How the Physics of Nothing Underlies Everything

Aristotle believed that objects would fly through empty space if they were allowed to. The French bishop claimed that God could even create a vacuum.

A scientist pulled it off Perhaps the first high-quality vacuum on Earth was created by Otto von Guericke who invented a pump to suck the air from within a hollow copper sphere. In a theatrical demonstration in 1654, he showed that it was impossible for two teams of horses to remove the watermelon-size ball.

The vacuum is the basis of any theory of something. The vacuum was empty. There isn't a medium that can slow down light. A vacuum without matter or energy can't bend space. The variety of nothing varies depending on what physicists want to describe. Patrick Draper is a theoretical physicist at the University of Illinois.

Modern physicists have grappled with more advanced candidates for the ultimate theory of nature and have encountered a growing number of different types of nothing. Each behaves like a different phase of a substance. The key to understanding the origin and fate of the universe may be a careful accounting of the different types of absence.

"We're learning there's a lot more to know about nothing than we thought." Is there more we are missing?

Our universe may sit on a platform of shoddy construction, a stable vacuum that is doomed in the distant future, to destroy everything in the process.

There is nothing quantum.

Physicists came to see reality as a collection of fields, with objects that fill space with a value at each point. Classical physics says that a field's value can be zero everywhere so that it doesn't have any influence or energy. The vacuum is boring according to Daniel Harlow, a theoretical physicist. There is nothing going on.

Physicists discovered that the universe's fields are not classical and are inherently uncertain. It is impossible to catch a quantum field with zero energy. Harlow compares a quantum field to an array of pendulums, each of which has an angle that represents the field's values. The pendulums hang almost straight down but are jittery.

Left alone, a quantum field will remain in its minimum-energy configuration. Particles are ripples in the field. The preferred state of the system is what we have in mind when talking about the vacuum of a system.