L'Écume des jours

"The froth of days"

常道。常名

Constance of Vibration & Constance of Resonance

 

觀 Quantasphere: for the Sake of It, Here I Care

世 Atmosphere:   for the Love of It, Here I Breath

音 Biosphere:       for the Life of It, Here I Am

The Magic Galactic Hexagon

ㅤ"The solar system and the galaxy. The plane of the solar system is tilted at 60.0 degrees to the plane of the galaxy. The midwinter sun is shown lined up with the centre of the galaxy, an alignment which occurs every 25,700 years and which peaked at the midsummer eclipse of 1999."  

The Remarkable Emptiness of Existence

Early scientists did not know it, but we do now: the void in the universe is alive.

by Paul M. Sutter

January 4, 2023

Arcturian Light Codes, Talon Abraxas M/J

In December 2022, an international team of astronomers released the results of their latest survey of galaxies, a work which confirmed that the vacuum of spacetime wreaks havoc across the universe. They found that matter makes only a minor contribution to the energy budget of the universe up. Instead, most of the energy within the cosmos is contained in a vacuum, and that energy dominates the future evolution of the universe.

That contribution is the latest in a string of discoveries stretching back over two decades. In the late 1990s, two independent teams of astronomers had already discovered that the universe's expansion was accelerating, i.e. our universe grows quicker and faster by the day. The exact present-day expansion rate is still a matter of debate among cosmologists, but the reality is apparent: Something makes the universe blow up. It appears as a repulsive gravitational force which has been named dark energy.

The trick here is that the vacuum, first demonstrated by Otto von Guericke in 1654, is not as empty as it seems. If we were to take a box (or, following Otto von Guericke’s example, two hemispheres), and remove everything from it, including all the particles, all the light, just everything, we would not be left with ― strictly speaking ― nothing. We would be left with the vacuum of spacetime itself, which is an entity in its own right.

As we live in a quantum universe, nothing is ascertained. At the tiniest of scales, subatomic particles fizz and pop into existence, briefly experiencing the world of the living before returning back from where they came ― disappearing from reality before they have a chance to meaningfully interact with anything else.

This phenomenon has been given various names: quantum foam, spacetime foam, and vacuum fluctuations. This foam represents fundamental energy to the vacuum of spacetime itself, a bare ground level on which all other physical interactions take place. In the language of quantum field theory ― the offspring of the marriage of quantum mechanics and special relativity ― quantum fields representing every kind of particle soak the vacuum of spacetime like crusty bread dipped in oil and vinegar. Those fields cannot help but vibrate at a fundamental, quantum level. In this view, the vacuum is singing to us, a harmony underlying reality itself.

Thanks to the most advanced quantum theories, we can calculate the energy contained in the vacuum, and it is infinite. As in, suffusing every cubic centimetre of space and time is an infinite amount of energy, the combined efforts of all those countless but effervescent particles. This is not necessarily a problem for the physics we are used to, because all the interactions of everyday experience sit “on top of” (for lack of a better term) that infinite tower of energy ― it just makes the math a real pain to work with.

All this would be mathematically annoying ― but otherwise unremarkable ― except for the fact that in Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, vacuum energy has the curious ability to generate a repulsive gravitational force. Typically, we never notice such effects ― because the vacuum energy is swamped by all the normal mass within it (in von Guericke’s case, the atmospheric pressure surrounding his hemispheres was the dominant force at play). But at the largest scales, there is so much raw nothingness to the universe that these effects become manifest as an accelerated expansion. Recent research suggests that around 5 billion years ago, the matter in the universe diluted to the point that dark energy could come to the fore. Today, it represents roughly 70 per cent of the entire energy budget of the cosmos. Studies have shown that dark energy is actually in the act of ripping apart the large-scale structure of the universe, tearing apart superclusters of galaxies and disentangling the cosmic web before our very eyes.

But the acceleration is not all that swift. When we calculate how much vacuum energy is needed to create the dark energy effect, we only get a small figure.

However, our quantum understanding of vacuum energy says it should be infinite, or at least incredibly large. Definitely not small. This discrepancy between the theoretical energy of the vacuum and the observed value is one of the greatest mysteries in modern physics.

➥ This leads to the question of what else might be lurking in the vast nothingness of our atoms and our universe.

Perhaps von Guericke was right all along. “Nothing contains all things,” he wrote. “It is more precious than gold, without beginning and end, more joyous than the perception of bountiful light, nobler than the blood of kings, comparable to the heavens, higher than the stars, more powerful than a stroke of lightning, perfect and blessed in every way.” 

GGG