The Physics of Nothing

NY Times ^ | June 12, 2009 | John Tierney

[neverdem]

A dispatch from my colleague Dennis Overbye:

As fans of the late, great “Seinfeld,” know, there is a lot to say about nothing.

At the World Science Festival Thursday night, four physicists spent nearly two hours under the jocular and irreverent grilling radio broadcaster John Hockenberry, cohost of “The Takeaway,” and barely scratched the surface of the void that is the background or perhaps the platform of all our experience. They did in the end offer an answer to the question that has plagued philosophers and scientists: Why is there something rather than nothing at all?

“Nothing is unstable,” Frank Wilczek, a physicist and Nobel laureate from MIT, finally said to a general murmur of agreement of his colleagues on stage, John Barrow of Cambridge University in England, Paul Davies of Arizona State and George Ellis of the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

Given a chance, nature will make nothingness boil with activity.

But that insight, which is unlikely to put theologians out of business, is getting ahead of a story that starts with the Greeks, who were so uncomfortable with the Big Zero that they didn’t have it in their number system. Along the way, as Dr. Barrow told us in a breezy history review, Nothing got replaced by something called the Vacuum, which the physicist James Clerk Maxwell defined as what was left when you took everything else away.

And that proved to be quite a bit ­– the laws of physics, for example. Where do they come from? For them to guide the universe into existence out of pure old-fashioned nothingness, Dr. Davies pointed out, would require them to have “a transcendent existence.” Nobody claimed to know what that would mean.

But quantum weirdness has made the Nothing known as the vacuum even more substantial...

[SpaceBar]

I always preferred Dr. Feynman’s approach to physics. Consolidate all your observations and distill them into the most concise, mathematically elegant set of statements you can that are both internally consistent and useful for making predictions or generalizations about the behavior of the system of interest. But leave philosophy to the philosophers.

[neverdem]

Cool plasma rips away tenacious tooth bacteria (Cool Plasma Toothbrush)

A Fourth indicator of a Stroke

Oldest Evidence Of Leprosy Found In India

Experts Say Chinese Filter Would Make PCs Vulnerable

FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.

[I see my hands]

"Consolidate all your observations and distill them into the most concise, mathematically elegant set of statements you can that are both internally consistent and useful for making predictions or generalizations about the behavior of the system of interest. But leave philosophy to the philosophers"

That statement satisfies all its stated ideals.

[TigersEye]

“Nothing is unstable,” Frank Wilczek, a physicist and Nobel laureate from MIT, ...

That is a rather negative way of looking at it. You could say the same thing in a much more positive way by saying "Nothing is potentially anything."

Stated either way the idea is illogical and inaccurate as well as a poor use of language. Nothingness would be the correct term and if it has any meaning then "nothingness is nothingness."

FWIW nothingness does not exist.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks neverdem.

---

· List topics · post a topic · FR page layout · Google ·

---

[MHGinTN]

‘It costs billions to take a close look at nothing.’ ... As is typical, these folks have offered a false ‘title’, because virtual is something, even at quantum mechanical level, so they haven’t ever actually focused upon nothing or nothingness. I suppose it was to be expected, since the human mind cannot possibly conceive of nothing ... even zero is something.

[Hoosier-Daddy]

“Zero-point energy. I always save the best stuff for myself.”

[Hoosier-Daddy]

“even zero is something.” You can say that again. He is something else.

[Larry Lucido]

So before the big bang, life in the universe was like waiting for a table in a Chinese restaurant....

[TigersEye]

I suppose it was to be expected, since the human mind cannot possibly conceive of nothing ... even zero is something.

Ex-ack-a-lackily! Nothingness only exists as a concept and that is a thing.

[SuperLuminal]

"FWIW nothingness does not exist"

WHAT!??

You mean that you haven't heard of any of the ideas coming out of the WH and made a judgment about the intelligence level there??
{:-)

[TigersEye]

Ouch! I done been pwnd as they say. :-{

[samtheman]

Interesting to think of nothing as what’s left when you take away everything else... and what’s still there are the laws of physics. Unless, I guess, there’s a way to remove them also. Then you’d have true nothing.