Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle suggests that in extremely tiny amounts of space and time, something can come from nothing.īut how? Surely this makes no sense? Well this seemingly empty space, contrary to what we would intuitively expect, is teeming with what physicists call quantum fluctuations, little packets of energy that appear and disappear very quickly. How much energy there is in that part of the box will be so uncertain that there is a chance it could contain enough energy to create particles literally out of nowhere. If we could examine an even smaller volume of space inside the jar over an even smaller interval of time, then something weird can happen. According to the Uncertainty Principle, because we're looking at that bit of space over a small interval of time, we've lost the ability to know exactly the amount of energy present there. But if we could slow down time and look at it over a very short time interval, things start to get strange. If we examined a very small volume of space inside the jar, we could in principle know precisely how much energy it contains. Let's think again about that ‘empty' jar. So what has this quantum weirdness got to do with the concept of nothingness? Well this theory can take a different form, in terms of energy and time. Unfortunately there's no way around this, it's an inescapable feature of reality at this scale. The common interpretation of this is that it means the more precisely we know where a particle is, the less we know about its movement. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle states that there is a fundamental limit to the precision with which two physical properties of a particle can be simultaneously known. You can never be sure of what's going to happen, not because the experiments and measurements aren't good enough, but simply because of the inherant uncertainty present. It's strange and based on uncertainty and probabilities. But the microscopic quantum world is very different. This is how our everyday classical world behaves: sensible, predictable, and understandable. Their experiments revealed a profound truth - that nothing is everywhere.Ĭause and effect. This all changed in the 17th Century due to work by Torricelli who created the first sustained vacuum and Pascal who furthered the work. Studying this nothingness has revealed nature's deepest secrets and helped us to explain why we exist.įor over a thousand years our understanding of nothingness was through the ideas of the Greek philosopher Aristotle who believed that nature would always oppose the existence of true nothingness. This is an important question because such 'emptiness' makes up most of the Universe the atoms that make up everything, including us, are mostly empty space. Now what still exists inside the box? It is really nothing? Or is there something still in it? Now remove everything we possibly can from inside of it: all the air, molecules, particles, every single atom. Just trying to imagine absolute nothingness is tricky.Ĭonsider a simple area of space, let's say the contents of this jar pictured. What is 'nothing' though? It's a difficult question to answer, because wherever we look around us, there always seems to be something there. It's easy to think that ‘nothing' is insignificant, but far from it the concept of ‘nothing' is fundamental to our Universe.
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