NOTHING LIKE A VACUUM .

NOTHING LIKE A VACUUM
NEW SCIENTIST
Robert Matthews, Science Correspondent, the London Sunday Telegraph
From New Scientist, 25 February 1995, Vol.145, No.1966, pp. 30-33.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, New Scientist 1995 (posted with
permission)

IT is all around you, yet you cannot feel it. Its effects may have lit
up the Universe in the big bang but today just lights up your office.
It is the source of everything, yet is nothing. Such are the
paradoxical features of one of the hottest topics in contemporary
physics - the vacuum. It is proving to be a wonderland of magical
effects: force fields that emerge from nowhere, particles popping in
and out of existence and energetic jitterings with no apparent power
source.
Many researchers see the vacuum as a central ingredient of 21st-
century physics. "We now know that the vacuum can have all sorts of
wonderful effects over an enormous range of scales, from the
microscopic to the cosmic," says Peter Milonni of the Los Alamos
National Laboratory in New Mexico. Some even contemplate the prospect
of harnessing the vacuum's bizarre properties to provide an apparently
limitless supply of energy.
The vacuum's miraculous properties all stem from a combination of
quantum theory and relativity. As Werner Heisenberg showed almost 70
years ago, the mechanics of the subatomic world mean that an
uncertainty is attached to any measurement of physical properties such
as energy. This uncertainty manifests itself in random, causeless
fluctuations in energy: the larger the fluctuation, the shorter the
time it survives.
Thanks to Einstein's famous equation E = mc2, Heisenberg's
uncertainty principle also implies that particles can flit into and
out of existence, their duration dictated only by their mass. This
leads to the astonishing realisation that all around us "virtual"
subatomic particles are perpetually popping up out of nothing, and
then disappearing again within about 10-23 seconds.
"Empty space" is thus not really empty at all, but a seething sea of
activity that pervades the entire Universe.

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