this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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“Nothing” doesn’t exist. Instead, there is “quantum foam” (bigthink.com)
submitted 7 months ago by BevelGear@beehaw.org to c/science@beehaw.org
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[–] Lampshade@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

So with a sufficiently small volume of space, we would have an actual nothing again? Or the foam can go infinitely small?

[–] Jeredin@lemm.ee 1 points 7 months ago

Consider this fact, some light waves like radio are large enough that a lot of matter is essentially invisible to their propagation; the radio waves just pass right by without any interactions. This becomes a similar problem when we try and measure such small quantum phenomena like zero-point energy. The quantum energy could be so small that they're invisible to our detectors, but are in fact still there - the two scales simple cannot interact in a measurable way. So, there'd like still be some quantum energy, just less and less until our detectors could not interact with the incredibly small quanta for measurement.