4 ms·
Afaik particles can seem to appear “out of nothing”, random in nature. They are called virtual particles. I believe the effect is very pronounced in the Casimi
by prox 4y ago
Afaik particles can seem to appear “out of nothing”, random in nature. They are called virtual particles.
I believe the effect is very pronounced in the Casimir Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect
The analogy is imprecise though, according to people know the maths/physics behind it, maybe someone can answer it better than me.
- bowsamic 4y agoThe Casimir effect is better explained by the zero point energy of the quantum vacuum, rather than "virtual particles". The latter is not necessary to explain it
- cwillu 4y agoVirtual particles are not particles. https://profmattstrassler.com/2011/10/10/virtual-particles-not-particles-at-all/ https://profmattstrassler.com/2011/10/10/virtual-particles-n...
- hinkley 4y agoProbably completely wrong, but the mnemonic I use for virtual particles, ever since I read Hawking as a wee lad (read: before decades of more literature has been published), was that matter and space are part of a whole, any time there's space (pun not intended), things can get wobbly, and variation has a sane average but the outliers can be weird. Like a rogue wave in the ocean if the wobbles line up they 'look' like something but usually they fade back into nothing before they smash into anything that would observe them. So virtual particles near an event horizon can interact with matter, but most of the time they just don't. I have persisted with this mnemonic because nobody has made a headline of "Hawking was wrong!" so far.
- hinkley 4y agoHawking Radiation is the process where virtual particles escape annihilation, and the surviving particle steals that energy from a black hole. If the black hole lives in space devoid of enough matter, it could eventually lose its event horizon, and explode.