41 points

Ah good, so I can tell my therapist I’m no longer a nihilist but a quantum foamer.

This is great.

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30 points

Conceptually, the nihilists are right! Nothing does matter.

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9 points

Dammit.

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1 point

Matters to me.

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5 points

I hate and love this. Thanks 💜

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Can quantum particles be blocked or contained or otherwise impeded from entering a vessel?

Are they truly just appearing and disappearing or do they just move so fast (like, faster than C) that it only appears that way?

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6 points

Nope, they actually appear and disappear. The idea is that even in vacuum there’s a certain amount of background energy and that energy can randomly turn into matter-antimatter pairs in what is basically the inverse of matter-antimatter annihilation.

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5 points

To a certain degree, as they mentioned in the article regarding the casimir effect. While one cannot keep out the quantum foam entirely, it can be restricted to specific wavelengths by altering the volume of the space.

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2 points

So with a sufficiently small volume of space, we would have an actual nothing again? Or the foam can go infinitely small?

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1 point

Consider this fact, some light waves like radio are large enough that a lot of matter is essentially invisible to their propagation; the radio waves just pass right by without any interactions. This becomes a similar problem when we try and measure such small quantum phenomena like zero-point energy. The quantum energy could be so small that they’re invisible to our detectors, but are in fact still there - the two scales simple cannot interact in a measurable way. So, there’d like still be some quantum energy, just less and less until our detectors could not interact with the incredibly small quanta for measurement.

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12 points

Quantum foam has been a mainstream thought for some time. It is referenced extensively in Michael Crichton’s 1999 novel Timeline in which a sort of multiverse time travel is achieved by scientists using some vague method based on quantum science.

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2 points
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I think Wikipedia articles about zero-point energy and quantum-foam explain this well.

Btw, wasn’t there an experiment with a laser vibrating a nano-particle with nearly lightspeed, separating the particle & anti-particle pair before annihilation, creating matter from nothing?

Ah, btw, Casimir effect.

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5 points

What is the ontology of a concept or idea? If nothing doesn’t exist materially but strictly conceptually, does it not exist or is there a different term one should employ to refer to it? 🤔

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1 point

It’s that they’re using a more normal people term. They probably wanted to say vacuum.

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7 points
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