Nothingness Quotes

“The universe is but one immense unit; it cannot be separated into spatial domains that are totally empty and others that are completely filled with matter. Matter and space can be distinguished from each other, but where we draw the blurred line between them is largely a matter of taste.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“This question about the reason we do not observe any quantum mechanical uncertainty in the appearance of flies or stars was never tackled by the inventors of quantum mechanics. Given that we are convinced that the basic laws of quantum mechanics are at the bottom of all mechanical laws, and that the beginning of our world can be understood exclusively in quantum mechanical terms, we have to ask ourselves: Why are there any observable systems at all on the classical side of the demarcation line between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics? Why are there these stumbling blocks, these flies, these stars? The demarcation line proper, between quantum physics and classical physics, was clearly stated by the fathers of quantum mechanics: Classical laws govern large and heavy classical systems. But they failed to tell us how and why the world became that way.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“Every object is embedded in the vacuum with which physics surrounds it. This means we don't observe the naked object-rather, we see it as the surrounding vacuum will dress it. Take, as an example, a positive electric charge, such as the proton's. Its presence modifies the surrounding vacuum. The effect appears because the fluctuating electrically charged particles and antiparticles in the vacuum move apart during their lifetime. The proton attracts negative charges and repels positive ones. On the average, the charge distribution will then look much as we illustrate in figure 76a. The field of what is now a polarized vacuum weakens the proton's electric field. Its true naked charge is larger than what it appears to be from some distance; the closer we get to the proton, the larger the charge we observe.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“To sum up: Electron and positron annihilate as a pair, in a particle-antiparticle collision. Their energy heats up the vacuum; when the hot vacuum decays, real particles emerge. The annihilation energy of electron and positron has, in the process, been used to realize the hidden faculties of the vacuum. For individual cases, the results may be muon-antimuon pairs, quark-antiquark pairs, and so on. In passing through the intermediate state of an excited vacuum, it looks as though the electron and positron actually knew which virtual particles their annihilation might realize. But in fact, electrons and positrons in themselves are pointlike, and can be fully described in terms of a theory that knows neither muons nor quarks. So it is not the electron and the positron that "know" the possible final products of their interaction- it is the intermediate state, our vacuum, that has that knowledge.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“This elementary process is symbolically illustrated in figure 59c: A photon becomes an electron-positron pair; inversely, an electron and a positron can combine into a photon (or as we said above, annihilate into a photon). But for the process to take place, we need a fourth particle as a catalyst. In the cloud chamber picture in figure 12, the catalyst was an electron that was knocked out of its atomic configuration in the process. Whereas the process in figure 59c cannot proceed without such a catalyst, the one in figure 59d can: Two photons can materialize into an electron-positron pair; and, of course, the inverse process, electron-positron annihilation into two photons, is equally possible.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“LIGHT AS AN EXCITATION OF SPACE

Let's try and understand light in terms of an excitation of empty space-even if that makes no immediate sense. We might alternatively understand light in terms of a field, as we introduced that term in chapter 2. But light differs from the fields of temperature distributions, of sound, or of water in fluid motion described there: Whereas those phenomena are due to the composite action or motion of molecules at a more elementary level, light has its own reality at that level. It cannot be understood in terms of an oscillation of some matter that also exists in the dark-no, light is nothing but just that, light. It is an oscillation of an abstract nature, equivalent to a set of numbers that are assigned to each point in space. True, these abstract numbers have implications-most notably, they imply energy. But while a water wave transports energy by the movement of water molecules, the passing of a light wave does not mean that anything material oscillates. The energy of the liquid wave is the energy associated with gravitation and motion of its molecules; the energy of light is energy pure and simple, associated with every illuminated point in space.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“Can a cat vanish, but not its grin? Can structure exist without matter? This may be possible in the abstract interpretation of Plato and Plotinus; in a concrete sense, it is impossible. Structured matter can be interpreted as an excitation of unstructured matter, just as the cat with the grin may be seen as an excitation of the nongrinning cat.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“To date we know only two real media that offer almost no resistance to moving bodies.
One such medium was discovered in the 1930s: If we cool down helium, a noble gas, to temperatures close to absolute zero, it will flow through the thinnest of tubes with almost no friction. This phenomenon is called superfluidity. Another substance that shows superfluidity is a rare isotope of the same element, called helium-3. It takes experience to explore all the facets nature offers us. No form of logic can replace it.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“Bodies influence the space that surrounds them; they tell us whatever we can learn about that space. Does this mean that, possibly, there is no such thing as space by itself? Could it be that space is nothing but a theoretical construction invented for the purpose of giving the observed world an ordered framework? Could it be that we perceive as the reality of space is nothing but the influence of abstract laws of nature on the behavior of massive objects or bodies? That space is wedded to these bodies and will vanish if they do? This is a respectable position to take. For more than two thousand years, it has coexisted with the view of space as the primary stage that permits material objects to make their appearance. Natural philosophers who theorized about space can easily be charted on a scale between these two extreme positions. On the left is Thales of Miletus, whose "space" is nothing but one shapeless fluid; on the other side, there is Democritus, with his empty space in which material objects whir around. Leibniz on the left, Von guericke and Newton on the right.
Albert Einstein juxtaposed these two concepts of space as, on one hand, the positional qualities of the physical world (left) and, on the other, the container of all physical objects (right) in his left-hand case, there is no space without an object; on the right, such an object cannot be thought of except in conjunction with the space that surrounds it-thereby assigning to space a higher reality than that possessed by objects.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“Any space that distinguishes directions and accelerations cannot be "empty", in Aristotle's meaning.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“But for all practical purposes the formation of ice breaks the continuous symmetries of water non-deterministically. This non-deterministic symmetry breaking is called spontaneous symmetry breaking.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“The energy of the vacuumin the universe presents us with a dilemma: We know, on the one hand, that this energy must be miniscule, since, as we have discussed, we would otherwise be unable to look straight ahead. All possible contributions to the energy of the vacuum must (almost) cancel out. The dilemma is that we know of many sources of vacuum energy that, to the best of our knowledge, are independent of each other; it would be hard to understand why their contributions should cancel. While the contributions of different sources to the total energy of the vacuum have positive as well as negative signs, such that they might cancel, at the same time each of them is huge compared with the experimental limit on their sum. This is the problem of the cosmological constant.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“All in all, we come to the conclusion that no more than 1 percent of all matter in the universe falls in the visible category.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“It is not only the theory of inflation that tells us we don't know all of the masses in the universe. In addition, there are observed facts that tell us the same. One of these is the chaotic motion of galaxies inside galaxy clusters. Galaxies don't appear singly, but rather inside such larger groupings. They are kept from escaping by the gravitational pull of the mass of the cluster. Individual galaxies move inside a cluster with velocities that are measurable by means of the Doppler effect. That's how we know these velocities to be so large that the gravity of the visible mass of the cluster does not suffices to hold the galaxies it contains together: Were there only the cluster's visible mass, its galaxies would have had to fly apart long ago. To keep all of them within the cluster, there must be about one hundred times more mass present than what is noticeable to us as visible matter.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“At the end of inflation, just as after the hot Big Bang, the universe is hot. It is, we might say, self-created by dint of its explosive growth: The inflationary process generates space, and the energy that space contains, from essentially nothing. To repeat Alan Guth's dictum, "The universe may be the ultimate free lunch.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“The energy that was hidden in the false vacuum is liberated in the course of this phase transition of the universe into the real vacuum; it now becomes normal energy, just like the thermal energy liberated in the process of crystallization of ice in water. The Higgs field takes the place of the ice crystals as the physical vacuum develops in the inflationary model. The energy generated in the inflationary process, which originates in the false vacuum ground state, manifests itself as motion energy in the Higgs field. We might say that it makes the Higgs field shiver. It then produces radiation and massive particles that move about randomly. In this thermalization process, it increases the temperature of the universe; it spreads evenly throughout all space. Inflation ends some 10^-33 after its own Big (or Small!) Bang in the same state the universe would have reached in the hot Big Bang model without inflation. This coincidence is at the basis of our model's success. We believe we can understand all further developments in terms of various theories, some of which are quite speculative, but none of which clash with the inflationary model. The success of the inflationary scenario when compared with that of the hot Big Bang is its implied explanation of the properties of the universe after t = 10^-33 seconds; these properties have to be entered into the hot Big Bang model as unexplained initial conditions.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“SYMMETRY BREAKING

The preferential direction fixed by this spontaneous symmetry breaking will now determine which among the elementary particles will share in the strong interaction and which will not. The gist is that the spontaneous symmetry breaking sees to it that, in addition to gravity, the one unified force that knew no preferential direction in the abstrat space of particle properties is now split into two distinguishable forces-the strong force and the electroweak force.

The symmetry that broke down in this phase transition is what we call GUT symmetry. Formally speaking, GUT symmetry breaking, which permits us to tell the difference between the strong force and the electroweak force, is equivalent to symmetry breaking in the ferromagnet. As one direction in space is spontaneously chosen as a preferential one, a field emerges and, simply by differing from zero, points in some given direction, breaking the previous symmetry. In the ferromagnet, this field is the magnetization; in our cooling universe, it is the Higgs field.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“We recall that the term inflation stands for the explosive growth of the universe by a factor of 10^50 in the time span between t = 10 ^-36 and t = 10 ^ -33 seconds. This is the time sequence suggested by the original Big Bang model but does not necessarily depend on it.

In our present context, it is important to see what triggered the inflationary expansion. The models we mentioned have a vacuum state of our world pass from a symmetric phase into one with reduced symmetries.

At the onset of inflation, some 10^-36 or 10^-35 seconds after the Big Bang, the initial era of the universe, when all the forces had the same strength, has long since passed; that ur-state had held only until t = 10^-44 seconds. Tryon's model includes the possibility that no matter at all existed before the onset of inflation; there was only empty space, but all the laws of nature did exist. In the model of Hartle and Hawking, inflation simply follows what they call the Planck time, the time at which quantum mechanical uncertainty also included space and time. It is at that time that the symmetry of the TOE, the theory of everything, collapsed.

Now back to the start of inflation at t = 10^-36 seconds: Up to it, and ever since the Planck time, there have been two forces-gravity and the unified forces of the elementary particles. All particles shared mass zero at the onset of inflation; all forces shared range infinity. The universe was, at a temperature of 10^28 degrees- sufficiently cold to permit the crystallization of a preferential direction in the abstract space of particle properties. This is analogous to the emergence of a direction of magnetization, as we discussed above-with the one difference that we have generalized geometric space to an abstract space.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“In physics terms, the reason for symmetry breaking is the instability of the symmetric state.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“The oscillations-or waves-mandated by the Goldstone theorem originate in the application of symmetry operations to small domains.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“THE GOLDSTONE THEOREM

It doesn't matter for our discussion that the broken symmetry of our world chooses a particular direction not in actual geometrical space but rather in an abstract space. There is one feature we can carry over from the previous consideration: Spontaneous symmetry breaking implies the existence of waves. The spin-waves in the ferromagnetic world of our model are replaced by excitations in the abstract space of particle properties, where the symmetry breaking actually occurs. In this world, there must be equivalent excitations, waves: The so-called Goldstone theorem says that every symmetry of the laws of nature that is not also a symmetry of the ground state implies the existence of an elementary particle; it even fixes the properties of that particle.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“In the process, we might remember that the ground state, the vacuum state of our world, doesn't display all the symmetries of the laws of nature either. Our relation to the universe is similar to that of the magnet-dwellers to their home, The difference is that the preferred direction of our world is not in the space of our geometric experience; rather, it is an abstract direction in the generalized space made up out of the properties of elementary particles. The fundamental laws of nature in the real world are completely symmetric with respect to rotations in geometrical space.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“For all we know, the universe as a whole does not rotate. Now, the reader might ask, with respect to what should the universe be rotating at all? With respect to some system that has no centrifugal force, it would appear. To the best of our knowledge, there is no such force in a system that does not perform a rotational motion with respect to what we call the firmament-the visible universe in its entirety. This either may be due to amazing coincidence or it may mean that the universe itself determines what, in the laws of nature, makes up the meaning of rotation. This is the way Mach's principle would have it. But does this make sense? If I sit on a stool that turns, I can use Newton's formulae to calculate my rotational velocity with respect to the universe. If that velocity turns out to be zero, the formula tells me there is no centrifugal force, and in fact I will not notice any. So far so good for Mach's principle.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“The space that is added as the universe expands has the same properties-curvature, energy density-as the parent space.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“We know there is a conservation law for electric charge; this simply means that the sum of these charges in any process remains constant. If a positive charge pops out of the vacuum, a negative one must accompany it, to keep the overall charge zero, as the vacuum demands. To the best of our knowledge the sum of all charges in the universe is zero-and so it must have been from its origin.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“To gain any intuitive understanding of the breakdown of this ultimate symmetry through vacuum effects at the critical 10^-44 seconds after the Big Bang, we will have to resort to examples in the space of our experience. Starting at that critical instant, gravity assumes a part of its own, distinct from the other three forces; these remain unified up to another branching point at 10^-36 seconds after the Big Bang. Up to it, they are jointly described by what the physicist calls a GUT, a grand unified theory. This theory joins the conjoined electroweak force and the strong force by means of an interaction we know very little of, and which we will call the GUT force. At 10^-36 seconds after the Big Bang, the strong force split off from the unified weak and electromagnetic forces. The range of the GUT force then is miniscule, close to zero, while that of the other forces remains infinite. The theory that describes the development of our universe from the second branch point at 10^-36 seconds to a third one at about 10^-10 seconds after the Big Bang, we know quite well, and it has acquired the familiar name of the standard model of particle interactions. To be more precise, we should specify "of the strong and electroweak interactions."

The breaking of GUT symmetry is accompanied by an effect of enormous importance for the development of our universe. This effect, called inflation, describes the unimaginably rapid growth of the universe by a factor of 10^50 in the miniscule time span of 10^-33 seconds. We will discuss this inflation together with the breaking of GUT symmetry. The overall symmetry breaking across the three branch points we mentioned was accomplished by the time our universe had reached the mature age of 10^-10 seconds; by this time, the forces were much as we know them today, with their diverging strengths and ranges. Of the present forces, only gravity, electromagnetism, and the color force retain infinite range, just like the unified force prior to the first branch point. It is the Higgs field that must be held responsible for the fact that the weak force and the GUT force lost infinite range when it pervaded our space.

To visualize this, recall from Chapter 7 how the Higgs field gives masses to the particles that interact with it, including the exchange particles of the weak and the GUT interaction. The larger the mass of an exchange particle, the smaller the range of the force it transmits. Conversely, infinite range can be realized only by forces that are carried by massless field particles.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“If the universe as we know it is nothing but a vacuum fluctuation with a purloined total energy that is not much different from zero, it may exist for quite a while before the vacuum decides to call in the loan.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“We don't really know whether there are black holes that emit observable amounts of Hawking radiation. Nevertheless, there is no way to overestimate the importance of Hawking's discovery; it not only showed that the physical principles of the general theory of relativity, of thermodynamics, and of quantum mechanics are mutually consistent; it also proved them to be interdependent. If we leave quantum mechanics out of the game, thermodynamics and the general theory of relativity, are mutually inconsistent. Hawking restored our confidence that we can apply the principles of the two signal theories of our century-the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics-simultaneously and without creating contradictions. We have no overall theory that unifies them-or, put differently, all the above remains somewhat conjectural. But let's remember that we cannot develop a true understanding of the early universe without a quantum theory of gravity. It was small enough so that quantum mechanics had to apply, and it was massive enough so that its ultimate matter density mandated the action of gravitational forces between its constituents.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“If all of the presently observable universe pooled its matter to create one giant black hole, its radius measured in light-years would amount to the same number as its age in actual years: approximately 10^10.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space

“We have good reason to believe that space and time begin to merge into quantum mechanical uncertainty at distances this small; they must be treated quantum mechanically from this scale downward. If the diameter of a black hole is well above the Planck length, we are justified in treating the particles that fluctuate about its Schwarzschild radius in terms of quantum mechanics while treating space, time, and gravitational field in the classical terms of general relativity.

This is exactly what Hawking did, and his theory makes sense for black holes with diameters well above the Planck length. We will see what that means for the mass, temperature, lifetime, and thermal radiation of a black hole. But we don't know whether or not (and, if at all, how) it shrinks in size below this Planck length. In particular, we don't have any idea whether it will actually disappear in an explosion, leaving behind a flat, undistorted space, or will simply propagate through space as a mini-mini-black hole with a diameter of 10^-33 centimeters.”
― Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space