The Quantum Vacuum: Why Empty Space Is Anything but Empty

<v Speaker 1>Welcome to the quark Side. Quantum Physics podcast, an exploration
<v Speaker 1>of the fundamental structure of reality, where quantum laws govern matter, energy,
<v Speaker 1>and information. Here, uncertainty is a feature, not a flaw,
<v Speaker 1>and understanding begins at the smallest scales.
<v Speaker 2>I want you to try something with me. It's a
<v Speaker 2>mental exercise I do sometimes when I can't sleep.
<v Speaker 3>Oh boy, okay, I'm listening.
<v Speaker 2>Imagine you are standing in the middle of the Great
<v Speaker 2>Basin desert, just you, the silence, and the ground beneath
<v Speaker 2>your feet. It's midnight, no moon. You look up.
<v Speaker 3>I know this view. It's one of the most humbling
<v Speaker 3>views on.
<v Speaker 2>Earth, it really is. You see the Milky Way arching
<v Speaker 2>over you. You know that dense river of stars. You
<v Speaker 2>see Jupiter, maybe Mars, but mostly, if you're being honest
<v Speaker 2>about what your eyes are actually registering, you see black darkness. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>sheer darkness, right, vast crushing darkness. And our brain has
<v Speaker 2>a very specific default setting for interpreting that darkness. We
<v Speaker 2>look at the space between the stars and we think
<v Speaker 2>that is empty.
<v Speaker 3>It's the ultimate intuitive assumption. I mean, it makes perfect sense.
<v Speaker 3>If I take a box and I pump out all
<v Speaker 3>the air, sweep of the dust block the light and
<v Speaker 3>I don't know shield it from magnetic fields. I have
<v Speaker 3>an empty box. I have nothing.
<v Speaker 2>And for most of human history that was it. That
<v Speaker 2>was the assumption. The void is just well, it's the
<v Speaker 2>absence of stuff. But today we're going to take a
<v Speaker 2>sledgehammer to that intuition, because it turns out that empty
<v Speaker 2>box doesn't exist.
<v Speaker 3>It really really doesn't.
<v Speaker 2>We're going to explore the quantum vacuum, and the headline,
<v Speaker 2>which sounds completely contradictory, is that nothing is actually something.
<v Speaker 2>In fact, empty space might be the most active, chaotic,
<v Speaker 2>and energetic thing in the entire universe.
<v Speaker 3>It's a foundation of reality. That's not an exaggeration. It's
<v Speaker 3>not just a backdrop the action. It's a seating ocean
<v Speaker 3>of activity that shapes atoms, that evaporates black holes, and
<v Speaker 3>might even be responsible for the Big Bang itself.
<v Speaker 2>So if you could actually see what's happening in those
<v Speaker 2>dark patches of the night sky, you wouldn't see emptiness
<v Speaker 2>at all.
<v Speaker 3>No, you'd see a riot.
<v Speaker 2>All right in the void. I love that image. But
<v Speaker 2>before we get to the kaas, we have to, you know,
<v Speaker 2>respect the history here, because for a long time, the
<v Speaker 2>smartest people on Earth. We're talking Newton, gal Leo. They
<v Speaker 2>were firmly on team empty.
<v Speaker 3>Oh. Absolutely, And it makes sense, doesn't it. This is
<v Speaker 3>what we call the classical view. Think about Isaac Newton.
<v Speaker 3>For him, space was a stage, a stage, a passive,
<v Speaker 3>wooden stage. The actors were the planets, the stars, you know,
<v Speaker 3>the apples falling from trees. They moved around on the stage.
<v Speaker 3>They bumped into each other, gravity pulled them this way
<v Speaker 3>and that. But the stage itself, it did nothing. It
<v Speaker 3>was just the container, an inert, passive background.
<v Speaker 2>So it was just there. If you kicked all the
<v Speaker 2>actors off the stage, if you somehow removed all the
<v Speaker 2>matter and energy from the universe, the stage would just
<v Speaker 2>sit there, existing but completely dead.
<v Speaker 3>Exactly in classical physics, and this includes Maxwell's incredible work
<v Speaker 3>on electromagnetism later on, the definition of empty was basically
<v Speaker 3>a mathematical zero.
<v Speaker 2>No particles, no particles, tell us no radiation, well us
<v Speaker 2>no radiation.
<v Speaker 3>And that equals a zero field value. That equals truly
<v Speaker 3>fundamentally empty.
<v Speaker 2>And to be fair, this view worked. It worked beautifully
<v Speaker 2>for centuries.
<v Speaker 3>It did. It predicted planetary orbits with stunning accuracy. It
<v Speaker 3>let us build bridges, design machines. There was absolutely no
<v Speaker 3>reason to doubt.
<v Speaker 2>It until the twentieth century showed up and decided to
<v Speaker 2>ruin everyone's simple, organized life or make it infinitely more fascinating,
<v Speaker 2>depending on how much you like linear algebra. I guess,
<v Speaker 2>so the quantum revolution happens. What was the specific thing,
<v Speaker 2>the smoking gun that killed the idea of the empty container?
<v Speaker 3>It wasn't one single discovery, but it all hinges on
<v Speaker 3>one fundamental rule, a pillar of the whole theory. Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, I know this one, or I think I do.
<v Speaker 2>This is you can't know where a particle is and
<v Speaker 2>how fast it's going at the same time.
<v Speaker 3>Rule. Right, that's the version most people learn in school,
<v Speaker 3>and it's absolutely correct position and momentum. But the uncertainty
<v Speaker 3>principle is actually a much deeper, much broader statement about
<v Speaker 3>the nature of reality itself.
<v Speaker 2>So it's not just about position and speed, not at all.
<v Speaker 3>It applies to other pairs of properties too, You can
<v Speaker 3>think of them as complementary variables. And the one that
<v Speaker 3>completely breaks the concept of nothing is the relationship between
<v Speaker 3>energy and time.
<v Speaker 2>Energy and time, So you can't know the energy and
<v Speaker 2>the time simultaneously. That sounds a little more abstract.
<v Speaker 3>It is, but think of it like photography. You know,
<v Speaker 3>if you're trying to take a picture of a fast
<v Speaker 3>moving car, you need a really really fast shutter speed
<v Speaker 3>to freeze the action right.
<v Speaker 2>If the shutter is open too long, the car is
<v Speaker 2>just a blur. If it's open for a millisecond, the
<v Speaker 2>image is crisp, exactly.
<v Speaker 3>But there's a trade off, isn't there. To get that
<v Speaker 3>crisp frozen moment that is a super precise measurement of time,
<v Speaker 3>you have to let in very little light. You lose
<v Speaker 3>information about the scene, about the energy of the photons
<v Speaker 3>because your window is so short.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, I'm following.
<v Speaker 3>The uncertainty principle is like the ultimate unbreakable shutter speed
<v Speaker 3>limit for the universe.
<v Speaker 2>So how does that apply to energy.
<v Speaker 3>Well, the formula states that the uncertainty and energy we
<v Speaker 3>call it delta e multiplied by the uncertainty in time
<v Speaker 3>delta T must be greater than or equal to a
<v Speaker 3>specific tiny number half of planks.
<v Speaker 2>Constant, which is a famously tiny number.
<v Speaker 3>It is incredibly tiny, But the crucial part is that
<v Speaker 3>it is not zero, and that distinction, that tiny non
<v Speaker 3>zero value changes everything.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, so what does that tell us?
<v Speaker 3>It tells us that nature forbids you from knowing the
<v Speaker 3>exact energy state of a system if you look at
<v Speaker 3>it for a brief enough window of time.
<v Speaker 2>So if I try to take an incredibly fast snapshot
<v Speaker 2>of empty space, the image.
<v Speaker 3>Of the energy becomes blurry. It has to. The uncertainty
<v Speaker 3>in the energy explodes to compensate for the certainty in
<v Speaker 3>the time. It means that on very very short time scales,
<v Speaker 3>the energy of any specific point in space must fluctuate.
<v Speaker 2>Hang on, must fluctuate. You don't mean it can fluctuate?
<v Speaker 3>No, I mean must. It's a requirement. Nature literally does
<v Speaker 3>not have a zero setting that it can hold for
<v Speaker 3>a fixed short period of time. A precise energy of
<v Speaker 3>zero for a precise time interval violates the uncertainty principle.
<v Speaker 2>So empty space isn't sitting at zero energy. It can't.
<v Speaker 3>It can't. It's jittering, it's vibrating around zero, frothing, seething,
<v Speaker 3>pick your verb.
<v Speaker 2>And this isn't a measurement problem, right, It's not that
<v Speaker 2>our tools are bad and we just can't detect the stillness.
<v Speaker 3>No, absolutely not. This is one of the hardest things
<v Speaker 3>to grasp about quantum mechanics. The fuzziness is a fundamental
<v Speaker 3>property of reality itself. The universe is inherently uncertain at
<v Speaker 3>this level.
<v Speaker 2>So even if you clear out all the matter, all
<v Speaker 2>the radiation, there's still something there.
<v Speaker 3>The quantum fields are still there, the electromagnetic field, the
<v Speaker 3>Higgs field, all of them. You can't comgri to the fields.
<v Speaker 3>They are the fabric of space, and because of this uncertainty,
<v Speaker 3>those fields are constantly vibrating.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, so we have energy fluctuating in empty space.
<v Speaker 3>It's buzzing.
<v Speaker 2>But Einstein taught us something pretty important about energy, right,
<v Speaker 2>the famous one e mc two two, the.
<v Speaker 3>Most famous equation in history. Energy equals mass times the
<v Speaker 3>speed of light squared.
<v Speaker 2>Which means energy and mass are two sides of the
<v Speaker 2>same coin. They are, for all intents and purposes, interchangeable.
<v Speaker 3>Precisely, And this is where the pop up universe comes
<v Speaker 3>into play. If you have energy fluctuations in the vacuum,
<v Speaker 3>and energy can become.
<v Speaker 2>Mass, then the vacuum isn't just fluctuating with abstract energy.
<v Speaker 2>It's fluctuating with mass with particles. This is the part
<v Speaker 2>that always sounds like science fiction to me. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>it just sounds impossible. You're talking about virtual particles.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, virtual particles, ephemeral, fleeting, but very real.
<v Speaker 2>So let's be very very specific here. I'm looking at
<v Speaker 2>that empty box we talked about, the one we pumped
<v Speaker 2>all the air out of. What is actually happened inside it?
<v Speaker 2>Right now?
<v Speaker 3>Okay, picture a particle and its antiparticle. The classic example
<v Speaker 3>is an electron and a positron, which is an anti electron. Okay,
<v Speaker 3>out of absolutely nowhere. The vacuum spontaneously borrows a tiny
<v Speaker 3>bit of energy from itself to create this pair. They
<v Speaker 3>pop into existence out of nowhere.
<v Speaker 2>There's no source.
<v Speaker 3>The source is the uncertainty of the quantum field itself.
<v Speaker 3>It's a loan from the universe's energy bank. So they appear,
<v Speaker 3>they exist for an incredibly brief moment, and then snap,
<v Speaker 3>they find each other. They could pull back together.
<v Speaker 2>And annihilate, and they give the energy back.
<v Speaker 3>They return the energy they borrowed back to the vacuum.
<v Speaker 2>The books are balanced, so it's like a bank loan,
<v Speaker 2>a cosmic.
<v Speaker 3>Overdraft, a very very high frequency, high risk bank.
<v Speaker 2>Loan, yes, and the uncertainty principle is the bank manager
<v Speaker 2>setting the terms of that loan.
<v Speaker 3>That is a perfect analogy. The rule is the more
<v Speaker 3>energy you borrow, which means the heavier the particles you create,
<v Speaker 3>the faster you have to pay it back.
<v Speaker 2>So you can make a big heavy particle.
<v Speaker 3>Can borrow enough energy to make say a top quark
<v Speaker 3>in an anti top quark, which are incredibly massive, but
<v Speaker 3>you might only have a trillionth of a trillionth of
<v Speaker 3>a second to exist before you have to annihilate and
<v Speaker 3>pay the debt.
<v Speaker 2>That seems incredibly convenient. I have to be honest, Hey,
<v Speaker 2>these particles exist, but they disappear so fast you can't
<v Speaker 2>possibly see them. It feels like a mathematical trick, like
<v Speaker 2>some physicists had a bookkeeping error in their equations and
<v Speaker 2>just gave it a cool name to cover their tracks.
<v Speaker 3>Well those were yeah, virtual particles. Don't worry about them exactly,
<v Speaker 3>and that is the healthy skepticism everyone should have. It
<v Speaker 3>sounds like a cheat code for physics, a fudge factor.
<v Speaker 3>But here's the thing. They are absolutely real. They are
<v Speaker 3>not just math. We have physical, experimental proof that they
<v Speaker 3>are there and that they have consequences.
<v Speaker 2>Way, give me the smoking gun, because if they disappear
<v Speaker 2>in ten twenty one seconds or less, how in the
<v Speaker 2>world are we seeing them.
<v Speaker 3>We don't see them directly, You're right about that. We
<v Speaker 3>see their footprints. We see the effects they have on
<v Speaker 3>the real particles we can see. And the clearest footprint
<v Speaker 3>of all is found in the simplest atom. There is
<v Speaker 3>the hydrogen atom.
<v Speaker 2>The classic one proton, one electron orbiting it right now.
<v Speaker 3>Think about that electron orbiting the nucleus. In the old
<v Speaker 3>classical view, that electron is just a simple negative point charge.
<v Speaker 3>It's a lonely dot moving through a true void.
<v Speaker 2>Sure simple.
<v Speaker 3>But in the quantum world, that electron is moving through
<v Speaker 3>this mosh pit of virtual particles we just described the
<v Speaker 3>seeding foam.
<v Speaker 2>The vacuum is buzzing all around.
<v Speaker 3>It exactly now. The electron is negatively charged. The vacuum, meanwhile,
<v Speaker 3>is constantly popping with these virtual electron positron pairs. The
<v Speaker 3>positive virtual positrons in that foam get attracted to our real.
<v Speaker 2>Electron opposites at fract and.
<v Speaker 3>The negative virtual electrons get repelled. They're pushed away.
<v Speaker 2>So the vacuum is reacting to the guest in the room.
<v Speaker 3>It creates a crowd around it. It forms a polarized
<v Speaker 3>cloud of virtual particles that swarms around the real electron,
<v Speaker 3>and this cloud actually shields the electrons charge, It screens it.
<v Speaker 2>Wait. Wait, so the charge of an electron that we
<v Speaker 2>measure isn't its real fundamental charge.
<v Speaker 3>Correct. When we measure the charge of an electron from
<v Speaker 3>a distance, what we are actually seeing isn't the bear electron.
<v Speaker 3>We are seeing the electron plus this fuzzy polarized cloud
<v Speaker 3>of virtual particles that is dampening its effect.
<v Speaker 2>So the naked electron is actually stronger, much stronger.
<v Speaker 3>But we can never see it naked. We always see
<v Speaker 3>it clothed in the vacuum.
<v Speaker 2>That is wild. It's like a celebrity trying to walk
<v Speaker 2>through a crowd of paparazzi. You can't see the person clearly.
<v Speaker 2>You just see this chaotic entourage moving with them.
<v Speaker 3>That's a perfect analogy, and we can measure this encourage effect.
<v Speaker 3>It subtly changes the energy levels of the electron in
<v Speaker 3>the hydrogen atom. It's an effect called lambshift.
<v Speaker 2>And we can measure that shift.
<v Speaker 3>We can or we can look at something called the
<v Speaker 3>magnetic moment of the electron, basically a measure of how
<v Speaker 3>magnetic it is.
<v Speaker 2>And how precise is this This is where the proof
<v Speaker 2>comes in.
<v Speaker 3>This is it. When we calculate what the magnetic strength
<v Speaker 3>of an electron should be using just simple quantum mechanics,
<v Speaker 3>you know, without the virtual particles, we get a number,
<v Speaker 3>a very precise number, okay, But when we go into
<v Speaker 3>the lab and we measure it, the experimental value is
<v Speaker 3>slightly different. It's a tiny bit stronger, and.
<v Speaker 2>The difference matches the effects of the cloud to.
<v Speaker 3>An astonishing, almost unbelievable degree. When we use the full
<v Speaker 3>theory of quantum electrodynamics QED to calculate the influence of
<v Speaker 3>that virtual cloud, the theoretical prediction matches the experimental measurement to.
<v Speaker 2>Parts per billion parts per billion.
<v Speaker 3>It is often cited as the most precise and successful
<v Speaker 3>prediction in the entire history of science.
<v Speaker 2>Wow. So, if virtual particles were just a math trick,
<v Speaker 2>that calculation would be completely wrong.
<v Speaker 3>It would be completely off. It wouldn't even be close. Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>the fact that it matches so perfectly tells us that
<v Speaker 3>the vacuum is alive, that cloud is real. You me
<v Speaker 3>the chair you're sitting on. Every single electron in our
<v Speaker 3>bodies is walking around with its own little ghost entourage
<v Speaker 3>from the vacuum.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, I'm sold on the app But that's all microscopic,
<v Speaker 2>it's tiny. Is there any way to see the force
<v Speaker 2>of nothing on a scale we can actually, you know, visualize.
<v Speaker 2>Can nothing actually push a physical object?
<v Speaker 3>It can? And this brings us to one of my
<v Speaker 3>absolute favorite phenomena in all of physics, the Casimir effect.
<v Speaker 2>This was discovered theoretically back in nineteen forty eight by
<v Speaker 2>Hendrick Casimir ra Yes, and.
<v Speaker 3>At the time people thought it was just a bit
<v Speaker 3>of a mathematical curiosity. The setup itself is deceptively simple.
<v Speaker 3>Imagine you take two metal plates, perfectly flat, perfectly reflective,
<v Speaker 3>and completely uncharged.
<v Speaker 2>So no electricity, no magnetism, none at all.
<v Speaker 3>You put them in a perfect vacuum, and you place
<v Speaker 3>them incredibly close together. We're talking micrometers apart.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, so two neutral plates floating in the dark. Logic
<v Speaker 2>says they should just sit there, they have no reason
<v Speaker 2>to move, nothing should happen.
<v Speaker 3>Classical logic says nothing should happen. But Casimir did the math.
<v Speaker 3>He included the quantum vacuum, and he calculated that they
<v Speaker 3>would actually be pushed together and invisible force would slam
<v Speaker 3>them shut.
<v Speaker 2>Why if they aren't magnetic, what's pushing them? Where does
<v Speaker 2>the force come from.
<v Speaker 3>It's the vacuum itself. Yeah, the pressure of the void.
<v Speaker 3>To understand why, we have to stop thinking of these
<v Speaker 3>virtual particles as little balls for a second and start
<v Speaker 3>thinking of them as waves. Quantum mechanics says, every particle
<v Speaker 3>is also a wave, right.
<v Speaker 2>The old wave particle duality. I'm with you.
<v Speaker 3>So in the open space outside the plates, virtual waves
<v Speaker 3>of any size, any wavelength can exist. You can have big, long,
<v Speaker 3>rolling waves, tiny short, choppy waves. Everything fits. The ocean's
<v Speaker 3>wide open.
<v Speaker 2>Right, unlimited possibilities.
<v Speaker 3>But between the plates it's a tight squeeze. You've created
<v Speaker 3>a boundary. It's like a guitar string. You can only
<v Speaker 3>place certain notes, certain wavelengths that fit perfectly between the
<v Speaker 3>two ends.
<v Speaker 2>Ah, I see, you can't fit a wave that's bigger
<v Speaker 2>than the gap between the plates exactly.
<v Speaker 3>You have physically excluded all the big long wavelength of
<v Speaker 3>virtual particles from the space between the plates. You filtered
<v Speaker 3>the mouth.
<v Speaker 2>So now you have an imbalance huge imbalance.
<v Speaker 3>You have a full vacuum pushing on the place from
<v Speaker 3>the outside. All the possible waves are banging against them,
<v Speaker 3>and you have a restricted vacuum pushing from the inside
<v Speaker 3>only the small waves that can fit.
<v Speaker 2>So there's more pressure from the outside.
<v Speaker 3>It's a radiation pressure difference exerted by nothing. There is
<v Speaker 3>literally more stuff popping in and out of existence and
<v Speaker 3>banging against the plates from the outside than from the inside.
<v Speaker 3>So the net effect is a force pushing the plates together.
<v Speaker 2>That is actually somewhat terrifying. That empty space exerts real
<v Speaker 2>physical pressure. If you can exclude enough of it, it
<v Speaker 2>will crush you.
<v Speaker 3>And we've measured it. Took a long time. The force
<v Speaker 3>is incredibly tiny and hard to detect, but in the
<v Speaker 3>nineteen nineties it was confirmed definitively. It's a real force.
<v Speaker 3>And you know from modern engineers this isn't just a
<v Speaker 3>fun theory. Oh how so think about nanotechnology or memes,
<v Speaker 3>microelectro mechanical systems. These are tiny little machines, gears and
<v Speaker 3>switches the size of dust.
<v Speaker 2>Motes like the accelerometer in my phone that detects when
<v Speaker 2>I turn.
<v Speaker 3>It exactly that when you build machines that small, the
<v Speaker 3>parts are incredibly close together, and for years engineers found
<v Speaker 3>that sometimes these tiny parts would just stick. They would
<v Speaker 3>clamp together for no apparent reason and get stuck. They
<v Speaker 3>called it stiction stiiction, and a big component of that
<v Speaker 3>stiction is the Casimir force. The vacuum is literally trying
<v Speaker 3>to weld your machine together, So you have to design
<v Speaker 3>your phone to actively fight against the pressure of the void.
<v Speaker 2>So nothing is now an engineering constraint on our technology.
<v Speaker 3>It absolutely is.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, so we've established the vacuum is energetic, it's buzzing,
<v Speaker 2>it's real. It pushes plates around. But this leads to
<v Speaker 2>a massive, massive problem, doesn't it. I've heard this referred
<v Speaker 2>to as the vacuum catastrophe.
<v Speaker 3>Oh yes, the cosmological constant problem. This is where this beautiful,
<v Speaker 3>elegant theory crashes headfirst into reality and explodes in a
<v Speaker 3>ball of fire.
<v Speaker 2>Let's get into this. We know there's energy in the vacuum.
<v Speaker 2>You called it zero point energy, right.
<v Speaker 3>Zero point just means the lowest possible energy state, As
<v Speaker 3>we said, thanks to Heisenberg, it's not zero. Now, if
<v Speaker 3>take queum field theory seriously, you should be able to
<v Speaker 3>calculate how much energy is in say a coffee cup's
<v Speaker 3>worth of empty space.
<v Speaker 2>You just sum up all those fluctuations.
<v Speaker 3>You add up all the virtual particles, all the waves,
<v Speaker 3>all the jitters from all the different fields. And when
<v Speaker 3>physicists do this, they get a number, a truly mind
<v Speaker 3>bogglingly astronomically huge number.
<v Speaker 2>How huge are we talking, Well, let's put.
<v Speaker 3>It in context. Einstein told us energy has mass, and
<v Speaker 3>gravity pulls on mass. So if the vacuum is full
<v Speaker 3>of this enormous amount of energy, it should have an
<v Speaker 3>enormous gravitational pull, right, it should weigh something a lot,
<v Speaker 3>an incredible amount. If the vacuum really contained the amount
<v Speaker 3>of energy, the theory predicts, space itself would have so
<v Speaker 3>much mass energy that it would have instantly crushed the
<v Speaker 3>entire universe into a black hole fractions of a second
<v Speaker 3>after the Big Bang.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, well, looking around, I can confirm that did not happen.
<v Speaker 2>I'm not currently spaghettified. The universe is still here.
<v Speaker 3>And not only is it here, it's expanding. In fact,
<v Speaker 3>observations of distant supernovae tell us it's accelerating. The expansion
<v Speaker 3>is speeding up.
<v Speaker 2>And that's driven by dark energy, which is, for.
<v Speaker 3>All intents and purposes, the measured weight of the vacuum.
<v Speaker 3>It's the observed energy density of space that is pushing
<v Speaker 3>the universe apart.
<v Speaker 2>So we have the theoretical weight what the math says
<v Speaker 2>the vacuum should weigh, and we have the measured weight
<v Speaker 2>what the telescope say it actually weighs. What's the difference.
<v Speaker 3>The discrepancy between the theoretical prediction and the observed value
<v Speaker 3>is about one hundred and twenty orders of magnitude.
<v Speaker 2>I'm sorry, did you say one hundred and twenty as
<v Speaker 2>in a one with one hundred and twenty zeros after it?
<v Speaker 3>I did a one followed by one hundred and twenty zeros.
<v Speaker 2>That is, I don't even have an analogy for that.
<v Speaker 2>If I was an architect and I calculated the load
<v Speaker 2>bearing capacity of a bridge and I was wrong by
<v Speaker 2>one hundred and twenty orders of magnitude, I wouldn't just
<v Speaker 2>be fired. I'd be arrested. The bridge wouldn't just collapse,
<v Speaker 2>it would turn into a singularity and devour the planet.
<v Speaker 3>You're not wrong. It is spectacularly epically bad. It is
<v Speaker 3>often called the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics.
<v Speaker 2>So why do we still trust this theory If the
<v Speaker 2>prediction is that catastrophic, why haven't we thrown the whole
<v Speaker 2>equation in the trash.
<v Speaker 3>That is the million dollar question or trillion dollar question.
<v Speaker 3>Because the theory works perfectly everywhere else. That's what drives
<v Speaker 3>physicists crazy. It gives us the Lamb shift to parts
<v Speaker 3>per billion, it predicts the Casimir effect. It's the foundation
<v Speaker 3>of the standard model of particle physics. It works for lasers,
<v Speaker 3>for semiconductors, but when you apply it to the universe
<v Speaker 3>as a whole, it breaks completely.
<v Speaker 2>So the vacuum works perfectly in the lab, but fails
<v Speaker 2>spectacularly in the cosmos exactly.
<v Speaker 3>Some physicists think there's a cancelation mechanism we haven't found,
<v Speaker 3>some deep undiscovered symmetry that cancels out most of that
<v Speaker 3>enormous energy, leaving just the tiny, tiny residual bit we
<v Speaker 3>see as dark energy. Others think our understanding of gravity
<v Speaker 3>at quantum scales is just fundamentally wrong, But for now
<v Speaker 3>it remains one of the biggest, most embarrassing unsolved mysteries
<v Speaker 3>in all of science.
<v Speaker 2>It's fascinating that the thing holding the secrets to the
<v Speaker 2>entire universe is the empty space right in front of
<v Speaker 2>our faces.
<v Speaker 3>And it gets even more dramatic, even more strange, when
<v Speaker 3>you take this buzzing vacuum and you put it next
<v Speaker 3>to the most extreme object in the universe, a black hole.
<v Speaker 2>Ah. Okay Stephen Hawking territory.
<v Speaker 3>Yes. In the nineteen seventies, Hawking used this very concept
<v Speaker 3>of the quantum vacuum to turn our entire understanding of
<v Speaker 3>black holes completely upside down.
<v Speaker 2>Before this, black holes were just cosmic vacuum cleaners, right,
<v Speaker 2>they are the ultimate eaters. Nothing escapes.
<v Speaker 3>Correct. The event horizon was a point of no return,
<v Speaker 3>a one way door into oblivion. But Hawking asked the
<v Speaker 3>simple question, what happens to the vacuum fluctuations right at
<v Speaker 3>the edge, right at the doorframe of the.
<v Speaker 2>Black hole, the cliff's edge?
<v Speaker 3>Precisely? Imagine one of our virtual particle pairs, an electron
<v Speaker 3>and a positron, popping into existence exactly at the vent horizons.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, Usually they just snap back together and vanish in
<v Speaker 2>a flash.
<v Speaker 3>Usually, but what if in that tiny sliver of time
<v Speaker 3>they exist, one of them falls into the hole and
<v Speaker 3>the other one stays just outside.
<v Speaker 2>They get separated, the cosmic divorce of the sension.
<v Speaker 3>Wait, the ultimate separation. Yeah, the one inside is captured,
<v Speaker 3>it's gone forever. The one outside is now alone. It
<v Speaker 3>has no partner to annihilate.
<v Speaker 2>With, so it can't vanish. It's been orphaned.
<v Speaker 3>It can't vanish. To conserve all the laws of physics,
<v Speaker 3>like momentum and energy, it has to become real. It
<v Speaker 3>gets promoted from virtual to reel and it zips away
<v Speaker 3>from the black hole out into space.
<v Speaker 2>So to an observer far far away, it looks like
<v Speaker 2>the black hole just spit out a particle.
<v Speaker 3>Exactly. It looks like the black hole's glowing. It's emitting radiation.
<v Speaker 3>This is Hawking radiation.
<v Speaker 2>Well, wait a minute. Energy isn't free. We established that.
<v Speaker 2>You said, the virtual pair borrows energy from the vacuum.
<v Speaker 2>If they don't annihilate, the debt isn't paid back to
<v Speaker 2>the vacuum. So who pays the bill for this newly
<v Speaker 2>real particle?
<v Speaker 3>The black hole pays. This is the absolute genius of
<v Speaker 3>Hawking's insight. The particle that fell in because of the weird,
<v Speaker 3>intense warping of space time at the horizon. It effectively
<v Speaker 3>has negative energy relative to the outside universe.
<v Speaker 2>Negative energy. So the black hole eats a negative calorie.
<v Speaker 3>That's a great way to put it. It eats a
<v Speaker 3>negative calorie. By swallowing that one particle with negative energy,
<v Speaker 3>the black hole's total mass energy decreases.
<v Speaker 2>So the black hole is paying the energy cost for
<v Speaker 2>the particle that escaped and became real.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, and that means the black hole is shrinking, slowly,
<v Speaker 3>incredibly slowly evaporating.
<v Speaker 2>That is profound. We used to think black holes were
<v Speaker 2>these immortal monsters that would just sit there until the
<v Speaker 2>heat death of the universe. But because of the quiet,
<v Speaker 2>constant buzzing of the vacuum, they are mortal. They dissolve.
<v Speaker 3>It takes an unfathomably long time for a big one,
<v Speaker 3>the google plex years. But yes, they dissolve back into
<v Speaker 3>the vacuum from whence they came.
<v Speaker 2>It's ironic, isn't it. The vacuum is the only thing
<v Speaker 2>that lasts.
<v Speaker 3>Well, lasts is a strong word.
<v Speaker 2>Oh no, don't tell me. The vacuum can die too.
<v Speaker 3>It's not that it dies, it's that it might change
<v Speaker 3>its mind.
<v Speaker 2>I do not like the sound of that change its mind.
<v Speaker 3>You see, We've been assuming that the vacuum state we
<v Speaker 3>live in, this specific buzz of empty space is the
<v Speaker 3>bottom floor, the absolute lowest possible energy state, the ground state,
<v Speaker 3>and it might not be. We aren't sure. This brings
<v Speaker 3>us to the deeply unsettling concept of vacuum decay.
<v Speaker 2>This is the cosmic horror part of our exploration today.
<v Speaker 3>A little bit. Yes, think of a ball sitting in
<v Speaker 3>a deep valley. It's stable, it's not going anywhere, it
<v Speaker 3>stays at the bottom. We call that a true vacuum.
<v Speaker 3>It's as low as.
<v Speaker 2>It can go right, stable, safe, But what if.
<v Speaker 3>Our universe isn't in the lowest valley. What if we
<v Speaker 3>are in a little dip, a small hollow up on
<v Speaker 3>the side of a much larger mountain. We feel stable,
<v Speaker 3>the ball isn't rolling, but there is a much deeper valley,
<v Speaker 3>a lower energy state further down. We call our current
<v Speaker 3>state a false vacuum.
<v Speaker 2>So we are just living on a ledge, thinking it's
<v Speaker 2>the ground floor.
<v Speaker 3>We might be on a ledge. In classical physics, the
<v Speaker 3>ball stays put unless you push it. But in quantum
<v Speaker 3>physics there is a spooky phenomenon called tunneling. The ball
<v Speaker 3>can without any external push spontaneously tunnel through the ridge
<v Speaker 3>and drop into the lower valley.
<v Speaker 2>And in this analogy, the ball is the energy state
<v Speaker 2>of the entire universe.
<v Speaker 3>The state of the fundamental fields that make up reality. Specifically,
<v Speaker 3>the Higgs field is the one we worry about. If
<v Speaker 3>our vacuum is only the tastable, it could, in theory,
<v Speaker 3>spontaneously transition to that lower, truer energy state.
<v Speaker 2>And what happens if that transition trigger somewhere?
<v Speaker 3>It would start at a single point anywhere, maybe in
<v Speaker 3>a physics lab, maybe in a galaxy a billion light
<v Speaker 3>years away. A tiny bubble of tree vacuum would form.
<v Speaker 3>And because it's a lower energy state it is energetically favorable.
<v Speaker 3>It would expand.
<v Speaker 2>How fast would it expand at the speed of light?
<v Speaker 2>And what's inside the bubble?
<v Speaker 3>The laws of physics as we know them would be rewritten.
<v Speaker 3>The fundamental constants of nature, the massive particles like the electron,
<v Speaker 3>the strength of forces. Everything would change instantly and violently.
<v Speaker 3>The chemistry that holds your body together would stop working.
<v Speaker 3>Adams might not even be able to form in that
<v Speaker 3>new vacuum.
<v Speaker 2>So it's not an explosion that destroys things it's a
<v Speaker 2>reformatting of the universe's hard drive.
<v Speaker 3>That's a perfect description. Matter as we know, it would
<v Speaker 3>simply cease to be possible inside the expanding bubble.
<v Speaker 2>And because it moves at the speed of light, we
<v Speaker 2>would have no warning, we wouldn't see it coming none whatsoever.
<v Speaker 3>We'd be having this conversation and then simply not be Okay.
<v Speaker 2>That is genuinely terrifying. How likely is this? Should I
<v Speaker 2>cancel my dinner plans for tonight?
<v Speaker 3>No, no, keep your dinner plans. The universe has lasted
<v Speaker 3>thirteen point eight billion years without this happening, so the
<v Speaker 3>probability is likely incredibly, incredibly vanishingly low. But there's always
<v Speaker 3>a butt.
<v Speaker 2>But the math allows for it. It depends very heavily
<v Speaker 2>on the precise mass of the Higgs boson and in
<v Speaker 2>another particle, the top quark. Our current measurements from particle
<v Speaker 2>colliders put us right on the edge. We seem to
<v Speaker 2>be in the metastable zone. So technically we are living
<v Speaker 2>on the edge of a cosmic cliff.
<v Speaker 3>Great, well, while we are still here in this cozy,
<v Speaker 3>false vacuum, let's maybe pivot to something a little less apocalyptic. Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>because as abstract and cosmic as all this sounds, the
<v Speaker 3>quantum vacuum actually impacts the technology we use every single day.
<v Speaker 2>Right, absolutely, It's not just for black holes and the
<v Speaker 2>hypothetical end of the world. It's in your pocket right now.
<v Speaker 3>You're talking about semiconductor right. The entire electronics industry, every
<v Speaker 3>computer chip, every smartphone relies on understanding how electrons move
<v Speaker 3>through materials like silicon. But an electron moving through a
<v Speaker 3>silicon chip isn't moving through empty space. It's moving through
<v Speaker 3>a crystal.
<v Speaker 2>Lattice, a solid block of atoms arranged in a grit, and.
<v Speaker 3>That lattice that environment modifies the vacuum. When a photon
<v Speaker 3>of light hits a semiconductor, it can excite an electron,
<v Speaker 3>leaving a sort of hole behind where it used to be.
<v Speaker 3>This electron hole pair is itself an excitation that interacts
<v Speaker 3>with the vacuum fluctuations of.
<v Speaker 2>The material, the vacuum inside the rock.
<v Speaker 3>Basically, yes, the optical properties of semiconductors, how they absorb
<v Speaker 3>into mid light, and how lasers work are all deeply
<v Speaker 3>influenced by these vacuum interactions. If engineers didn't account for
<v Speaker 3>quantum field theory, our modern lasers and high speed computer
<v Speaker 3>chips just wouldn't work the way they do.
<v Speaker 2>And what about superconductors, those amazing materials that carry electricity
<v Speaker 2>with zero resistance, zero energy loss.
<v Speaker 3>That's another even deeper vacuum phenomena. In a superconductor below
<v Speaker 3>a certain temperature, electrons overcome their natural repulsion and pair
<v Speaker 3>up into what are called Cooper pairs.
<v Speaker 2>Which is weird because electrons usually hate each other like
<v Speaker 2>charges repel.
<v Speaker 3>Exactly, so how do they suddenly decide to pair up.
<v Speaker 3>They do it because the vacuum state inside the material
<v Speaker 3>has fundamentally restructured itself. The crystal lattice deforms in a
<v Speaker 3>way that creates a sort of attractive force mediated by
<v Speaker 3>the background vibrations.
<v Speaker 2>So the background hum of the material actually coaxes them together.
<v Speaker 3>The underlying symmetry the vacuum breaks, allowing these pairs to
<v Speaker 3>exist and flow without resistance. So when you get an MRI,
<v Speaker 3>or you hear about maglev trains or quantum computers, you
<v Speaker 3>are using technology that relies on a manipulated, restructured vacuum state.
<v Speaker 3>We are already engineering the void.
<v Speaker 2>There's also this really weird concept called the Unru effect.
<v Speaker 2>This one really messes with my head because it implies
<v Speaker 2>that nothing depends on how fast you're driving.
<v Speaker 3>It's a beautiful mind bending connection between relativity and quantum mechanics.
<v Speaker 3>We usually think of emptiness as being absolute. If I
<v Speaker 3>see a vacuum, you see a vacuum. It should be objective, right.
<v Speaker 2>Zero particles should be zero particles for everybody.
<v Speaker 3>But the unrue effect says that if I am floating
<v Speaker 3>still in space, I see a cold, empty vacuum. But
<v Speaker 3>if you zoom past me, accelerating at a massive rate,
<v Speaker 3>you won't see a vacuum. You will see a bath
<v Speaker 3>of hot particles. You will feel warmth, you will radiation.
<v Speaker 2>Wait, so I see particles where you see nothing just
<v Speaker 2>because they hit the gas pedal. Yes, where do the
<v Speaker 2>particles come from? They can't just appear.
<v Speaker 3>They come from the vacuum fluctuations. Your intense acceleration pumps
<v Speaker 3>energy into the system. From your perspective, it's like creating
<v Speaker 3>a sonic boom. But for the vacuum. You are ripping
<v Speaker 3>through the virtual particle foam so violently that your detector
<v Speaker 3>perceives those fluctuations as a real thermal radiation.
<v Speaker 2>So temperature is relative. The very definition of empty is relative.
<v Speaker 3>The vacuum of one observer is not the vacuum of another.
<v Speaker 3>That's the takeaway. If you could build a spaceship that
<v Speaker 3>accelerated hard enough, you could roast a chicken in what
<v Speaker 3>another observer would swear is cold empty space, just from
<v Speaker 3>the friction of the vacuum itself.
<v Speaker 2>That really challenges the idea of objective reality. The question
<v Speaker 2>is their particle There has an answer that is, we'll
<v Speaker 2>check your speedometer first.
<v Speaker 3>Physics is full of these strange relative truths.
<v Speaker 2>Let's talk about the strong force for a second. We
<v Speaker 2>talked about electrons and quantum electrodynamics QED. We said, the
<v Speaker 2>vacuum screens the charge. It surrounds the electron and makes
<v Speaker 2>it seem weaker from.
<v Speaker 3>A distance, right, the entourage effect.
<v Speaker 2>But I've read that for the forces inside the nucleus,
<v Speaker 2>for quarks and the strong force, the vacuum does the
<v Speaker 2>exact opposite it does.
<v Speaker 3>It's one of the strangest things. This is the realm
<v Speaker 3>of quantum chromodynamics of QCD, and in QCD, the vacuum
<v Speaker 3>creates a phenomenon called anti screening or asymptotic freedom.
<v Speaker 2>Anti screening, so the vacuum doesn't hide the charge, it
<v Speaker 2>amplifies it.
<v Speaker 3>It effectively does Yes, the virtual particles in the QCD
<v Speaker 3>vacuum aren't just quark antiquark pairs. They are also gluons,
<v Speaker 3>the particles that carry the strong force, and gluons, unlike photons,
<v Speaker 3>can stick to each other, they carry their own charge.
<v Speaker 2>They're sticky.
<v Speaker 3>They're very sticky without getting bogged down. In the deep mathematics,
<v Speaker 3>the net effect of this gluon filled vacuum is that
<v Speaker 3>it acts like a tightening rubber band.
<v Speaker 2>A rubber band.
<v Speaker 3>How so QEED with electrons, the closer you get, the
<v Speaker 3>more you pierce that screening cloud, and the stronger the
<v Speaker 3>effective charge becomes. In QCD with quarks, the closer you get,
<v Speaker 3>the weaker the interaction seems so.
<v Speaker 2>When two quarks are right on top of each other
<v Speaker 2>inside a proton, the.
<v Speaker 3>Rubber band is slack. They float around almost freely. This
<v Speaker 3>is asymptotic freedom. It won the Nobel Prize for gross
<v Speaker 3>will check and Pulitzer because it was so counterintuitive.
<v Speaker 2>But if you try to pull them apart.
<v Speaker 3>The vacuum fights you. As you pull two quarks apart,
<v Speaker 3>the rubber band of the vacuum stretches and the energy
<v Speaker 3>in the field between them grows. The force gets stronger
<v Speaker 3>and stronger the farther.
<v Speaker 2>You pull, so it effectively locks them in it's quark confinement.
<v Speaker 3>It imprisons them forever. You can never ever pull a
<v Speaker 3>single quark free from a proton, because to do so,
<v Speaker 3>you'd have to put an infinite amount of energy into
<v Speaker 3>the vacuum. Before you could do that, the rubber band snaps,
<v Speaker 3>but it doesn't release the quark. The energy you put
<v Speaker 3>into stretching it becomes so great that it's cheaper for
<v Speaker 3>the vacuum to just create a new pair of quarks
<v Speaker 3>out of thin air.
<v Speaker 2>So you start with one quark you pull, and you
<v Speaker 2>end up with two. You can never isolate one. The
<v Speaker 2>vacuum is the prison guard of matter.
<v Speaker 3>It is the glue that binds the nucleus together. Without
<v Speaker 3>this specific, weird anti screening behavior of the vacuum, protons
<v Speaker 3>and neutrons wouldn't hold together. Atoms wouldn't exist, we wouldn't exist.
<v Speaker 2>So we've covered how the vacuum works now. It's screens electrons,
<v Speaker 2>it brind's quarks, It pushes plates around and makes black
<v Speaker 2>holes evaporate. But what about the beginning, the ultimate origin story,
<v Speaker 2>the Big Bank. There's a theory that says the entire
<v Speaker 2>universe itself is just a vacuum fluctuation that got well,
<v Speaker 2>a little out of hand.
<v Speaker 3>That's essentially the core idea behind inflationary cosmology.
<v Speaker 2>Can you explain that? How do you get everything from nothing?
<v Speaker 3>In the very first fraction of a second, we think
<v Speaker 3>the universe underwent a period of hyper accelerated expansion called inflation.
<v Speaker 3>But what drove it? The theory says it was driven
<v Speaker 3>by the energy of a quantum field, the inflint and field.
<v Speaker 3>It was a very high energy vacuum state.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, a supercharged verse of the vacuum we have today.
<v Speaker 3>Exactly Now, remember those tiny quantum jitters we talked about
<v Speaker 3>at the very start, the unavoidable fuzziness from the uncertainty principle.
<v Speaker 2>The microscopic fluctuations.
<v Speaker 3>During inflation, the fabric of space itself expanded so incredibly fast,
<v Speaker 3>faster than the speed of light, that those tiny microscopic
<v Speaker 3>subatomic jitters got stretched. They were physically stretched from a
<v Speaker 3>size smaller than a proton to the size of a galaxy.
<v Speaker 2>Whoa so a quantum blip a momentary energy fluctuation became
<v Speaker 2>a galaxy.
<v Speaker 3>It became the seed of a galaxy. Those fluctuations stretched
<v Speaker 3>across the cosmos created tiny differences in density across the
<v Speaker 3>early universe. Some spots were a little denser, some a
<v Speaker 3>little emptier, all because of a quantum roll.
<v Speaker 2>Of the dice, and gravity took over from there.
<v Speaker 3>Exactly over millions of years, the slightly denser spots pulled
<v Speaker 3>in more matter, eventually collapsing to form the first stars, galaxies,
<v Speaker 3>and the great cosmic web. The slightly emptier spots became
<v Speaker 3>the great voids between the galaxy clusters.
<v Speaker 2>So if I look at a map of the large
<v Speaker 2>scale structure of the universe, that web of galaxies, what
<v Speaker 2>I'm really looking at is a blown up, fossilized picture
<v Speaker 2>of the quantum vacuum from thirteen point eight billion years ago.
<v Speaker 3>You are and we have incredible proof of this. We
<v Speaker 3>can look at the cosmic microwave background radiation, the baby
<v Speaker 3>picture of the universe. It shows tiny temperature fluctuations. The
<v Speaker 3>specific pattern of those hot and cold spots on the
<v Speaker 3>sky matches the mathematical predictions of quantum vacuum fluctuations perfectly.
<v Speaker 2>That is, man that is heavy. We are literally made
<v Speaker 2>of frozen quantum noise.
<v Speaker 3>We are If the early vacuum had been truly still
<v Speaker 3>truly empty in the classical sense, the universe would be
<v Speaker 3>a smooth, featureless, boring soup of particles, no stars, no planets,
<v Speaker 3>no us. The fundamental instability of nothing is the only
<v Speaker 3>reason that something exists at all.
<v Speaker 2>There's also something called the Shwinger effect, right, which is
<v Speaker 2>about like ripping matter directly out of the void here
<v Speaker 2>and now.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, this connects back to that idea of creating something
<v Speaker 3>from nothing. The physicist Swinger predicted that if you could
<v Speaker 3>create an electric field that is strong enough, and I
<v Speaker 3>mean truly ridiculously massive, like ten eighteen volts per meter.
<v Speaker 2>Which is a lot, a lot.
<v Speaker 3>More than we can currently make. But if you could,
<v Speaker 3>the field would be so strong it would literally pull
<v Speaker 3>on the virtual electron positron pairs in the vacuum, rip
<v Speaker 3>them apart before they can annihilate, and make them real.
<v Speaker 2>Just by applying a strong enough field to empty space.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, you provide enough energy to the vacuum with your
<v Speaker 3>field to pay the mass debt, and pop, real matter
<v Speaker 3>appears where there was none before. We haven't fully achieved
<v Speaker 3>this in a lab yet, but some of the world's
<v Speaker 3>most high powered lasers are getting very, very close to
<v Speaker 3>that limit.
<v Speaker 2>It's the ultimate alchemy, making matter from empty space.
<v Speaker 3>It reinforces the modern idea that matter isn't really a
<v Speaker 3>separate thing in the vacuum. Matter is just an excitation
<v Speaker 3>of the vacuum. It's a persistent wave on that quantum motion.
<v Speaker 3>You can't have the waves without the water.
<v Speaker 2>This whole conversation, it really shifts the philosophical ground, doesn't it.
<v Speaker 3>It absolutely does.
<v Speaker 2>We usually think of creation as needing a builder, an
<v Speaker 2>external agent, someone to arrange the bricks and mortar. But
<v Speaker 2>this suggests that the bricks just appear spontaneously because the
<v Speaker 2>empty space refuses to be quiet.
<v Speaker 3>Exactly. Nothing is unstable in modern physics. You don't necessarily
<v Speaker 3>need a miracle to get a universe. You just need
<v Speaker 3>a quantum vacuum. In time, the void is naturally fundamentally creative.
<v Speaker 2>It's beautiful in a way. The universe breathes, and.
<v Speaker 3>There's one final frontier, a real bleeding edge idea. We
<v Speaker 3>should touch on the idea that space and time themselves
<v Speaker 3>might not be fundamental.
<v Speaker 2>What could be more fundamental than space and time the vacuum.
<v Speaker 3>Some modern theories, ideas from string theory and quantum gravity,
<v Speaker 3>suggest that space time is emergent, that the connections, the
<v Speaker 3>quantum entanglement between different regions of the quantum vacuum are
<v Speaker 3>what actually stitch the fabric of space together.
<v Speaker 2>So if you could somehow turn off the entanglement between
<v Speaker 2>the fluctuations, space.
<v Speaker 3>Would fall apart. The very concept of distance might lose
<v Speaker 3>its meaning.
<v Speaker 2>That is a lot to process it is.
<v Speaker 3>We are still learning. We still have the vacuum catastrophe
<v Speaker 3>to solve, We have the connection between the vacuum and
<v Speaker 3>gravity to figure out. Yeah, but one thing is absolutely settled.
<v Speaker 3>The box is not empty.
<v Speaker 2>The box is alive.
<v Speaker 3>The void is alive.
<v Speaker 2>So the next time you look up at that night
<v Speaker 2>sky and you see that profound darkness between the stars,
<v Speaker 2>don't think of it as nothing. Think of it as
<v Speaker 2>a seething, boiling ocean of potential, buzzing with invisible energy,
<v Speaker 2>creating and destroying particles every billionth of a second, holding
<v Speaker 2>the core of your atoms together and pushing the galaxies apart.
<v Speaker 3>It's the fullest, busiest place in the universe.
<v Speaker 2>And here's the thought to leave you with If space
<v Speaker 2>time itself truly does emerge from the web of entanglement
<v Speaker 2>of the vacuum, as these new theories suggest, are space
<v Speaker 2>and time dissilusions? Are they just a useful story our
<v Speaker 2>minds tell, a story created by the incessant crackling buzz
<v Speaker 2>of the void. Are we just surfing on the noise?
<v Speaker 3>That is the question that keeps physicists up at night.
<v Speaker 2>Thanks for this fascinating journey, pleasure as always,