3 ms·

Virtual particles are not particles. https://profmattstrassler.com/2011/10/10/virtual-particles-not-particles-at-all/ https://profmattstrassler.com/2011/10/10/

• hinkley 4y ago
  Probably 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.