An interesting article from Quanta about the physics of nothing and how it could actually mean the opposite:
As modern physicists have grappled with more sophisticated candidates for the ultimate theory of nature, they have encountered a growing multitude of types of nothing. Each has its own behavior, as if it’s a different phase of a substance. Increasingly, it seems that the key to understanding the origin and fate of the universe may be a careful accounting of these proliferating varieties of absence.
“We’re learning there’s a lot more to learn about nothing than we thought,” said Isabel Garcia Garcia, a particle physicist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in California. “How much more are we missing?”
So far, such studies have led to a dramatic conclusion: Our universe may sit on a platform of shoddy construction, a “metastable” vacuum that is doomed — in the distant future — to transform into another sort of nothing, destroying everything in the process.
Don’t you love the constant influx of existential crises coming at us from all angles, suggesting that everything is ultimately for nothing?
Okay, so that’s 75% tongue-in-cheek and this metastability won’t occur in our lifetime (or likely any human’s lifetime) but I’d almost rather not know.
Filed under: quantum physics theoretical physics