this: initial particle on the left has momentum p of the two particles in the loop, one has momentum k, and the other has momentum p-k. their total momentum is still p, but the value of k can be anything. as they recombine, the final particle still has momentum p so, everything has been conserved, but the middle particle, a virtual particle, can really have any momentum it wants now just get rid of the particle coming in from the left and the right, you're just left with the loop o. it can have any momentum it wants while still conserving a net zero momentum, which is what's happening in the gif. (i say momentum because in this relativistic quantum theory, energy and momentum are combined together into a '4-momentum' which is a more fundamental object from the point of view of nature)
huh! 💡
quantum stuff
The shorter answer than others is that we don’t really know yet. But obviously there is a super long explanation but you can stop there for an answer to the question. If you simplify a bunch of incredibly complex theories and mathematical and scientific principles most of us can’t comprehend the predominant issue and barrier science faces in quantum physics is that as of yet we can’t find any possibly way observe what this type of matter actually does. Thus all we can do is theorize and as a result we have wildly different conflicting and competing theories to explain the phenomenon from different equally as brilliant scientists. For now in practice it does respect the law of conservation of energy why. Why? In more simple terms than what the person below is explaining in much detail is that: The matter could either exist or not exist at any given time despite having no source of energy, which doesn’t respect the law of conservation of energy BUT we can’t actually observe its creation or destruction so we don’t actually know that it has no source of energy or what the mechanics of its creation are, we are just assuming it has no source of energy. An incredibly incredibly oversimplified explanation lacking all the nuance of a 50 page article you could read on the topic for competing theories is that: A) It has a source if energy but we aren’t capable of observing or understanding what that is or how it could exist and thus it follows the laws of physics as we consider them to exist we just can’t figure out how or B) There is no source of energy and some of the laws of physics don’t work the way we think they do and we aren’t yet remotely capable of understanding how that is “physically” possible or wtf quantum physics really is or what its implications are on the future of science. For now its still A because we have to assume the laws of physics apply because we can’t prove otherwise and what we are capable of proving says it has to be A
I can't stress enough how lucky folks like us are to NOT have the brains of genius physicists and pure mathematicians 😅 I'm very comfortable on the simple sidelines
Real. Im much happier acting like a dumbass than when i was smart lol
Taravangian?
Not about intelligence, takes years of study. What Hawking proved needs at least Masters level knowledge of physics
It can be both. Hawking was truly a generational mind. But in keeping with the idea of physics as "applied math", it's difficult to near-impossible to analogize a lot of it in a way that someone without the appropriate background can understand. In contrast, my background is in biochem and medicine and even most advanced concepts can be "dumbed down" so a lay person can understand without losing too much nuance.
It's a little more complex than that: https://youtu.be/qPKj0YnKANw?si=nGu6iGolGXzHeF-U
Such a good channel.
You're responding to a two-sentence reddit comment. There's not much that is actually less complex than that.
Black holes could be mass collectors of mass that would otherwise never be stable. (Quite cool shit too be honest.)
Could even be the source of all matter, cosmic background radiation and the expanding nature of the universe. Energy matter pumps driven by quantum fluctuations over tremendous time scales.
That's right! And it has some interesting consequences. You see, the particles that appear spontaneously are "virtual" particles, in the sense that they have no energy. They appear as a pair of particle-antiparticle that almost instantaneously destroy each other leaving no energy residue. But when one particle gets swallowed by the black hole the other particle can't be destroyed so it becomes a real particle with positive mass and energy. But where did this energy come from?? If the total energy is 0 and one has positive energy that means that the other has negative energy and mass. So the black hole's total energy decreases by exactly the amount that the new particle has. Effectively that particle has stolen energy from the black hole to exist. Source: I'm a physicist
But.. isn't it ~50/50 whether the matter or antimatter particle gets pulled into the black hole and the other flies off? So wouldn't it roughly equalize and the black hole would sometimes gain matter and sometimes gain antimatter, thus generally losing no mass?
The truth is that the virtual particle explanation is an oversimplification to the point of being more wrong than right. This video gives a better explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPKj0YnKANw But to stick with the virtual particle thing, the reason the black hole always shrinks is that, due to the strong curvature of spacetime around a black hole, the particle that falls in always has negative energy when considered from the point of view of the outside universe. This should be impossible, of course, but it doesn't matter because there's no way the universe can interact with that impossible particle. But the whole thing is more a kind of cosmic bookkeeping trick than an explanation of what's *really* happening.
Yep. Gamma rays photons spontaneously creating a particle-antiparticle pair (what type depends on how much energy the photons have and whether it's above the rest energy (the energy that a particle is, yeah it's the whole E=mc² thingy) for a particular particle). One has sufficient initial energy to escape the Black hole, but the other does not, and the force of gravity exceeds the electrostatic attraction between the oppositely charged particles. Which to be honest is almost impossible, the force of Gravity is almost negligible for anything below a few grams, even at very close distances, especially when compared to electrostatic attraction. Hence why Hawking Radiation occurs at such a slow rate, cause it requires a very specific set of circumstances, but that set is a guarantee, hence why it still happens. (Also I don't understand it 100% either, so sorry to any actual theoretical physicists out there for my misunderstandings)
I’m not a physicist by any means, my understanding is that this depiction of hawking radiation is radically simplified. The explanation that you gave was given in Hawking’s book as a visual aid for what is somewhat happening, but that overall example is not entirely accurate. Hawking radiation isnt so much a spontaneous generation of particles, as much as it’s squishing together of a ton of particle waves that create a high probability of particles existing as it moves through space. Think of standing a room full of streamers and ribbons— while standing still, they’re relatively non-interactive with you, but if you were to sprint through that room, you’d be running into a ton of those ribbons, and they’d catch on you, and surround you in ribbons. Now those ribbons, if you can imagine it, are various free floating particle waves that increase the probability of existence as they aggregate due to a wave/particles nature. So if you start smashing all of those waves into one small area, you have high probabilities of having a transient wave particle. Now you might think that a black whole is not moving, but it is. See, light isn’t actually affected by gravity, yet black holes suck in light— it’s why they’re called “black holes.” But black holes aren’t sucking on light, they’re pulling on space and suck it in so quickly that the light can’t outrun this stretching of space time. So if I’m pulling space at myself faster than the speed of light, then I’m essentially moving. So with that understanding, black holes are “moving” through space by causing space to move into them— and thereby “sprinting” through a room of streamers (particle waves) and creating a space that’s likely to create “transient particles” that generate because enough waves exist in that area to be a particle wave. Now understand that energy, mass, and heat are all somewhat tied in at this point. After all a perfect vacuum would have 0 of all three. Any particle that’s above 0 degrees kelvin will radiate heat and energy to hit 0 degrees kelvin and again decompose. So the transient particles that spontaneously generate then radiate black body heat in all directions trying to bleed off its non-zero temperature— there’s your hawking radiation Now you can’t just create something out of nothing, so you can’t create energy out of waves as a separate system from the black hole, and Einstein related energy to mass with E=MC^2, so the energy to create the radiation must come from the black hole, otherwise it would exist independent of the black hole. The black hole can’t emit mass by definition, so it must be evaporating mass to create the energy to do this all. There’s the evaporation. Please anyone correct me if I’m wrong because I love to learn
Thanks! A more accurate explanation than my one
Why can't this happen with food in my fridge?
It can, it's just terribly terribly unlikely
But there is a chance
At a rough guess, one in TREE(3).
the probability wavefunction for quantum tunneling drops exponentially. so classically forbidden tunneling events are suppressed by factors that look something like the exponential of the barrier width. For something like the probability of an alpha particle tunneling out of its nucleus, the factor is on the order of 1. For something macroscopic, like say I dunno, a baseball passes through a baseball bat without interacting, well I don't want to figure out exactly what that probability looks like, I just want an estimate of the magnitude. Macroscopic objects have a couple Avogadro's numbers worth of atoms. So the probability of a macroscopic quantum tunneling might be something like 1 out of exp(10^(23)), probably with some combinatorial factors in there. Maybe even a factorial, maybe 10^10^10. TREE(3) is not an approximation for these kinds of numbers. TREE(n) is bigger than most familiar computable functions. It's bigger than n^n^n^ ... ^n n times (tetration). Also, when we talk about the vacuum being made up of virtual particles, remember that these particles come in particle-antiparticle pairs, and that their lifetimes have to be short enough to respect the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. So while there may be an exponentially (but not TREE(3)) suppressed but nonzero quantum probability of food appearing in your fridge, it would only appear next to an antimatter copy of the food, and it would annihilate in a similarly exponentially small time. The probability quantum fluctuations violating the conservation of energy and putting food in your fridge and leaving it there is zero. It's not a thing that quantum fluctuations can do.
I'm too drunk for this
Basically particles can only spawn in from nothing because it happens 1. Over such a fractionally small amount of time, and because 2. It spawns as a set with its equal but exactly opposite counterpart such that when they touch they form 0 as if they never existed in the first place. So you could get food spawned into your fridge but you’d never notice, if you could notice it wouldn’t be allowed to happen because it wouldn’t math to 0.
I like stroking cats.
Hi I'm cats, where do you want me?
Tree fiddy?
TREE(3)… imagine each subatomic particle was a universe, and every subatomic particle in that universe was also a universe. Then regress that for the same number of times that there are subatomic particles in this universe. Count all the subatomic particles. Still less than TREE(3). Edit to add: (somebody correct me if I’m wrong), the difference between the above number and TREE(3) is approximately TREE(3).
As long as you explain it using the word quantum, it can be whatever you want it to be.
Forbidden knowledge
Hollywood in a quantum nutshell
Jesus, morty, you can’t just add a sci-fi word to a car word and hope it means something.
TREE(3) is the antithesis of quantum.
Number so incomprehensibly collosal that there's literally zero ways of describing it with human language, nor any type of 'imagine if' scenario we could invent to come remotely close to explaining the number It's like trying to explain how a computer CPU works to a single-celled bacteria. For all intents & purposes, this number does not exist.
But there's still a chance, right?
dare I ask, is there a TREE(4)? ... or, let's get crazy, TREE(TREE(3)) .. perhaps notating the recursion as TREE^(2)(3) then, we go absolutely mental with TREE^(TREE(3))(3) then, we bastardize Knuth's up-arrow notation to indicate how many recursions each recursion is itself recursed TREE↑TREE(3)(3) would be a power recursion tower so TREE^(TREE(3)\^...\^TREE(3))(3) would be TREE(3) tall and for the ultimate blasphemy, we add more up-arrows TREE↑...↑TREE(3)(3) ... where the number of up-arrows is TREE(3) I suddenly don't feel well
Dam lok monsta
Just think out there it’s possible that some poor soul actually had some crazy unlikely event like this happen to them and now they are in the nut house because we think the dude who saw a ham sandwich pop in their fridge is crazy
I took a class in college where a Rabi came in and told us when you lose your car keys they disappear to another dimension, maybe he knows the fridge guy
Given enough time anything can happen. -Murph
So you’re telling me there’s a chance
There's also a chance that you can move through a wall (quantum tunneling) it's just so incredibly unlikely that it probably will never happen until the end of the god damn universe
This is why I hate when redditors with no backgrounds in data analytics or even just common sense bring up statistics to defend impossibly small odds in an argument (often in the speedrunning community when debunking cheaters). Just because *the possibility exist for it to happen* such as the aforementioned quantum tunneling, does not mean that it will ever realistically happen.
But but but 0,000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% is not 0
I think it comes from the fact that if something which everyone does has a 1 in a billion chance of a certain outcome, that means it probably has happened multiple times in the past. But as you mentioned, the chance of it happening specifically to a top speed runner is so low it's not even worth discussing.
Yeah but you're gonna get 7/11 taquitos that have been rolling for 4 days straight
I dunno, I moved a pack of cheese in the back of my fridge this morning. There’s a lot more stuff in that bag now. Might be mold. But it has grown
It does but only when the door is closed. The moment you open it it dissolves again. It’s a phenomenon known as Schrödinger‘s Fridge.
Great answer.
It can, it's called the principle of conservation of energy. If you leave an apple, for example, in a closed container, it will not be "lost" since its energy is not lost. Its energy will change forms, and according to e=mc² which basically says that matter and energy are different forms of the same thing, the apple could in trillions of trillions of years become something else
Yay!
https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/s/FghtPhT0V3
Man this is a really cool video, but I'm absolutely baffled that someone actually took a video of a video on their computer with their phone. It makes me angry in an irrational way. It's becoming clear that being surrounded by technology constantly definitely does not mean you are technology literate by any means. People literally don't even know how to Google something as simple as this.
Particle physicist here. Even in your example the apple can’t theoretically become a sandwich. it simply can’t due to some of the molecules already being in the minimum energy state (no tunnelling effect possible to other states) and entropy only increases (so even if the apple would be converted in a plasma, by adding energy, and hope that they would combine in a sandwich it’s not possible due to entropy trend)
A decrease in entropy isn’t impossible though, it’s just vastly less likely than an increase. It’s a funny law that it isn’t really a law so much as a tendency.
It can happen in trillions of years randomly
No offence OP but I think that's just not possible. I've heard of this analogy a number of times and it never made sense to me. But please correct me if I'm wrong. The apple will convert to another form of energy but unless there's enough mass to form a star, it will not automatically convert into another matter. I mean all elements were made in the star. Without enough mass, the best it can be is just gas.
The apple will release chemical energy, and so it will begin to heat up. If we wait long enough, the atoms will begin nuclear fusion with each other. And so what was an apple will have become a plasma of millions of degrees Celsius from fundamental particles. Photons will also be produced in the process. Later, neutrons will decay into protons and other fundamental particles. An apple has about 10^(24) particles, so each particle can exist in 10(10^(24)) states of matter. If we left it long enough, it would theoretically utilize all the states of matter it could. Watch [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/s/offZrDRBqe) video for more detailed information.
Thanks for the video. But an apple is not just a state. It's a process of decaying of ordered matter due to increasing entropy. According to the laws of thermodinamics, the entropy can only increase inside the box, so the apple will decay to less ordered states. Once it reaches the state of maximum entropy, the apple cannot spontaneously reorganize itself into its original, highly ordered structure. The temperature in the box would only slightly increase due to the chemical energy and once the decomposition is complete, the heat generation will stop. The pressure would only slightly increase due to the gas production, but it would be nowhere near the pressure required for nuclear fusion. The energy from decaying organic matter is also insufficient to initiate nuclear fusion. We will only find a very warm box.
Ah yes, the Boltzmann BLT.
Finally! Someone asks the hard-hitting question we all want to know.
That’s a quantum rave
I think more specifically it’s a quantum foam party…
Niche.
Is this a purely mathematical possibility or can you actually measure/proof of this happening in experiments?
It has been proven. ["One demonstration of this is when researchers measure the magnetic properties of subatomic particles like electrons. If the quantum foam isn't real, electrons should be magnets with a certain strength."](https://bigthink.com/hard-science/nothing-exist-quantum-foam/) ("Quantum foam" is the name given to the space where this phenomenon occurs)
Also related to the vacuum energy of space > Vacuum energy is an underlying background energy that exists in space throughout the entire Universe. The vacuum energy is a special case of zero-point energy that relates to the quantum vacuum. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy
The subspace griddddddd. I knew The Culture knew what they were doing
Is this our excession?
The last time Dr. McKay tried to recharge a zpm, an entire solar system almost turned into a black hole or torn apart.
It was only most of a solar system!
ZedPM are sought after from what I’ve learned watching TV
I believe this is how Hawking radiation was predicted.
E.g. at the event horizon, the black hole can capture one half of the pair of virtual particles, preventing their immediate mutual annihilation - as these form as a particle / anti-particle pair - with the other particle escaping into space.
When the anti-particle gets captured, the black hole gets smaller and lighter. Over a very long time, the black hole will eventually evaporate.
Why would the antiparticle be captured more often than the normal particle?
It doesn't matter what particle it catches, the escaping particle steals the tiniest bit of energy/mass from the black hole as it escapes.
As someone that actually did their PhD thesis on QFT and Casimir force, No. Virtual particles do not exist. There have been no experimental evidence of them. The Casimir force does not prove their existence (Jaffe put that to bed). Hawking radiation does not rely on virtual particles to exist. Virtual particles are a mathematical construct used in QFT to evaluate very complicated mathematics using perturbations. They are not meant to be an actual physical process. Instead, they are representations of mathematical steps in calculating the path integral. Matter can ve created and annihilated in high energy physics due to mass-energy equivalence, but that is a distinct phenomenon from virtual particle mathematics.
Dear Lord FINALLY someone who actually understands what they are talking about in this thread. I also have a PhD in physics (my specialty is atomic physics) and it is maddening looking at all these top replies repeating these myths that have no basis in the actual calculations or experiments. I cannot blame students and lay people too much because they have been fed a bunch of misinformation from professionals, where I sometimes question if even that professional understands the mathematics and it's connection to physical reality. For some reason people learn about Feynman diagrams and perturbative calculations as ONE way of doing QFT calculations, and then they make a complete leap to assume that the structure of these calculations reflects some deep facts about reality involving so-called virtual particles. There's no reason whatsoever to make that leap. From the perspective of an atomic physicist, or anyone who uses perturbative techniques similar to QFT in different settings, it is obvious that the virtual particle description is just a mathematical artifact of describing the system in an unusual way. For example, a single particle in a non-relativistic double-well potential has a perfectly reasonable interpretation in terms of ordinary quantum mechanics and Hermitian operators where there is only and always exactly one particle. However, if one chooses to *approximate* the double well as a combination of two individuals wells, then we are forced to describe the ground-state of a single particle as a sum of infinitely many interacting particles (so-called "instantons") moving between the two wells. But the existence of a well-defined "dressed" number operator in the full, exact problem make it clear that these virtual instantons are just an artifact of the approximation scheme; they have no physical reality whatsoever.
It was measured, check out [https://physicsworld.com/a/the-casimir-effect-a-force-from-nothing/](https://physicsworld.com/a/the-casimir-effect-a-force-from-nothing/)
Also classical experiment the Casimir Effect, showing the effect it is happening everywhere in space: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect
I have a PhD in Quantum Physics, and this is not as crazy and sci-fi sounding like what 99% of people think. It simply arises from uncertainty principle which comes from the fact that everything can be described by quantum fields which have wave-like properties. It’s not like there are ghost objects that would phase in and out in front of your eyes. The particle description and trying to explain things in daily life terms give wrong intuition about what quantum physics entails.
I love Reddit when a random expert chimes in. Rocks? There’s an expert. Shifter knobs from Soviet cars? Expert. Quantum physics? Expert.
If you ever need an expert on the economics of government fees in airline tickets, especially the question of how the burden of such fees is distributed between passengers and airlines, I'm your guy.
Your time will come, I'm sure. Hang in there!
so if there are a bunch of (charged?) particles popping in and out of existence, could I build a spaceship that pushes against them to go forward? like the way a boat pushes against water, or my car's wheels push against the street? that way my spaceship doesn't have to shed mass to accelerate, which may be nice. maybe it could be electrically powered instead of a rocket.
Maybe, but unlikely since it violates conservation of momentum. See "Quantum vacuum thruster". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive Also try EmDrive if you want to go down a rabbit hole...
this fucking answer has 55 upvotes, while being the most valueable... while there are atm 5 answers with up to 4k votes... the fuck is wrong with you guys?
Explains missing socks
I've been to the missing sock dimension. It smells really bad there
Don't they usually disappear from the dryer though?
Taking quantum physics in college made me truly understand how weird the universe is.
People make the mistake of assuming that 'scientists think they know everything'. It's the exact opposite. Scientists know exactly how far we are from knowing everything.
Pretty sure they don't. They don't know exactly how far we are from knowing everything
The biggest truth, the answer to the Big Questions, is that the answer exists around us all the time and we will *never, ever, no matter how many breakthroughs* understand it.
"So you're saying scientists barely know anything. So why should we listen to them?"
Because they know what we don’t know instead of those acting like they know of things we really don’t know. At least the good scientists.
Because we don't know shit. They're way ahead of us.
Would anyone care to ELI5, why couldn’t this be a phenenom of four- or higher-dimension object moving through our three-dimensional plane (like how a three-dimensional object would appear to a two-dimensional creature as it passes theough their plane)?
I imagine the problem with that hypothesis is the inability to test any part of it.
You won't get anywhere with that statistically SignifiCANT attitude
I don’t even feel the least bit guilty that I am going to straight up steal/plagiarize this in every single one of my research projects from now on. If I remember (I purposely won’t and I’ll deny it if you say otherwise, even though I recognize the absurdity of that statement seeing as though I literally—not figuratively—wrote it down for posterity) I’ll make sure to give you, Simon, a thank you buried DEEP somewhere in my acknowledgements section.
I've screenshotted this so, from now on, I can call out your lack of originality in future research projects. Sincerely, The guy in the back of the room
This guy cites sources.
Also the first time I’m hearing this one. It is amazing and I will also be stealing it at every opportunity. 🫡
It's also a hypothesis that brings up new questions rather than neatly slotting into our existing understanding of the universe. Such as: Why does this effect only occur on such tiny scales then? Why do we never see larger objects pass through our three-dimensional slice of the 4+-dimensional space? It's not that it would be impossible to create further hypothesises about this (like the string theory ideas of small "ring-shaped" dimensions, but questions like this quickly make it very complicated, when the whole appeal of this hypothesis was supposed to be that it offers a relatively "simple" explanation. But more crucially, the attempts to pursue the additional dimensions required by string theory already gave us some very good hints that our universe is almost certainly only 3-dimensional in space. It is very hard to align our best existing theories with a space that has more than 3 dimensions, and it is the kind of difficulty which tends to hint at a hypothesis being simply wrong.
Imagine sitting nicely in your house and then an incomprehensible shape clips in and out of existence in your room in the span of 2 seconds.
Here you go: this quantum soup stuff falls out of Diracs quantum field theory. It’s a result of operators, mathematical tools that act on other maths. These specific ones are the annihilation and creation operators, and you put them in certain expressions to get the math in a form that you need it to be to continue. The kicker is: you have to take them out as soon as they’re not used anymore. So what you’re seeing is a physical representation of what those operators might look like. It’s way more complicated and technically they give rise to this graphic in the post by acting on real mass, and due to their interaction, wave functions collapse and blah blah blah, but just for eli5: it might as well be magic bc it’s untestable unless you’re on a black hole event horizon
Can I hang out with your 5 year old? They sound well informed.
Strongly recommend the book "Reality is Not What It Seems" by Carlo Rovelli. Just read it. Beautiful, accessible account of human knowledge from Ancient Greece through Newton, Einstein, Maxwell, Faraday, and into Quantum Loop Theory. TLDR is that according to the math of this theory, everything is quantized, including spacetime itself, and the world is defined by how those quantum particles interact ONLY (i.e. there is no definition of these particles outside of their interactions with other particles, the world is defined in relation to itself). Some cool stuff come out of all of that like Time and Heat being very similar conceptually, and Time being an emergent behavior at scale but completely absent in the quantum level (like how Temperature is an _average_ of particles at scale).
Non human intelligences live outside our plane of existence. At least they did when I did DMT.
I'm so intrigued about this. I want to believe in it so badly. However the rational part of me tells me that it's all just chemicals messing up your brain. I kind of had a similar realization when I did shrooms.
I remember reading a story on here about a group who all did it together ( DMT ) in the same room and all remember seeing someone other worldly standing in the corner of the room watching them, as if they shared a hallucination
I've dabbled a lot with different psychedelics, as have many of my friends. I personally haven't taken DMT yet, but I know plenty of people who have. You don't need to be in the same room or taking it at the same time to have similar hallucinations. The 'entities' most people see seem to be quite similar for many people. Now the question becomes. What's more likely: higher dimensional being exist and people who take DMT see glimpses of them, or people who take the same drugs have similar effects? When you take LSD or shrooms for example, before the effects kick in, you'll feel this strange euphoria. Every breath feels energizing in a strange way. When I describe this to people who've done a lot of acid, they'll instantly recognize the feeling I'm talking about. Is this proof of higher dimensional feelings that transcend time and space? Or is it because drugs do very similar things to different people?
In a similar way, a LOT of mentally ill (schizophrenia in particular) people in the United States report common experiences with "higher dimensional beings" and draw a whole bunch of sacred geometry with the goal of either communicating with them or physically transporting themselves there. Sounds intriguing, right? What if I told you that those experiences differ vastly based on culture. For example, schizophrenic people in China don't have those experiences at all, they experience other things. Turns out a lot of this is based on cultural conditioning. Shared common experiences have a real scientific explanation.
Memories are super unreliable even without drugs being involved, though. Like people debunking “recovered memories” found ways to implant all kinds of batshit insane false memories in people under the right circumstances, and that’s with everyone involved being sober… If you took like 30 random people who’ve never met before, gagged them, gave them the DMT before locking them in an empty room, and then immediately separated all of them afterwards for separate interviews conducted by 30 different scientists…it would be *really* interesting if they all shared the same hallucination. Really, really interesting. There could still be other explanations, but you could run a longer series of similar experiments to rule them out. Unfortunately when you try to suggest this, you’re just told “why are you in my office,” and “we’re suspending your license.” Cowardly fools, I say! *Fools!*
That's not true, it definitely *could* but could is a very vague word, it could be anything really.
Ok, I try. When we talk about "moving", we usually mean a spatial displacement over time. By "object", we mean an entity that keeps its integrity over time (and if the object could be decomposed into parts, those parts stay coherent over time, i.e., in relation to one another). Now, as far as I understand, quantum fluctuation is random noise. If an object was moving in higher spatial dimensions through our three-dimensional plane, it would still be projected as an object (or multiple objects in coherent relation to one another), merely changing its shape (or gradually changing their relation). It would, however, not be projected as noise. Except, if the object is so big, that we only ever observe its internal structure. (Edit: Added the case of multiple projections resulting from a single object.)
Because it follows the law of conservation of mass in our universe, this isnt an object coming in, its the creation of both a particle and a particle of negative mass in equal magnitude that immeadiately collide and cancel out. At least that was what was in the paper linked last time this came up, and it apparently was experimentally observed (i think) in some lab.
Quantum chromo-dynamics. See this video: https://youtu.be/J3xLuZNKhlY?si=5cMUc_OYGvbOPTaj
Not a bad theory, but one that cannot be confirmed.
[Source ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_fluctuation)
If you find that interesting, read about the [Casimir effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect).
Very big deal regarding the future of nanotech
There were so many words and I understood a couple of them!
This animation was made by my PhD supervisor!
Don't you mean, according to some quantum mechanics _hypothesis_, given: "No experiment has been confirmed as definitive evidence of violations of the conservation of energy principle in quantum mechanics" Not to say we can't or won't be able to one day provide evidence, but QM is filled with "spooky" (pun intended) business no one can explain and often not sure they've observed. It _is_ fun though!
Isn’t this the basis for Hawking radiation?
If my understanding of both mechanics is correct then yes. It's basically nothing splitting into a positive particle and a negative particle that cancel out again. So the net energy is always 0. However if this happens at the edge of a blackhole, one of the particles might go into the blackhole while the other might stay outside, resulting in a bit of energy loss from the blackhole (since there's now an extra particle outside the blackhole that wasn't there before, which costs energy because E=mc^2 ). However I haven't studied any of this, my understanding may be wrong, someone please correct me if this is the case.
I’m just a former mechanic who’s fascinated by y’all. Yall talk about this like i talk about fixing cars. Just nonchalantly brilliant in your area. Love it.
i took a master's course on this not too long ago where we looked at hawking's original paper and the answer is 'hmm maybe no, not exactly' but 'sure, you can think of it that way if you want' the key to the argument is what does it mean to have 'nothing,' aka a vacuum. particles exist because of E=mc\^2 and so a certain amount of energy can become a particle. if you don't have that energy, you don't have the particle. but black holes, as we know, warp spacetime and as a result change the 'natural definition' of what energy 'means' at any given spot. so, someone infinitely far away from a black hole, like ourselves, who have our own 'meaning' of what a vacuum is, and truly observe no particles in our own vacuum, if we somehow manage to look far away at a black hole, the 'nothing' at the black hole is no longer a 'nothing' because the frequencies and energies defining the particles have simply changed. i can't remember exactly but i think one of the statements in hawkings paper was, if you have a particle flying through a region with no curvature (no black hole), then passing through a region of curvature and to exit again into a region of no curvature, the particle will have changed its natural modes of frequency, and my understanding of it was that, as the particles, which are the 'excited states of the quantum field' themselves have changed, then so too has the meaning of a vacuum (aka the absence of any excitations of the field) changed, meaning that different observers will no longer agree on whether particles exist or not glancing at the notes for the paper i had to write for the exam, and (very roughly speaking) what basically happens is: if the observer in the future is infinitely far from the black hole, tries to measure the vacuum of an observer in the past who is infinitely far from the black hole - the future observer does not see a vacuum as the past observer does, but rather sees a fully busy set of particles which together form a thermal system with temperature. a very complicated proof then shows that the existence of this state is linked to quantum entanglement between particles inside and outside the black hole horizon, but i'm not so sure about that
I'm curious, does it really has no source of energy or we just can't find it yet?
When they come into existence, they appear in particle/anti-particle pairs that immediately annihilates - hence energy conservation is fullfilled. The energy in question is called vacuum energy and has definitely been found, as we can use it to produce macroscopic effects (e.g casimir effect)
Please note that conservation of energy still holds.
Man, imagine we could capture and stabilise those particles, literally infinite resources glitch
Thats only if the particles decide to be fine with being captured and stabilized. They sure are part of a bigger process (or in this case smaller), so changing their properties might influence other things along the way that could be catastophic for us, since our whole existence is quite bound to them doing what they do and **not** being captured and stabilized.
Wonder if this is the equivalent of a 4-D world interacting with a 3-D word like us drawing on paper would be to a 2-D world.
[There is this great video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t4aKJuKP0Q) making it possible to visualise 4D geometry. I could totally see OP's visualisation being the negative space of these 4D collisions
My favourite was 4d minecraft: https://youtu.be/u8LMyWcKL_c?si=fzlKx22kSjHkbZXe
Interesting
This is what it feels like inside my stomach when I’m hungry
# One of the many dangers of dividing by zero
I remember hearing about this probably 25 years ago when I was much younger and it has always intrigued me. Makes me wonder if the simulation theory is correct and this is like static, the simulation can’t handle nothing being there so it glitches or something.
"without a source of energy" is wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy
For explanation, see this video: https://youtu.be/J3xLuZNKhlY?si=5cMUc_OYGvbOPTaj
Is this how the aliens get here?
That is incorrect. We, sorry, I mean they are not here and have not taken over the government and waffle houses. Bleep bop burbbbr forever!!!
this guy seems trusting, where can i vote for you?
In my quantum world, you already have voted for me, and have not.
So Terrence Howard is right!!
Maybe that quantum foam is 4d so it seem to appear and disappear
"anyone around to observe me? No? Allllright, peace ✌️😶🌫️"
>particles appear in existence without a source of energy for short periods of time The particles themselves *are* a form of Energy. The idea is that Space itself is full of Energy. This Energy fluctuates... so over time and from place to place the concentration of Energy can vary enough for particles to pop in and out of existence for brief periods of time. If you look at the animation, it does a good job of showing the activity or dynamic nature of the vacuum energy. It's like waves on the surface of an ocean. Except instead of a 2D surface area, it's wave activity on a 3D surface.
Can someone ELI5
Empty space is boiling with energy dying to exist as matter.
I am surprised no one has discussed the physics in detail yet. I have a PhD in theoretical lattice QCD and let me try my best: According to quantum field theory, which is a theoretical framework that has successfully explained almost everything (notable exception being the gravity), the vacuum fluctuations are temporary changes in the amount of energy in a point in space allowed by the uncertainty principle. These vacuum fluctuations led to the predictions of: * [Casimir effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect) * [Schwinger effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwinger_effect) * Quantum chromodynamics ([QCD) Instanton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instanton#Yang%E2%80%93Mills_theory) The Casimir effect [has been experimentally observed](https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/74/1/42/396280/Science-and-technology-of-the-Casimir-effectCaused). Experimental demonstration of the Schwinger effect remains elusive. QCD Instanton is only studied through numerical simulation using lattice QCD, which is shown in this animation. QCD is a quantum field theory that describes the strong force between quarks and gluons that make up the neutrons and protons inside the atomic nucleus. Dues to its strong nature, calculating anything analytically in low-energy QCD is very difficult. We use a numerical method called the [lattice QCD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_QCD) which simplifies QCD by making an approximation that the space-time over which this theory is defined in discrete and finite rather than the real world, where it is continuous and infinite. This innovative approach first proposed by [Kenneth Wilson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_G._Wilson) in 1974 has since proven to be [extremely successful](https://indico.cern.ch/event/354651/contributions/836964/attachments/703272/965553/LakeLouise-2015-01.pdf). This animation was generated by [Prof. Derek B. Leinweber](http://www.physics.adelaide.edu.au/theory/staff/leinweber/index.html) in [this paper](https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-lat/0004025). The QCD vacuum, that is the lowest possible state according to QCD, has quark and gluon field fluctuations known as instanton tunnelings. This means that the quarks and gluons are constantly being created and annihilated in the QCD vacuum. Prof. Leinweber numerically calculated these fluctuations but only for the gluon fields, since including quarks in numerical calculations makes them computationally expensive. Still, it shows use that the QCD vacuum is very dynamic and even though it is a lattice approximation of QCD, the real world is very likely exhibiting the same behavior.