Wherever we look, if we look closely enough, we find nature defying the notion of a dead, inert universe. Science has tended to dismiss the innate activities of matter as Brownian motion or “stochastic noise”—the fuzziness that inevitably arises when we try to measure or observe something, which is in human terms little more than a nuisance. But some of these activities are far more consequential, and do not even require matter to incubate them. In a perfect void, pairs of particles and antiparticles can appear out of nowhere without violating any laws of physics.
