The Fabric Of Spacetime. It Has To Be Something But What?

Colmc54 | 04:21 Mon 16th Nov 2015 | Science

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In my mind I can conceive a space that is totally empty such that however large or small it is all the possible measurements are zero. Yet if I pass a photon through it it's original electromagnetic waveform will propagate through it long after the original particle that emitted it has been left behind. I could put my imagined space of nothing close to a galaxy and see the same beam of light bending in it's course from passing through my imagined box of 'nothing'.

But that is just the tip of the iceberg of the stuff that 'nothing' does. Clearly it has to be something.

This may sound trivial but if Admiral Nelson is one day to be followed by Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise we really need to start to look at nothing. Nothing seems to be more important than anything.

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Any Rt's Or Nurses Out There To Help With This Assignment Of Mine Please

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Hypognosis

@Colmc54

If 'space' had any physical substance, would it not cause a damping effect on perturbations passing through it, such as electromagnetic waves? Photons would 'wear out' and have no chance to cross the kind of distances we are now observing.

It has only just occurred to me how remarkable it is that photons do not disperse through the medium and are, instead, as directional as it is possible to be. You cannot see them from the side, relative to their motion. No energy is dissipated and they can last billions of years, so long as they don't collide with anything.

jim360

Neutrinos are even more impressive.

Khandro

This reminds me that about two decades ago I read 'The Fabric of Reality' by David Deutsch in which he writes about photons and frog's eyes, - they can apparently see individual photons - if you put a frog way out in space and shone a beam of light towards it from earth, the photons would have become so dispersed that it might see photons individually with a time lapse before the next one. Fascinating! as Mr Spock used to say.
I've still got the book and will look it up again.

Colmc54

Question Author

My conceptual box of zeros (a 'Gedanken' maybe) must have within it some form of latent energy (zero point energy) to allow the infinite propagation of photons through it regardless of how large I decide my box is.
I have an idea for an experiment but I'm using my mobile at the pub. Might post something tomorrow from my PC if decoherence doesn't get me in the night and I float off the planet and expire in the 'vacuum' of space!

Hypognosis

A fun concept I have toyed with and never heard spoken of on TV etc (because it is too frivolous for words) is that some of myriad objects we are able to see is due to light having been bent round a multiplicity of gravitational 'corners' such that we are able to see multiple images of the same galaxy from different angles and at different stages of its developmental cycle, thanks to the cumulative distances involved.

In actuality, there would be too much visual distortion for a super-red-shifted galaxy to still look feasibly like a galaxy.

If zero point energy is the same thing as the proposition of spontaneously appearing particle-antiparticle pairs then I am up to speed on that. However, the pairs are supposed to annihiliate each other which you would think would leads to our views of massively distant galaxies to be fogged up by photons sent in our direction by countless annihilation events (subject to serendipitous orientation of any omitted photons).

If a travelling photon (from a background galaxy) happened to collide with one of these fleeting spontaneous particles then you would expect some attenuation of the light reaching us from the distant galaxy, wouldn't you? (Not my place to know whether it does, or not).

Colmc54

Question Author

My imaginary box is now in Sudbury deep underground. No more energy inefficient spherical tunnels underground. Just one particle of interest under our microscope.
Superconducting tech puts our particle in an alternating electrical field. Then the AC frequency is increased.
Then I thought that you may not need anything in the box to find out about spacetime. All we need to do is to is calibrate the machine and look for the signal of nothing. Refining the process could lead to the indication of structure as per the discovery of the 3 valence quarks of the proton through the resonance signals that were observed. What would we find in my box of nothing?

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(From my phone not my PC)

Colmc54

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