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    What Is Empty Space?
    What Is Empty Space?
    What Is Empty Space?
    Ebook100 pages4 hours

    What Is Empty Space?

    By Doug Domke

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    About this ebook

    Why ask what empty space really is? It is the nature of space itself that seems to be at the heart of the mysteries in physics and cosmology today. Einstein also told us that space is a something. He showed it could be stretched and warped when he published General Relativity in 1915. But over the last one hundred years, the nature of empty space has continued to become more mysterious and confusing. We’ve learned a lot about the Universe in the last one hundred years. We’ve even learned a lot about the nature of empty space. But we still have a lot more to learn! That is the subject of this book.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLulu.com
    Release dateMay 26, 2016
    ISBN9781365141317
    What Is Empty Space?

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      Book preview

      What Is Empty Space? - Doug Domke

      What Is Empty Space?

      Preface

      In 2016 physics and cosmology are in the same condition as they were in back in 1885.  At that time, there were many problems associated with the nature and speed of light.  The more experimental data that was collected, the more confusing the situation became.  It wasn’t until twenty years later, when Albert Einstein came along, that all these mysteries started to be resolved with the introduction of special relativity. 

      Today, we have our own set of mysteries and seemingly conflicting results that no one fully understands.  We will probably need another great mind, like an Einstein, and another big breakthrough in the next few years to make sense of it all.

      Why ask what empty space really is?  It is the nature of space itself that seems to be at the heart of the mysteries in physics today.  

      Let’s think about the nature of space.  We know that the Earth is moving because we are in orbit around the Sun.  But we don't really have a sense of that motion, except by seeing the evening stars change position in the sky over the course of a year. Motion is relative. You can't tell you are moving except in relation to other objects. 

      But what about spinning?  When a skater does a spin, she feels her arms pulled outward by centrifugal force. That outward pull is just the result of spinning.  It's not relative to anything.  Picture the skater in the empty void of space with nothing around to tell her she is spinning.  Yet she would still feel the pull on her arms if she was spinning. What is she spinning relative to?  Empty space is the answer, so it's somehow more than the absence of anything!

      Einstein also told us that space is a something.  He showed it could be stretched and warped when he published general relativity in 1915.  But over the last one hundred years, the nature of empty space has continued to become more mysterious and confusing.   For example, we have found out that the expansion of the universe is accelerating for reasons we don’t understand.  We say this acceleration is powered by a mysterious force called dark energy, which seems to be a characteristic of empty space.

      Quantum theory tells us that empty space contains particles that momentarily burst into existence and then disappear.  In recent years we have even been able to measure the minute pressure that these particles can exert on real everyday matter. 

      Quantum theory, which has been validated by all kinds of experimental evidence, also seems to conflict with Einstein theories of relativity in many ways.  All our experiences tell us we shouldn't have two dramatically different conceptions of reality — there must be one huge overarching theory, says Abhay Ashtekar, a physicist at Pennsylvania State University.  This, in itself, is one of physics great mysteries, and at the heart of it, is our lack of understanding of empty space.

      In this book, we will talk about these mysteries, as well as others.  These mysteries are, in fact, the current leading edge of physics today.   We will discuss what physicists know and what they still don’t know.  We will attempt to speculate on what it all means.  We will discuss a series of observations made during the last fifty years.  Some conflict with what we think we know.  And some of these observations conflict with each other.   We will try to put into context what this all means. 

      We will also try to put all this in historical context, i.e. what have we learned in the last hundred years and how we learned it.   We’ll explain how Einstein changed our perception of reality and how that relates to the mysteries we face today. 

      This book is written for someone who wants to learn a little about physics, but isn’t a physicist. That means we will try to explain all of this without delving into all the mathematics which is at the heart of how physics attempts to describe nature and reality.

      Until the last few hundred years, we didn’t even have a concept of empty space.  According to Aristotle, the Greek philosopher and scientist, the universe consisted of earth, wind, water and fire!  We didn’t know that the space between the planets and stars was empty, let alone consider what exactly is implied by empty space.   Only recently, did we realize that empty space existed.  And now we are coming to realize, we don’t really know what it actually is!

      The vacuum is one of the places where our knowledge fizzles out and we’re left with all sorts of crazy-sounding ideas, says John Baez, a mathematical physicist at the University of California at Riverside.

      That is the subject of this book.

      Doug Domke

      May 2016

      Acknowledgements:  Special thanks to my wife Polly and our daughter Ginger Sainz for their suggestions and help with editing.

      Chapter 1– The Aether

      To understand where we are in physics today, we need to start with some history – what we have learned in the past few hundred years.  Once that is clear, we can talk about what we still don’t know.  In this chapter, we are going to explore what we learned prior to Einstein and his theory of relativity. It is mainly the story of what we learned about light that lead us to Einstein’s great discoveries.

      Before about 1500, very little was actually known about the universe.  We didn’t know that the space between the planets and stars was empty.  We didn’t know why the objects in the sky moved in the way they did.  The heavens were a complete mystery.

      As people like Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) studied the heavens, some of the

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