Nothing: A Very Short Introduction
Frank Close
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN: 0199225869
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This short, smart book tells you everything you need to know about "nothing." What remains when you take all the matter away? Can empty space--"nothing"--exist? To answer these questions, eminent scientist Frank Close takes us on a lively and accessible journey that ranges from ancient ideas and cultural superstitions to the frontiers of current research, illuminating the story of how scientists have explored the void and the rich discoveries they have made there. Readers will find an enlightening history of the vacuum: how the efforts to make a better vacuum led to the discovery of the electron; the ideas of Newton, Mach, and Einstein on the nature of space and time; the mysterious aether and how Einstein did away with it; and the latest ideas that the vacuum is filled with the Higgs field. The story ranges from the absolute zero of temperature and the seething vacuum of virtual particles and anti-particles that fills space, to the extreme heat and energy of the early universe.
About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.
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quarks we would need to expand the dot out to the Moon, and then keep on going another twenty times more distance. A quark is as small compared to a proton or neutron as either of those is relative to an atom. Between the compact central nucleus and the remote whirling electrons, atoms in particle terms are mostly empty space, and the same can be said of the innards of the atomic nucleus. In summary, the fundamental structure of the atom is beyond real imagination, and its emptiness is profound.
torch or to power a radio, which will provide a few volts and for which the positively and negatively charged plates are separated by the order of a millimetre, the resulting electric field will be up to a thousand volts per metre. At SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator in California, the electric fields accelerate electrons to a speed of about 300,000 km a second, within a thousandth of a per cent of the speed of light. To do this they pass through some 30 billion volts in about 3 km, which
if Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic phenomena was correct, and everything we know says that it is, then the situation that Einstein was imagining, travelling at the speed of light, must be impossible: we can never achieve light speed. This set Einstein thinking about the definition of velocity, and the concepts of absolute and relative. For this gedankenexperiment he imagined a passenger on a train watching another train pass by, 66 which was inspired by a phenomenon that we have all at some
otherwise which would rule? In general it was inconceivable that the void in which electromagnetic phenomena take place operates with a different space-time fabric from that which applies for the all-pervasive force of gravity. 73 Travelling on a light beam According to Newton’s theory of gravitation, the Sun and Earth interact instantaneously. However, according to Einstein’s relativity theory of 1905, such interactions can only be transmitted at the speed of light, such that time would
quantum possibility into the Void. In Genesis some God said, ‘let there be light,’ but for the Rigveda, gods are creations of human imagination, invoked to explain what lay beyond understanding: ‘the Gods came afterwards . . . who then knows whence all has arisen?’ As science discovers answers, it exposes deeper questions whose answers are for the future. In 144 the meantime, I leave you with a poetic interpretation from the Rigveda: The non-existent was not; the existent was not Darkness was
