Experiment Creates Matter From Nothing

[Vertigo]

Reminds me of a Zen quote "Nothing is what I want."

But seriously, don't we already know that mass can be created out of energy?
(E = MC^2)

Like VB says, the opposite of fission.


Is this somehow different?

Yes, as I understand it it is different. In that no energy is being supplied. The energy balanced is maintained, I think (@Venusian Broon will be able to tell you more precisely), by particles constantly coming into existence and going out of existence all the time and/or by creating matter/anti-matter pairs. So whilst I think there are other environments where we put energy in and particles come out so to speak, in this particular study they have tried to eliminate all external fields other than gravity which can't be excluded.

 

[Biskit]

Yes, energy is being supplied - it comes from the electric field. Everything else (spin, momentum etc) is balanced by the pair of particles each carrying opposite and equal values, but the mass "created" is balanced by the matching reduction in the electric field.

 

[hitmouse]

Yes, as I understand it it is different. In that no energy is being supplied. The energy balanced is maintained, I think (@Venusian Broon will be able to tell you more precisely), by particles constantly coming into existence and going out of existence all the time and/or by creating matter/anti-matter pairs. So whilst I think there are other environments where we put energy in and particles come out so to speak, in this particular study they have tried to eliminate all external fields other than gravity which can't be excluded.

Yes. The net sum is zero. Particles and their antiparticles are fizzing in and out of existence the whole time in vacuum or elsewhere: this is neither new nor controversial. Ultimately they cancel each other out (unless possibly on the edge of a black hole) so energy is conserved.

 

[Vertigo]

Yes, energy is being supplied - it comes from the electric field. Everything else (spin, momentum etc) is balanced by the pair of particles each carrying opposite and equal values, but the mass "created" is balanced by the matching reduction in the electric field.

I think in this case there is no electrical field. That one is a slightly different experiment.

 

[Biskit]

I think in this case there is no electrical field. That one is a slightly different experiment.

This experiment applies an electric field to a graphene sheet to create an analogue of the Schwinger effect (electrons and "holes" rather than electrons and positrons ) with much smaller field strengths, but there's still an electric field to supply the energy.

 

[LordOfWizards]

Yes, as I understand it it is different. In that no energy is being supplied. The energy balanced is maintained, I think (@Venusian Broon will be able to tell you more precisely), by particles constantly coming into existence and going out of existence all the time and/or by creating matter/anti-matter pairs. So whilst I think there are other environments where we put energy in and particles come out so to speak, in this particular study they have tried to eliminate all external fields other than gravity which can't be excluded.

Well, This time I read the article. They are talking about the zero point field. Particles are constantly appearing from nothing, but then their anti-pair twin annihilates them. What they described at one point was essentially not allowing the pairs to annihilate. And they are applying an electric field.

 

[Ray Zdybrow]

The physicists view of 'nothing' hasn't changed. However, it refers to the vacuum state with no matter and no other fields. In real life that's somewhat possible by removing all matter and shielding for EM fields, but gravity is currently impossible to shield, as the article discusses.

But the vacuum state, even if one could shield for gravity would still, on quantum scales should have structure and allow for the spontaneous creation of matter via energy fluctuations.

Which is how the above experiments create out of 'nothing' - energy is still required to be converted into matter in the vacuum state. It's the same sort of process when a gamma-ray photon, say...an electromagnetic wave with an energy of about 0.51MeV, can change into an electron-positron pair. (Just think about it for a second, isn't it weird that an EM wave can change into something 'solid' like an electron!)

We're used to fundamentally destroying matter, via fission processes, which liberates energy. This is just the opposite process - using energy to create matter.

"True nothing" would have no properties at all.

TLDR; when a physicist talks about 'nothing' they usually mean 'something'. And that something has properties that can lead to spontaneous creation of matter, given the right conditions.

Ok, can understand that, unlike most of the previous posts. The "physicists view of nothing" as first stated seems like the commonsense view of "nothing", from a materialist perspective. If it's a state which does not exist in nature, the "Matter out of nothing" headlines are just bending the meaning of "Nothing"