Quantum Foam May Explain The Amount Of Energy In The Universe
As it seems, the “empty” vacuum is full of energy. It just that the energy isn't visible. But it may be hiding inside the quantum foam.
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According to conventional theories, spacetime should be filled with a gigantic amount of energy. About 10 to the power of 120 more energy than what we observe currently. And that is something to think about. Theoretical physicists have been trying to figure out where all that energy is. But none of them has been truly successful.
Now a physicist named Steven Carlip from the University of California, Davis has a new idea. His theory claim that the titanic amounts of energy of spacetime are hidden because of the effects of quantum events at the Planck scale. His research was published by the journal Physical Review Letters.
Carlip s theory is largely based on the research of John Wheeler from the fifties. It was Wheeler who came with the idea that at the Planck scale – the smallest possible scale physically possible – spacetime exists in the form of quantum foam. He claimed that at such small scales time, space and energy are under the rule of the uncertainty principle.
Since them, at times physicists like to return to the idea of quantum foam from time to time. If spacetime is truly made from quantum foam it should have enormous amounts of energy in it. Other scientists are more in favor of the standard effective field theory which claims that vacuum fluctuations create the cosmological constant. And for the most part, physicists were trying to remove the energy that comes with quantum foam.
On the other hand, Carlip claims that in a Universe full of quantum foam energy should exist everywhere and in large amounts. If you could observe from a close distance it would be obvious that areas the size roughly of the Planck length are “glued” together in a way that doesn't contradict general relativity and that have the same probability of either expanding or shrinking. But once you move to a larger scale these quantum fluctuations will quickly disappear. And when it comes to time – time would have no given direction in this scenario.
Carlip isn't hiding that he wants to create a full cosmological model. But he isn't talking about the nowadays very popular topic of dark matter and dark energy. His goal is just to find a solution to the size of the cosmological constant.
Sources:
- https://phys.org/news/2019-10-physicist-quantum-foam-huge-cosmic.html
- https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.08277
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