It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Under just the right conditions---which involve an ultra-high-intensity laser beam and a two-mile-long particle accelerator---it could be possible to create something out of nothing, according to University of Michigan researchers. The scientists and engineers have developed new equations that show how a high-energy electron beam combined with an intense laser pulse could rip apart a vacuum into its fundamental matter and antimatter components, and set off a cascade of events that generates additional pairs of particles and antiparticles.
Matter and antimatter destroy each other when they come into contact under normal conditions.
"But in a strong electromagnetic field, this annihilation, which is typically a sink mechanism, can be the source of new particles," Nees said, "In the course of the annihilation, gamma photons appear, which can produce additional electrons and positrons."
"The basic question what is a vacuum, and what is nothing, goes beyond science," he said. "It's embedded deeply in the base not only of theoretical physics, but of our philosophical perception of everything---of reality, of life, even the religious question of could the world have come from nothing."
True, but they may be mis-stating the experiment.
Originally posted by SaturnFX
Flag on the field...
You cannot make something from nothing...Thermodynamics laughs at your feeble mortal attempt to do so...
What if they are just trying to reverse that equation and turn energy into matter (per E=mc^2)? I don't think it's physically impossible but it might be the first time anyone has done it, if they do it?
The Quantum foam theory says that
Originally posted by Gazrok
That's pretty much how it sounded to me too. The more intriguing thing for me, is that it sounds like there is mass to be found within the vacuum, as a result of the collision?
So they pop into existence and must annihilate without any external energy source. Perhaps with an external energy source, conservation laws can still be maintained if the particles pop into existence and don't annihilate?
the uncertainty principle allows particles and energy to briefly come into existence, and then annihilate, without violating conservation laws.
Maybe according to classical physics but not according to modern physics.
Originally posted by catwhoknows
A vacuum is something which is entirely empty.
In quantum mechanics, the vacuum is defined as the state (i.e. solution to the equations of the theory) with the lowest energy. To first approximation, this is simply a state with no particles, hence the name.
Even an ideal vacuum, thought of as the complete absence of anything, will not in practice remain empty. Consider a vacuum chamber that has been completely evacuated, so that the (classical) particle concentration is zero. The walls of the chamber will emit light in the form of black body radiation.
In fact, if space vacuums are full of this and that, they are not vacuums. So they are wrongly named.
They said create from a vacuum. You would like people to stop using the word vacuum but wanting it to be so doesn't make it so.
Nothing can be created from nothing, whatever scientists think.
So they pop into existence and must annihilate without any external energy source. Perhaps with an external energy source, conservation laws can still be maintained if the particles pop into existence and don't annihilate?
Nothing can be created from nothing
So remove one of the pair by zapping it with a high powered laser? Will that work? It sounds plausible but I never heard of anyone doing it.
Originally posted by Astyanax
One trick would be to remove a member of each particle pair from the scene so that the other has nothing to annhilate with. Event horizons do this niftily, which is why black holes emit Hawking radiation.