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.
So I wonder, even if it’s only appearing very briefly it’s still going to exert some small gravitational effect. And who is to say the density of quantum foam is perfectly evenly distributed through the universe, within, through and between galaxies? Could this be an alternative explanation to dark matter?
So I wonder, even if it’s only appearing very briefly it’s still going to exert some small gravitational effect.
I don’t think so. Remember: This is energy being converted to mass, not mass coming out of nowhere.
Correct me if I am wrong, but as I understand it mass and energy is equivalent no? And it also still baffles us as to why rest mass and resultant mass from energy should be equivalent at all?
Correct me if I am wrong, but as I understand it mass and energy is equivalent no?
Yes.
And it also still baffles us as to why rest mass and resultant mass from energy should be equivalent at all?
I don’t know about this one. I’m not an expert so don’t quote he on it, but I don’t remember hearing this before.
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.
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?
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.
So with a sufficiently small volume of space, we would have an actual nothing again? Or the foam can go infinitely small?
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.
