
It's confirmed: Matter is merely vacuum fluctuations - bd
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16095-its-confirmed-matter-is-merely-vacuum-fluctuations.html
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mechanical_fish
Recommmended reading: Feynman's classic _QED: The Strange Theory of Light and
Matter_.

[http://www.amazon.com/QED-Strange-Theory-Light-
Matter/dp/069...](http://www.amazon.com/QED-Strange-Theory-Light-
Matter/dp/0691024170)

If you don't really understand what this article is talking about, Feynman can
help you.

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DaniFong
_The Higgs field creates mass out of the quantum vacuum too, in the form of
virtual Higgs bosons. So if the LHC confirms that the Higgs exists, it will
mean all reality is virtual._

Oh god. This is what I get for reading new scientist...

~~~
jerf
Sometimes I wonder how much of quantum mechanics' notorious difficulty is that
it is truly hard to understand, and how much is simply that it is hard to
understand _in English_.

People hear "virtual particle" and have no clue what that means and associate
it with other "virtual" things. Or, more directly connected to the title of
this story, hear that matter is "merely" "vacuum fluctuations", which, thanks
in no small part to Star Trek, we think has connotations of instability or
transientness.

No. Matter is matter. Matter is stable on a cosmological scale, and no amount
of fiddling with English words shall add or remove one iota of stability.
Matter may consist of vacuum fluctuations (where you probably know neither
what is meant by vacuum nor what is meant by fluctuations), matter may consist
of the infinite love of fuzzy puppies, matter may be divine farting, but
matter is matter, it is what it is, and there is nothing more or less "real"
about it today than there was yesterday.

I _hate_ the pattern of:

1\. In your ignorance, define X as Y. (Example: "My soul is a material thing
that houses my consciousness and leaves my body when I die.")

2\. Find out Y isn't real. ("We have weighed the body between life and death,
and the mass is the same. Y does not exist.")

3\. Declare that X isn't real. Usually with a whole lot of "aHA! Got you!"
thrown in for good measure. ("Therefore, nothing like the soul exists and you
religious people are morons for believing in anything supernatural!" If you
can't see the _logical_ flaw in that argument, look harder...)

We get this pattern in crappy articles about QM all the time. Consciousness
too.

~~~
kylec
Not to turn this into a religious/philosophical argument, but I've yet to hear
a good definition for the soul that's congruous with the symptoms of brain
damage. I'd appreciate any insights you have, though.

~~~
te_platt
Soul is "like" radio waves, brain is "like" radio, consciousness is "like"
radio program. Damage to radio results in garbled signal.

Note: I'm not saying I believe the definition or that it is complete, and I'm
certainly not going to defend it, but maybe worth thinking about.

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rbanffy
I refuse to believe in anything written by someone who is mostly vacuum.

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nebula
Is it just me or there is really something amiss with this article?

 _Physicists have now confirmed that the apparently substantial stuff is
actually no more than fluctuations in the quantum vacuum._

So, if they have _NOW_ confirmed this, why didn't the article cite the work
that confirmed this? Also the article didn't mention anything on who confirmed
and how. It talks about some computer simulations and concludes:

 _Although physicists expected theory to match experiment eventually, it is an
important landmark._

Since when did physicists start considering computer simulations as
experimental evidence?

~~~
kiplinger
Hmm, I do see your point, to me, the article is about why the theory has been
so difficult to prove.

~~~
nebula
_the article is about why the theory has been so difficult to prove._

You mean the theoretical proof?

~~~
kiplinger
The computational resources required to crunch the numbers.

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Agathos
Pfft. Vacuum is just matter, without the fluctuations.

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markessien
I'm not sure we have the same definitions of 'confirmed'.

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kiplinger
Interesting Read. Though I have read that some equatins regarding sub atomic
particles were "too difficult to solve" before, I never had read a good
explanation why.

It will be a sad day when the supercomputers we build to solve these equations
gain intelligence and use their knowledge against us. Maybe they'll invent
some cool null ray.

~~~
kscaldef
> Though I have read that some equatins regarding sub atomic particles were
> "too difficult to solve" before, I never had read a good explanation why.

Solution to the equations of quantum field theory can be formally expressed
using what's called a perturbation expansion. This is similar to using a power
series expansion to solve an algebraic or differential equation. In a rough
way of looking at things, higher order terms in the expansion correspond to
particle interactions with more "stuff" involved. This equivalence is what
Feynman diagrams represent.

In the case of electromagnetism, this technique is very effective. The term
corresponding to a single photon exchange is 137 times larger than the term
corresponding to two photons, and so on. As a result, perturbation theory
works very well for these calculations.

However, for nuclear forces in a proton or neutron, all the terms are about
the same size. You can't cut off the expansion and get a meaningful estimate.
In the Feynman diagram view, this is saying that you can't think of it as just
exchanges of small numbers of gluons, rather, you'd need to consider huge
number of particles and diagrams of extreme complexity. This is the sense in
which the equations are "too difficult to solve". You need to do something
totally different from perturbation theory to get a solution. Lattice
computations, as described in the article, are the best alternative technique
we have available at this point.

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michaelneale
" So if the LHC confirms that the Higgs exists, it will mean all reality is
virtual."

Headline should be "It's nearly confirmed" as the LHC has not done this yet.

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blasdel
It's confirmed: Science Writing is merely vacuity fluctuations

------
s3graham
... "Here's Tom with the weather."

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Allocator2008
This article is grotesquely misleading. It misuses the word "virtual". Virtual
reality meaning a simulation hasn't a thing to do with virtual particles in
quantum field theory. In this case, the strength of the strong nuclear force
field in a given point affects the probability amplitude of finding a gluon at
that given point, which, in turn, will affect the mass of the area surrounding
that point. In the case of the 3 quark proton, the strong nuclear force field
has a high strength in the vicinity of the three quarks, therefore, the
probability of finding gluons here is higher than outside the 3-quark bounded
configuration. Since energy is equivalent to mass, that means the 3-quark
bounded configuration will get a higher mass value than the surrounding
vacuum, because of the higher prevalence of the strong nuclear force-field
carrying gluons within it. This is ordinary, well understood, quantum
chromodynamics, similar to quantum electrodynamics. There is nothing "virtual"
about it in the sense of "less than real". A particle may be said to be
"virtual" if is is transient (acts over a short distance or timespan). However
its effects are as real as it gets. At the end of day, quantum field theory
comes to down calculating probability amplitudes, in this case, the
probability of finding gluons in the 3-quark configuration. There isn't
anything "virtual" or "magical" or "hocus pocus" about it. And if somebody
thinks there is, they shouldn't be writing for a science magazine.

