As the old saying goes, there are clouds, all things are born of being, and there are born of nothing. So can matter really be produced out of thin air?
In most people's cognition, there is nothing in the vacuum, there are no particles in space, it is completely empty. In fact, the vacuum is not empty, there is no absolute vacuum.
Quantum field theory holds that there is actually a huge amount of background energy in the vacuum. According to the estimates of the American physicist Wheeler, the background energy density of the vacuum may be as high as 10∧13 J/cm3. This energy, also known as vacuum zero energy, exists even at absolute zero.
This energy in the vacuum manifests itself in the form of particles. Scientists believe that a large number of pairs of virtual particles will appear out of thin air in a vacuum, which are positive and negative, and then annihilated and disappeared in a very short period of time. They appear from time to time, and this phenomenon exists in almost any corner of space-time, which is called vacuum quantum fluctuation.
The existence of quantum fluctuations in a vacuum can be deduced from the uncertainty principle proposed by the German physicist Heisenberg in 1927. The uncertainty principle is one of the central ideas in quantum mechanics, that is, we cannot know the position and velocity of a particle at the same time.
In 1948, the Dutch theoretical physicist Casimir predicted that if there were indeed energy fluctuations in the vacuum, then there must be a phenomenon now known as the Casimir effect. However, at that time, there was no condition to complete such a high-precision experiment.
Fast forward to 1996, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States used experiments to verify this idea for the first time.
The scientists placed two electrically neutral metal plates in parallel in a vacuum and brought them very close together. Due to the existence of the metal plate, the quantum fluctuations are disturbed, so the number of virtual particle pairs between the two parallel metal plates is less than the outside of the plate, at which time the energy difference between the inside and outside of the two metal plates is formed, and the two plates will be subjected to a force in the vacuum that makes them close to each other - the Casimir force.
The 1996 experiment succeeded in measuring this force. Experimental data show that at a 10-nanometer gap (about 100 times the scale of a hydrogen atom), the Casimir effect can produce about 1 standard atmospheric pressure.
It can be seen that the ubiquitous quantum fluctuations in the vacuum are real.
There are pairs of virtual particles in the process of quantum fluctuations, and under certain conditions, virtual particles can be converted into real particles.
For example, for a quantum fluctuation that occurs at the event horizon boundary of a black hole, if one of a pair of virtual particles falls into the black hole and the other particle loses the object with which it annihilates, it will become a real particle. It seems to us that black holes radiate particles outward, which is Hawking radiation.
Virtual particles can be generated one after another in a vacuum, and under certain conditions, they can also be physicalized, so that it seems that it is indeed made out of nothing, and the matter in the universe can indeed be produced out of thin air.
However, the vacuum that seems to us to be empty is not empty, full of energy fluctuations, which is a sea of energy. That is to say, it seems that matter is generated out of thin air, but in fact, there is a background energy in the vacuum.
For this ubiquitous vacuum energy, if it can be used in the future, it will be a truly inexhaustible and inexhaustible energy source in the process of interstellar navigation, which is better than nuclear energy and antimatter energy.
Whether matter in the universe exists in the form of particles or in a field state, there is always mass or energy, and mass and energy are conserved, and they can neither disappear out of thin air nor produce out of thin air. Einstein used a concise mass-energy equation to tell us that mass and energy are actually the same thing, and not that mass and energy can be transformed into each other as understood by many people. The mass of an object is a measure of the energy it contains; as the energy it contains increases, so does its mass.
Many people believe that in the process of annihilation of positive and negative matter, the mass of the object is 100% converted into energy. The so-called mass energy here is actually the conversion of physical particles into light radiation, and the matter has changed into a form of existence. Moreover, scientists have now realized the transformation of light to physical particles in the laboratory, and only two high-energy laser beams can be interacted to generate positive and negative electron pairs.
Light is essentially an electromagnetic wave, and due to the existence of wave-particle duality, it can be regarded as both a particle and a light wave. Since a photon has no static mass, it can be considered a pure energy form of matter.
In short, matter is not extinguished, it is impossible to create something out of nothing, and the existence of energy means that there is matter, not what energy becomes matter, but the form of existence is different. Vacuum is not empty means that the seemingly empty universe is actually filled with various forms of matter, such as dark matter and dark energy. Although we cannot see or touch it, it is only other forms of existence that are different from ordinary material forms.
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