Empty Space is Not Empty!

[voidisyinyang]

"The Universe is flat. It has zero total energy.... If you have nothing in quantum mechanics you'll always get something."

 

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/a-universe-from-nothing-lecture/

 

"we live in a universe dominated by Nothing."

 

Lawrence Krauss gives a talk on our current picture of the universe, how it will end, and how it could have come from nothing.

 

Krauss is the author of many bestselling books on Physics and Cosmology, including “The Physics of Star Trek.”

 

If you’ve ever wanted to answer that annoying question, “how could the Universe have formed from nothing”, then watch this video.

 

Lawrence Krauss is funny, informative, and if you watch the entire video (it’s over an hour long, so you might need to pause it a few times), he will blow your mind. Lawrence seems like a pretty cool guy

Edited July 3, 2010 by drewhempel

[Brian]

...

[Ramon25]

doesnt that guy strike you as kind of full of himeself and a little bit of a know it all with circular logic?

[voidisyinyang]

[Ramon25]

Well I appreciate the detailed response but I guess what I mean is that this guy keeps sayng the everything is remarkable and that evolving seems to be noting special and thens saids nothing is remarkable and that evolving happend do to natural laws. Yeah? How is he so sure its nothing special or that we are nothing important? He is just assuming and basing his idea on bias. his science is clear his interpretations are biased...

[Birch]

Drew, thanks for this.

 

It reminds me of the guy who wrote something about triangles not really existing - except as an exercise and that in itself is very cool! Think about it!

 

"My" current position on such matters = doesn't matter a whip who's wrong and who's right. What does matter IMO is:

 

- who/what can help people the most/best with health and happiness

 

- who/what can help the earth the most/best with health and happiness (although do try define "happy" from the Earth's perspective, might just mean kicking me off :-p

 

Shucks! Given I'm dependent on both of the above for survival (everyone else can make a call on which:-p one...), makes sense I'd like to help, no?

[Apech]

This is a stunning view by the Planck telescope of the light emitted by cosmic interstellar dust and the big bang background radiation.

 

Planck

 

 

... add also dark matter and dark energy ... indeed space is not empty.

[Brian]

...

[joeblast]

Well I appreciate the detailed response but I guess what I mean is that this guy keeps sayng the everything is remarkable and that evolving seems to be noting special and thens saids nothing is remarkable and that evolving happend do to natural laws. Yeah? How is he so sure its nothing special or that we are nothing important? He is just assuming and basing his idea on bias. his science is clear his interpretations are biased...

"nothing remarkable"="given the circumstances, it would be sort of odd if this phenomenon didn't happen..."

[Owledge]

Drew, the review is a bit short for an hour-long video.

 

I didn't watch it, but from reading this thread, the whole thing sounds like the old philosophical meander of arguing about definitions, or like talking about concepts far beyond what words are suitable for.

I mean... Could you explain the subtitle of this thread to me? "90% of mass is space between quarks in the proton". Since when does space equal mass? Or is is not space? Then why did you call it space? And what about the space between the quarks of neutrons?

[voidisyinyang]

Drew, the review is a bit short for an hour-long video.

 

I didn't watch it, but from reading this thread, the whole thing sounds like the old philosophical meander of arguing about definitions, or like talking about concepts far beyond what words are suitable for.

I mean... Could you explain the subtitle of this thread to me? "90% of mass is space between quarks in the proton". Since when does space equal mass? Or is is not space? Then why did you call it space? And what about the space between the quarks of neutrons?

 

OH you really gotta watch the vid -- he focuses on SPECIFICALLY the space between the quarks!!

 

No -- Professor Lawrence Krauss emphasizes empirical data and he gives some excellent data sources -- visuals, etc.

 

I like science as a metaphor but my personal view is that technology is destroying ecology -- and there's no pure math, etc. so I like to psychoanalyze scientists. I got banned from the SEED science blogs by PZ Myers -- at first they said I'm a crank -- and I said yes -- I'm a crank who is openly providing free psychoanalysis for scientists online! haha.

 

Anyway last night I just watched the "Secret life of Chaos" -- a BBC doc and then I followed up on it for my latest blog post -- check this out -- actual Matrix technology update:

 

http://naturalresonancerevolution.blogspot.com/2010/07/naturalmotion-and-matrix.html

[Owledge]

About the natural motion thing: I was wondering what took them so long.

This idea I had many years ago, like probably many other people had, too.

I'd say what prevents ideas like that from nearly instantaneously being put into action are the slowing effects of the systems of society. Imagine the progress if these were not there.

[voidisyinyang]

About the natural motion thing: I was wondering what took them so long.

This idea I had many years ago, like probably many other people had, too.

I'd say what prevents ideas like that from nearly instantaneously being put into action are the slowing effects of the systems of society. Imagine the progress if these were not there.

 

Yeah his background is in "synthetic biology"

 

http://syntheticbiology.org/Applications.html

 

Energy Production And Storage

Summary

 

* Humans that photosynthesize

 

Hmms sounds familiar!

 

Yeah here's a comment I made on one of the SEED science blogs back in 2006:

No this is good. I don't support say Professor emeritus Theodore Roszak's humanist attack against Gould, Sagan and other scientists who emphasize the random destructiveness in the universe. My favorite analysis of science is "Doubt and Certainty" by Tony Rothman and Physics Professor Sudarshan (1998 or so). I think that left-brain logic of science goes with right-hand technology that alters our measurements of right-hand racemization -- in otherwords, as Chomsky as even suggested in 2003, science is just a "cycling of the elements." So left-hand carbon-based molecules (ecology as earth) are being replaced with right-hand silica-based molecules (fire as desertification) through "right-hand" technology (metal) with water as the pivot point. Water is a macro quantum molecule that defies the 2nd law of thermodynamics (just read physics professor J.L. Finney's "What's So Special About Water?" article in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 2004). As water pressure increases entropy decreases -- due to the Platonic Geometry -- the tetrahedral binding properties of the water molecule with itself.

 

Tetrahedrons are seen as the key to "saving" Earth -- Buckyfullerenes for "synthetic ecology" and "nanowater," etc., -- silica is supposedly symmetrical but the new silica-DNA biochips will change how humans perceive symmetry! In fact it's been conjectured that silica was right-handed when life formed on earth from the "vital clay" model of Professor A. G. Cairns-Smith -- nonlinear crystallization.

 

I'm sitting in full-lotus as I type this -- that's how humans can restore brain symmetry, lost at the last major global warming, 2.5 mya, causing permanent bipedalism for hominids. Read "The Lop-sided Ape" by Professor Michael Corballis. Full-lotus yoga restores brain symmetry -- making humans more like peaceful orangutans (and yes I support Professor Jeffrey Schwartz' "Red Ape" argument)through tetrahedron body position and the brain does have silica-molecules that nanotech is reengineering with the silica in soy!!

 

Highly ironic that the brain of Earth is being replaced with soy farms -- the Amazon.

 

Posted by: drew hempel | September 27, 2006 10:38 AM

Edited July 6, 2010 by drewhempel

[joeblast]

"90% of mass is space between quarks in the proton". Since when does space equal mass? Or is is not space? Then why did you call it space? And what about the space between the quarks of neutrons?

The main point is the strong force interaction between the quarks accounts for this. The strong force is very strong - ostensibly if you were able to grasp onto a quark and pull it apart from the others it is bound to, the binding energy increases the further they're pulled apart - and at some point you'd have put enough energy into the system that a new quark pair would spontaneously form, arising from all of the energy you had put in trying to separate them.

 

Neutrons are no different - they're just made of UDD instead of UUD up/down quarks. (The manifestation of the weak force interaction will allow for one of the quarks to transmute into another, that's how radioactive decay happens.)

[Ramon25]

"nothing remarkable"="given the circumstances, it would be sort of odd if this phenomenon didn't happen..."

I guess that kind of my point, uh yeah that means the universel las kind of promote life

[voidisyinyang]

The main point is the strong force interaction between the quarks accounts for this. The strong force is very strong - ostensibly if you were able to grasp onto a quark and pull it apart from the others it is bound to, the binding energy increases the further they're pulled apart - and at some point you'd have put enough energy into the system that a new quark pair would spontaneously form, arising from all of the energy you had put in trying to separate them.

 

Neutrons are no different - they're just made of UDD instead of UUD up/down quarks. (The manifestation of the weak force interaction will allow for one of the quarks to transmute into another, that's how radioactive decay happens.)

 

You're also going to have watch the video lecture -- he's not talking about the strong force. Krauss is talking about dark matter and dark energy -- so dark energy is actually the mass of space itself.

[Owledge]

I've watched the video now. It could have been summed up pretty nicely.

That guy doesn't realize how much his talk is the religious fairy-tales he mentioned in the beginning.

A big topic is dark matter, and there are so many potential fallacies involved, besides him showing an alarmingly strong tendency to REALLY KNOW things, while he mocks the same thing regarding past science. (I experienced this first hand with another theoretical physicist.) I don't want to write too much on this, but there's a lot of interesting psychological stuff involved. Science in all times ironically suffers from the things seen as typical aspects of religion. Man, near the end when he talks about what scientists in the far future would see and do wrong, that was so foolish.

 

A common fallacy is being too quick at believing that your measurements are accurate. A scientist with a limited view will believe that he can explain everything in the universe with the tools he has now. The measuring instrument is a holy relic of science. It is all-knowing, supreme and perfect. Because the child is not happy when all the toys are broken.

 

And there's so much politics involved. Scientists try to rescue their theories from invalidity, making everything fit nicely again.

Science can only be as good as the logic and sanity of the scientists, and I've long ago given up the myth of 'professionals' - in any field by the way, who are objective and able to be absolutely correct.

 

It's just sad how some people can joke about this in others all the time, while doing the same thing without considering that.

 

I am not saying that just because many things he says seem to complex to check for correctness they are fallacious, but there's a historical record of how often fallacies (and manipulations) of great magnitude occur in science.

 

What seems to be very rare are videos that give us all the background info and shed light on both sides, that serve the attitude of someone who wants to be convinced, not merely be presented with some fascinating ideas and claims. There are certain objections to theories that are quickly derided as being disproven or not sufficient to explain phenomena. I mean, we can see that with the whole global warming thing. And when wondering why the galaxies distance themselves from each other with twice the speed in twice the distance and so on, before talking so much about a weird theory like expanding space, I'd like to see a really good video about the idea that the Doppler effect might be influenced by the universe's atmosphere. It is mostly hydrogen and hydrogen filters out the short wavelengths, making everything more red than it should be. And then when he talks about the dark matter and doesn't want to go into that (while going into incredible detail other times) but jokingly names things they could exclude - "snowballs, planets and boring things" - I wonder whether they have considered the mass of all the gases in the universe. And even if they had, there are so many things that can disprove relativity and the assumption that energy is not affected by gravity. Imagine there is no curvature of space, but electromagnetic radiation has a mass and is affected by gravity, then try to estimate the sum of the mass of all radiation in the universe. Or don't do this, but estimate the mass of all non-electromagnetic radiation. Forget the fact that science has seldomly been right when doing calculations of this crazy magnitude, but there are so many things you can fail to consider. And the more complex crazy theories become, the greater is the likeliness of error.

Generally, what is the factor that a stellar body's average density is higher than the average density of atmosphere in space? Now put against this the factor of how much more space in the universe is occupied by 'empty space' than by stellar bodies.

 

Oh and then there are the disregarded theories like the one of the electrical universe. So the science establishment will even intentionally not consider all possibilities.

 

Like I said, a good presentation should shed light on a topic from all sides, also assuming the position of a critic. Like sometimes mentioned by researchers, a feature of good science is honestly and with all your capacity trying to disprove your own theories.

 

...

 

About what I wrote earlier - arguing about definitions. It might be not the nicest language, but in the video he uses so many self-created mind constructs, playing with them ... In parts what he does looks like intellectually jerking off. Meaning, he is so excited about the weird and mysterious picture of the universe that he himself created; like he needs that. Classically religious* behavior.

 

*in the commonly used sense, not so much the original meaning.

Edited July 7, 2010 by Hardyg

[voidisyinyang]

I've watched the video now. It could have been summed up pretty nicely.

That guy doesn't realize how much his talk is the religious fairy-tales he mentioned in the beginning.

A big topic is dark matter, and there are so many potential fallacies involved, besides him showing an alarmingly strong tendency to REALLY KNOW things, while he mocks the same thing regarding past science. (I experienced this first hand with another theoretical physicist.) I don't want to write too much on this, but there's a lot of interesting psychological stuff involved. Science in all times ironically suffers from the things seen as typical aspects of religion. Man, near the end when he talks about what scientists in the far future would see and do wrong, that was so foolish.

 

A common fallacy is being too quick at believing that your measurements are accurate. A scientist with a limited view will believe that he can explain everything in the universe with the tools he has now. The measuring instrument is a holy relic of science. It is all-knowing, supreme and perfect. Because the child is not happy when all the toys are broken.

 

And there's so much politics involved. Scientists try to rescue their theories from invalidity, making everything fit nicely again.

Science can only be as good as the logic and sanity of the scientists, and I've long ago given up the myth of 'professionals' - in any field by the way, who are objective and able to be absolutely correct.

 

It's just sad how some people can joke about this in others all the time, while doing the same thing without considering that.

 

I am not saying that just because many things he says seem to complex to check for correctness they are fallacious, but there's a historical record of how often fallacies (and manipulations) of great magnitude occur in science.

 

What seems to be very rare are videos that give us all the background info and shed light on both sides, that serve the attitude of someone who wants to be convinced, not merely be presented with some fascinating ideas and claims. There are certain objections to theories that are quickly derided as being disproven or not sufficient to explain phenomena. I mean, we can see that with the whole global warming thing. And when wondering why the galaxies distance themselves from each other with twice the speed in twice the distance and so on, before talking so much about a weird theory like expanding space, I'd like to see a really good video about the idea that the Doppler effect might be influenced by the universe's atmosphere. It is mostly hydrogen and hydrogen filters out the short wavelengths, making everything more red than it should be. And then when he talks about the dark matter and doesn't want to go into that (while going into incredible detail other times) but jokingly names things they could exclude - "snowballs, planets and boring things" - I wonder whether they have considered the mass of all the gases in the universe. And even if they had, there are so many things that can disprove relativity and the assumption that energy is not affected by gravity. Imagine there is no curvature of space, but electromagnetic radiation has a mass and is affected by gravity, then try to estimate the sum of the mass of all radiation in the universe. Or don't do this, but estimate the mass of all non-electromagnetic radiation. Forget the fact that science has seldomly been right when doing calculations of this crazy magnitude, but there are so many things you can fail to consider. And the more complex crazy theories become, the greater is the likeliness of error.

Generally, what is the factor that a stellar body's average density is higher than the average density of atmosphere in space? Now put against this the factor of how much more space in the universe is occupied by 'empty space' than by stellar bodies.

 

Oh and then there are the disregarded theories like the one of the electrical universe. So the science establishment will even intentionally not consider all possibilities.

 

Like I said, a good presentation should shed light on a topic from all sides, also assuming the position of a critic. Like sometimes mentioned by researchers, a feature of good science is honestly and with all your capacity trying to disprove your own theories.

 

...

 

About what I wrote earlier - arguing about definitions. It might be not the nicest language, but in the video he uses so many self-created mind constructs, playing with them ... In parts what he does looks like intellectually jerking off. Meaning, he is so excited about the weird and mysterious picture of the universe that he himself created; like he needs that. Classically religious* behavior.

 

*in the commonly used sense, not so much the original meaning.

 

This Scientific American article by Krauss and his collaborator is a nice summary of the above video lecture:

 

http://genesis1.asu.edu/~krauss/0308046.pdf

 

The accelerating cosmic expansion is beginning to undermine the three observational pillars of the big bang

theory: the motion of galaxies away from one another, the cosmic microwave background radiation, and the

relative quantities of light chemical elements such as hydrogen and helium.

 

I read this book by Krauss as well --

 

Prof. Krauss is the author of many acclaimed popular books, including, The Fifth Essence: The Search for Dark Matter in the Universe (Basic Books, 1989), which was named Astronomy Book of the Year by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific,

 

So he has focused on dark matter previously.

 

Actually I read the revision of that book:

 

Quintessence: The Mystery of the Missing Mass, a revision and update of The Fifth Essence, appeared in February 2000.

 

So it's important to take into account that quantum mechanics relies on gravity as relativity as well -- and quantum mechanics is the electromagnetic energy.

 

http://genesis1.asu.edu/~krauss/hidinpd.html

 

But the (individual) gravitational attraction of each atom with every other atom is so small we could never possibly measure it. Richard Feynman gives a very good example. He said if you take a friend to the top of a tall building and push them off - well, maybe not a friend - if you're 200 feet up, it takes gravity all that way to accelerate the body, but it's electromagnetism that stops it. The reason you don't go through the concrete is that the electrons in the atoms of your body are repelled by the electrons in the atoms of the concrete. You don't even make a dent. Electromagnetism can stop you in a fraction of an inch, whereas it takes gravity all that way to accelerate you. It gives you some sense of the relative strength of those forces.

 

Q: So electromagnetism trumps gravity.

 

A: Except, ultimately, when you get to very, very, very small scales. The size of the scales we're talking about, compared to the size of a nucleus of an atom, are like the size of a nucleus of an atom compared to the size almost of our galaxy. We're really talking about small scales, which is why we're not probing them experimentally right now. The theory tells us that if we extrapolate what we know to that scale, something crazy must happen. In fact, gravity becomes strong at that scale and you can't ignore it any more. When we do calculations of atoms and how the sun works and how we work, you can ignore gravity. Gravity matters on two scales of the universe. One, on the very large scale, because even though it's very weak, when you build up all that matter, it's dominant compared to the other forces. And on very small scales, it's important. This is a long answer.

 

We know there are gravitational waves. We don't know that the quantum theory of gravity is right, but there's every reason to believe that gravitons exist. But maybe there's some remnants and maybe we can understand some puzzles of our universe, of why our universe is so uniform on large scales or why there's dark energy, which after all we think may be a remnant of the very beginning of time. The biggest mystery in cosmology is the nature of dark energy. The largest energy that we know of in the universe seems to reside in empty space. There are really good reasons to think that to understand that, we need to understand the nature of gravity on fundamental scales.

 

Here's another Dr. Lawrence Krauss video lecture on science and religion -- given at the college I attended for my first year of school -- Hampshire College (I took quantum mechanics at Hampshire College):

 

Edited July 7, 2010 by drewhempel

[Ramon25]

I've watched the video now. It could have been summed up pretty nicely.

That guy doesn't realize how much his talk is the religious fairy-tales he mentioned in the beginning.

A big topic is dark matter, and there are so many potential fallacies involved, besides him showing an alarmingly strong tendency to REALLY KNOW things, while he mocks the same thing regarding past science. (I experienced this first hand with another theoretical physicist.) I don't want to write too much on this, but there's a lot of interesting psychological stuff involved. Science in all times ironically suffers from the things seen as typical aspects of religion. Man, near the end when he talks about what scientists in the far future would see and do wrong, that was so foolish.

 

A common fallacy is being too quick at believing that your measurements are accurate. A scientist with a limited view will believe that he can explain everything in the universe with the tools he has now. The measuring instrument is a holy relic of science. It is all-knowing, supreme and perfect. Because the child is not happy when all the toys are broken.

 

And there's so much politics involved. Scientists try to rescue their theories from invalidity, making everything fit nicely again.

Science can only be as good as the logic and sanity of the scientists, and I've long ago given up the myth of 'professionals' - in any field by the way, who are objective and able to be absolutely correct.

 

It's just sad how some people can joke about this in others all the time, while doing the same thing without considering that.

 

I am not saying that just because many things he says seem to complex to check for correctness they are fallacious, but there's a historical record of how often fallacies (and manipulations) of great magnitude occur in science.

 

What seems to be very rare are videos that give us all the background info and shed light on both sides, that serve the attitude of someone who wants to be convinced, not merely be presented with some fascinating ideas and claims. There are certain objections to theories that are quickly derided as being disproven or not sufficient to explain phenomena. I mean, we can see that with the whole global warming thing. And when wondering why the galaxies distance themselves from each other with twice the speed in twice the distance and so on, before talking so much about a weird theory like expanding space, I'd like to see a really good video about the idea that the Doppler effect might be influenced by the universe's atmosphere. It is mostly hydrogen and hydrogen filters out the short wavelengths, making everything more red than it should be. And then when he talks about the dark matter and doesn't want to go into that (while going into incredible detail other times) but jokingly names things they could exclude - "snowballs, planets and boring things" - I wonder whether they have considered the mass of all the gases in the universe. And even if they had, there are so many things that can disprove relativity and the assumption that energy is not affected by gravity. Imagine there is no curvature of space, but electromagnetic radiation has a mass and is affected by gravity, then try to estimate the sum of the mass of all radiation in the universe. Or don't do this, but estimate the mass of all non-electromagnetic radiation. Forget the fact that science has seldomly been right when doing calculations of this crazy magnitude, but there are so many things you can fail to consider. And the more complex crazy theories become, the greater is the likeliness of error.

Generally, what is the factor that a stellar body's average density is higher than the average density of atmosphere in space? Now put against this the factor of how much more space in the universe is occupied by 'empty space' than by stellar bodies.

 

Oh and then there are the disregarded theories like the one of the electrical universe. So the science establishment will even intentionally not consider all possibilities.

 

Like I said, a good presentation should shed light on a topic from all sides, also assuming the position of a critic. Like sometimes mentioned by researchers, a feature of good science is honestly and with all your capacity trying to disprove your own theories.

 

...

 

About what I wrote earlier - arguing about definitions. It might be not the nicest language, but in the video he uses so many self-created mind constructs, playing with them ... In parts what he does looks like intellectually jerking off. Meaning, he is so excited about the weird and mysterious picture of the universe that he himself created; like he needs that. Classically religious* behavior.

 

*in the commonly used sense, not so much the original meaning.

 

fucking well said!

[joeblast]

You're also going to have watch the video lecture -- he's not talking about the strong force. Krauss is talking about dark matter and dark energy -- so dark energy is actually the mass of space itself.

it was the most logical assumption, not having dug up a spare hour to watch it yet!

 

 

 

Ah okay, yeah, good vid. Dude rambles and goes off on a lot of commentary & tangents, but the substance was good.

Edited July 8, 2010 by joeblast