this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
108 points (100.0% liked)

Science

13003 readers
19 users here now

Studies, research findings, and interesting tidbits from the ever-expanding scientific world.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

Be sure to also check out these other Fediverse science communities:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Gaywallet@beehaw.org
alyaza@beehaw.org
remington@beehaw.org
108
“Nothing” doesn’t exist. Instead, there is “quantum foam” (bigthink.com)
submitted 5 months ago by BevelGear@beehaw.org to c/science@beehaw.org
39 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Lampshade@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] Jeredin@lemm.ee 1 points 5 months ago

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.