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guide
to the nothing
of the vacuum of science
in the "age of science," attitudes toward nothingness--what
the ancients called the void and what is now referred to as
the vacuum--have undergone a dramatic shift. beginning with
Galileo, who made empty space the arena of reality, modern physicists
have gradually raised the status of nothing. today many physicists
believe that nothingness is the foundation of everything, not
just the arena in which matter resides but the substrate from
which matter is actually constructed. as physicists envision
the universe now, everything that exists is ultimately just
a complex enfolding of the underlying substrate of empty space.
this vision presents the universe, as English physicist Paul
Davies has summed it up, as "nothing but structured nothingness."
indeed, it might be said that one way of characterizing the
history of modern physics is the gradual rise in the status
of nothing from anathema to supreme principle. ...
Galileo would complete this revolution by making empty space
the foundation of his world-picture, the neutral background
against which the motion of matter was mechanistically played
out. in the Newtonian world-picture that was the crowning achievement
of the scientific revolution, empty space shares equal billing
with matter and force as one of the three fundamental pillars
of reality.
with the development of 20th-century physics, the status of
empty space would rise even higher, eventually eclipsing matter
and force to stand alone as the ultimate foundation of all that
is. ... physicists now believe that everything in our universe--every
speck of matter and every active force--arose from the nothingness
of empty space. one of the most important stories of modern
science has been the gradual folding of more and more elements
of our world-picture into the fabric of space. Einstein began
the process, inadvertently it must be said, by revealing with
his general theory of relativity that gravity could be understood
as a byproduct of the underlying curvature of space. unlike
Newton, for whom gravity remained the ultimate mystery, Einstein's
theory places the origin of this fundamental force in the architecture
of the void. that something as powerful as gravity--the force
which holds our planet in orbit around the sun and our sun in
orbit around the galaxy--could be a byproduct of empty space
seems to defy reason.
the equations of general relativity even allow for the existence
of empty universes: vast expanses of space and time devoid of
matter and energy. physicists refer to these as "vacuum" universes.
such a world would be Augustine's nightmare, a pure and purposeless
void, in the most profound sense. but the pure void of general
relativity is itself an abstraction; physicists have since discovered
that the vacuum is far from empty.
that other great pillar of 20th-century physics, quantum mechanics,
showed us that the vacuum is teaming with "virtual" particles,
ephemeral ghosts of ordinary matter which constitute a seemingly
infinite background of energy that some people hope will one
day provide the solution to all our energy needs. though such
a prospect is highly contentious (most physicists reject the
idea outright), there is no doubt that the vacuum has continually
surpassed physicists' expectations; every time they think they
have found nothing, it has turned out to be a very complex something.
today it looks as if Aristotle might well get the last laugh
and that a true vacuum, a genuine nothingness, is little more
than an illusion. the nothingness of space seems to encode not
only gravity but also all the other fundamental forces physicists
recognize. the unofficial goal of physics today is indeed to
find a unified theory which would integrate general relativity
and quantum theory into a single mathematical framework, enfolding
everything into the fabric of pure space. the current leading
contender is string theory, which describes matter as microscopic
strings undulating in six infinitesimal dimensions of space,
themselves embedded within the four cosmological dimensions
that relativity describes.
- based on a text by Margaret Wertheim
---
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