Mysteries at the Micro Level 2: Matter is an Illusion Physical Reality is Empty Space Buzzing With Energy. A detailed overview of Quantum Field theory.
Recitation of the Holy Scripture.
By those who extract violently.
And those who draw out gently.
And by those who glide.
And those who race each other in a race.
And by those who arrange the matter.
On the Day when the Quake quakes.
And the subsequent (one) follows it.
Hearts, that Day, will tremble.
Their eyes humbled.
They say, “Will we indeed be returned to [our] former state.
What! When we are decayed bones?
They say, “Then, that would be a losing return.”
Indeed, it will only be a single shout.
And behold they will be [alert] upon the earth’s surface.
End of Recitation of the Holy Scripture.
O people you already have an idea of the vastness of this universe and as well as its smallest things and building blocks. When physicists began to examine the relationship between energy and the structure of matter then the belief that a physical, Newtonian material universe that was at the very heart of scientific knowledge was abandoned, and the realization that matter is nothing but an illusion replaced it. Scientists began to recognize that everything in the Universe is made out of energy.
I told you in Part 24 that the first person who gave the concept of the smallest particle was Democritus in 460 BC. Then in 1897 J.J.Thomson discovered Electron then in 1911 Ernest Rutherford presented the idea of nucleus & electron and after that Neils Bohr gave the model of the atom with nucleus inside and electron in different orbits moving around the nucleus. And in 1970 we found that proton and neutron are also not basic fundamental particles but made up of quarks. So now we know that every material thing is made up of three particles electron, up quark and down quark.
Everything we see in the universe, all the diversity in the natural world, all stars, planets, plants, animals, I myself, you, your laptop, clothes all made up of the same three particles with slightly different arrangements repeated over and over again. These particles the electron and two quarks are the building blocks of all that around us. This is what is being taught to our people our students in colleges and universities of most advanced schools even in Europe and America. But the fact is that it is not true. It is a lie that we tell students so that not to expose them to the disturbing truth too early. The best theories that physicist have do not have the electron particle and two quark particles, but the fact is that they don’t rely on particles at all i.e the primary building blocks of nature are not particles, but something much more obscure and abstract. The building blocks of nature are fluid like substances which are spread throughout the entire universe and ripple in strange and interesting ways. That’s the reality in which we live. These fluid like substances are called fields. Although the latest scenario is again changing and these fields may get replaced in the near future with little tiny strings as in String theory but as of today the most reliable time tested and tried theory of the explanation of all that around us is this Quantum Field theory.
So we have two fundamental theories of physics: quantum field theory and general relativity. Quantum field theory takes quantum mechanics and special relativity into account and is a comprehensive theory of all the forces and particles except gravity. General relativity is an excellent theory of gravity, but it ignores quantum mechanics. Nobody knows how to reconcile these theories yet. That’s what people working on quantum gravity, String theory, Supersymmetry theories, M Theory are trying to do. But in general, the scientific community now a days is divided in favor of one or other theories. If my Lord Wills when the time comes I will present some facts from the scriptures to the scientific community about this matter and suggest them the broader changes they need in the framework of their theories. If my Lord Wills some of them may consider and succeed.
Quantum field theory extends quantum mechanics from single particles to fields that exist everywhere. Quantum field theory tells us the fundamental of the universe are fields or a single unified field that is made up of many distinct and superimposed fields. These fields fill the entire universe making the fabric of cosmos and are not stacking over one another but meshed with each other and occupy the same space. It’s not an idea that scientists just come up with. It’s an idea which dates back almost 200 years and is credited to Michael Faraday as he talked about electric and magnetic fields. And that it is just a property of space and that the magnetic field is present in the fabric of space itself. It is already there, but now it is entirely new in the form of Quantum Field Theory which says not only electricity and Magnetism but matter also originates like this. Material objects are also nothing but the result of energy momentum moving around and responding to things like charge and spin and it is their complex relationships that give rise to matter.
The field is there and all you need is to bring the right sort of energy to activate it or turn it on. So this is the universe we live in. There are 12 fields that give matter, and four other fields that are the forces. And the world we live in is the blending of these 16 fields all interacting together in interesting ways. One more field is Higgs field, responsible for the mass of everything. This is predicted in 1960’s then after 50 years in 2012 we found Higgs Boson the particle and later in 2015 the Higgs field. The 12 matter fields are six quarks fields for Up/Down, Charm/Strange, Top/Bottom quarks and 6 for Leptons i.e Electron, Muon, Tau and their respective Neutrinos. And the four force fields in which the electromagnetic force, carried by the photon, creates electric and magnetic fields and is responsible for chemical bonding and electromagnetic waves inclusive of light. The Strong Force carried by a particle called the gluon, and is responsible for the binding of quarks together to form hadrons like protons and neutrons. As an extra effect, it creates the nuclear force that binds the latter particles to form atomic nuclei. The weak force carried by particles called W and Z bosons, also acts on the nucleus of atoms, mediating radioactive decay.
Altogether we call it the standard model. The gravitational force is credited to the curvature of spacetime, described by Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
So in Quantum Field theory physical atoms are made up of vortices of energy that are constantly spinning and vibrating, each one radiating its own unique energy signature. All is actually energetic vibrations confined to that particular field and these minimal excitations of the field are what are called quantum and plural of which is quanta. The basis of this theory is that energy is not continuous. Energy in this universe is always parceled up into some little discrete lumps. That’s actually what the word quantum means. Quantum means discrete or a lump. And the ripples of the waves of this fluid, the ripples of the field in case it is a matter field, get bound into little bundles of energy by the rules of quantum mechanics, and those bundles of energy are what we call the particle, the electron the quarks.
All the particles that exist in your body are waves of the same underlying field. And we’re all connected to each other. Just like the waves on the sea all belong to the same, the particles in your body are ripples of the same field as the particles in someone else body.
O people this space you see around in this universe in between stars and planets and on small scales inside atoms is actually not empty. This empty space which fills the entire universe is itself the real foundation of the universe. I remember whenever in my childhood I thought about space and the horrible distances in between celestial bodies planets stars and galaxies I felt a cold wave in my spinal cord. For most of the people, it is the matter this material world that terrifies them. The huge piles of matter in the form of earth planets and stars and their abundance in the universe. But for me, this empty space is more a reason to cause shivering in my body. As you now know that the universe is expanding and I told you in part 16 that in just 1 hour the size of our
universe increases to almost 3.5 billion Km to 7 billion Km. Depending if we take the observable universe as 46 Billion light years across or 92 billion LY across respectively. This size is increasing only because of space which is expanding. Now I give you an example that why this empty space is more a reason to cause shivering in my body. Consider you have a piece of land. Now you can sow and cultivate whatever type of crop, plants you like in that land and it will come out from that land and you can even take its soil and can make your house or whatever you like. Everything is possible but your land your total area your total space will never increase in size. This is what happening in the universe that it is growing in size and that is because of this seemingly non entity thing we call empty space. As John Wheeler said that no point is more central than this, that space is not empty, it is the seat of the most violent physics.
Space is not empty, actually made up of virtual particles popping out so fast that we cannot see them. On the back screens is an animation showing empty space inside a proton. To give a sense of the scale of this field, the activity represented in the animation occurs at a million billion billion frames per second within a region of space just a few million-billionths of a meter across. This animation was made by Derek Leinweber an Australian professor of physics by using supercomputer simulations which was featured in the 2004 physics Nobel Prize lecture by Frank Wilczek who won the Nobel prize that year. Now coming to the point, proton made up of 3 quarks but the weight of Proton is only 10% of these quarks and 90% by empty space. This also solved a years-long debate that all this material world is an illusion. As I already told you that matter is actually empty and also gave you a size comparison of an atom with that of its nucleus in part 18. Now it turns out that all this empty space is actually matter, a fluid of invisible virtual particles popping in and out of existence in a time scale very short. To understand it consider a fish that live deep inside an ocean. For it the whole water around is just like space, a medium in which everything else exists. She takes that water for granted as it is just a container as this space is for us human beings and only considers the other things in the water like sea life, plants and rocks as the material world. But for us looking from outside, the reality is that water itself is matter.
So vacuum in a circulating state becomes matter, and that empty space is full of energy and this energy is not small. There is a lot of it and we can actually calculate how much energy there in that space. And that reality might actually come out of it that everything we see is actually emerging from that space. All this world around in which we live is made up of a fine fabric of space and time. Space is what there is so that things do not pile at the top of each other and time is what preventing everything to happen at once.
In quantum field theory, the vacuum state is the quantum state with the lowest possible energy. It contains no physical particles, and is the energy of the ground state. This is also called the zero point energy, the energy of a system at a temperature of zero.
So it’s not the material world that defines the space but the space that defines the material world. The fabric of space appears as a violent virtual plasma consisting of particles whose size is on the order of Planck’s length 10 power -33 cm. The energy density of the electric flux passing through each particle is enormous. It is 10 power 93 grams per cubic centimeter, expressed in mass units. That is a huge number 10 with 93 zeroes. It is so big that to give you an idea if we took all the stars in the universe and stuck them into a centimeter cube of space. The density of that cube would be 10 to the 55 gram still 39 orders of magnitude less than the vacuum density at the quantum level.
Discovery of this energy in the vacuum was really significant but in general, it was ignored for many years as the number is so massive that physicists felt it hard to accept. After the Casimir effect has been demonstrated in the laboratory, now we can show that the vacuum density is a reality as plates can be pushed together by using the vacuum. In fact, we are now able to extract photons directly out of the vacuum and we can extract energy directly out of what we thought of as empty space.
Calculations by leading physicists such as Wheeler show that a cubic centimeter of vacuum, like the size of a sugar cube has so much raw energy in it that, if condensed into matter, there would be more matter than what is observable in the universe through the largest telescope.
When Michael Faraday was asked by the King of England that would this electromagnetism, he discovered be of any benefit. He replied I don’t know. But this thing changed the whole human civilization. Now we cannot think of living without electricity and all the gadgets that work on electricity. Same if we understand the way to utilize the energy in empty space and also how to utilize gravity at its most fundamental level, our civilization will change altogether and we can get access to almost an infinite amount of resources.
So O humankind God has already put a lot of resources in the fabric of this cosmos for the coming times. So that His saying would be fulfilled upon you as the stage is already set for your next venture to conquer this universe.
Is this all designed, created, happening and running by its own. Nay, it is all by the Will and command of your Lord. So which of the favors of your Lord will you deny?
Recitation of the Holy Scripture.
Then remember the name of your Lord and devote yourself to Him with complete devotion.
He is the Lord of the East and the West; there is no deity except Him, so take Him as Disposer of your affairs.
Your Lord is the Free of need, the possessor of mercy. If He wills, he can do away with you and give succession after you to whomever He wills, just as He produced you from the descendants of another people.
Indeed, what you are promised is coming, and you will not cause failure to God.
Indeed, this is a reminder- so whoever wills may take to his Lord a way.