Gold
I too would say you have a bar of gold...
And yet, if we define a volume of "empty space" and insert 0.0000000000004% by volume of contaminants in the form of an electron and proton, we say we have something (hydrogen) called "matter", and not "empty space".
The proton has spin and a magnetic moment. We are told that the proton is actually made of six "particles", three quarks and three gluons. We are also told that gluons act like little springs that are attached to and hold the quarks together. If a gluon were to escape to be on its own, it would very rapidly disappear, that is, evaporate into the "empty space" of the "vacuum". In the absence of all else, the proton is mathematically predicted to be stable for a lifetime of somewhere on the order of 10
34 years (having spin and a magnetic moment for all that time...). However, it is also mathematically predicted that a proton can decay, but would do so by becoming two quarks (a quark and an anti-quark) and yet another "particle" called a pion. Isn't it rather amazing how a "particle" of "something" can transform itself into a "particle" of something else?
To switch gears, consider the speed of light. The speed of light in a vacuum is, well, the speed of light. If we pass an EM wave, or photon (that pesky particle wave duality thing) through something transparent to that EM wave, something we call "matter" (which is mostly empty space), the speed of that wave becomes slower by an amount related to that "matter's" refractive index. We use this property everyday and seem to have no problem believing that as an EM wave propagates through "matter", which again is mostly "empty space", the speed of light slows down.
However, if we pass that EM wave/photon through the "vacuum", i.e., supposedly empty space, the speed of light is slowed to, well, the speed of light. Why? Why does an EM wave/photon, unencumbered by anything in the "emptiness" of the vacuum not just take off at an infinite speed? We are told that the speed of light is a constant, a magical thing that just happens to be. Even though it makes sense for us to know that an EM wave will slow below the speed of light when passing through a cloud of hydrogen (which is 99.9999999999996% "empty space" or "vacuum"), we can't seem to wrap our head around the possibility that an EM wave is also "slowed" to the speed of light when passing through a vacuum because it is actually propagating through "something", not just the supposed emptiness we call "vacuum".
And then there is the "vacuum catastrophe". Most scientists believe the vacuum contains something we call energy, however, the amount predicted to be there varies by 55 orders of magnitude, and in some predictions, even moreso. More recently we have predictions of dark energy and dark matter, because we believe all that "matter" we observe and predict to be in the universe, must represent only a small percentage of what the universe is actually made of in order for all that "matter" to behave as it does in our observations. Add to that the Casimir effect and those "virtual particles" just popping into and out of existence from "nothing", and one might begin to think that perhaps the "vacuum" is not the emptiness we may believe it to be.
A quote:
"Everything is made of nothing, all nothing is almost something...
There are two kinds of nothing, organized nothing and disorganized nothing."
"Nothing" is just a word. Like "bark" (the outer layer of a tree or the sound a dog makes), or the names assigned to quarks, like up, down, top, bottom, color, and strange, these are just words we assign, sounds we utter or write using an alphabet, to allow us to portray thoughts to others. The word "aether" has gotten a bad rap. As long as we use words like "vacuum", "dark energy", or "dark matter", all is well, but label those as being the attributes of the "aether" and all hell breaks loose.
Just food for thought,
PW
Author
Topic: Where does the energy come from (Read 9681 times)
