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In a surprising way, the author's Macintosh opens a window on the universe.
Quantum Foam
- by Del Miller
- October 21, 1999
"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." -- J. B. S. Haldane
Quantum Foam: Desktop Picture from Apple Computer
The day Apple's iBook was announced I raced to the web to catch that so anticipated first glimpse, but oddly, what struck my eye wasn't the computer itself but rather the desktop image across its screen. It was an eerily beautiful image, graceful, highlighted parabolas of blue arced across the screen, shedding their hue across a field of pure light and shadow. The simple, subtle play of contrast conjured a scene of hidden depth, a two-dimensional slice of a multi-dimensional matrix. The pattern was entitled Quantum Foam, evoking some quintessential wave breaking on the shore of reality. Something clicked in my memory, an association from long ago that suddenly bloomed into an understanding that the artist had something very important to say.
Therein lies a story...
The year was 1974 and I was roaming the stacks of the university library researching some long forgotten paper. A million books surrounded me yet for some reason my eye was caught by a single, immense volume whose title reached out from the binding and pulled me to it. In enormous block letters it said simply, "GRAVITATION." Curious, I took it from the shelf and opened it to find a thousand pages of opaque mathematics, filling the book with equations of such esoteric complexity that I boggled at this self-parody of the arcane. I understood nothing that was written, even the characters on the page were hieroglyphics. But for some reason I sat down in the aisle and spent the next hour turning through the pages. I was awed and increasingly intrigued, and as I slipped the book back onto the shelf I made myself a promise: Some day I would understand what the authors were trying to say.
It has been twenty-five years since, and though I keep trying, I still haven't quite kept my promise. I'm not a physicist so my research has been self-driven and lacking the rigor of formal coursework, but I've learned enough to know that Charles Misner, Kip Thorne and John Archibald Wheeler were describing one of the most noble and daunting endeavors in the history of mankind, the search for the nature of reality itself.
A pixelated universe
The quest for the essential substance of existence occurs at a scale more fundamental than atoms, more basic than their electrons, protons and neutrons, deeper than the subatomic sprites, called quarks, from which the atomic nucleus is made. The essence of all that is, exists on a finer scale even than the fabric of space and time.
Each tiny pixel on your computer screen could span trillions of atomic nuclei lined up across its width. If you could magically blow up just one of those nuclei larger than the entire computer, larger than the earth, larger even than a thousand solar systems set edge to edge; only then would the individual quantum bits that fill the universe become as large as the pixels on your screen. Quantum mechanics insists that anything so infinitesimal cannot remain in our universe for long, but is required to pop in and out of existence within the fleeting interval that light requires to traverse its unimaginably tiny sphere. Slowed to a cosmic snail's pace our quantum pixels, the sparkling fabric of the universe, would be flickering like the snowy screen of a television tuned to a nonexistent channel.
These effervescent particles are bundles of pure gravity called gravitons, and they do more than simply flicker. Relativity requires that such small creatures possess an event horizon, hence they take the form of tiny black holes and wormholes in the structure of space and time. They loop and whorl around each other, a multidimensional foam of creation, generating the exotic stuff of which all matter and energy are made.
By a mechanism not yet clear, the gravitational foam gives rise to a flickering sea of elementary particles. Ghostly quarks and electrons, photons and others, filling the universe with virtual matter and virtual energy that we cannot even sense. The vacuum of space is filled with this phantom medium, awaiting that vanishingly rare opportunity to pause in this ethereal dance and become reality as you and I know it. Waves of sheer persistence propagate through this churning virtual foam, ever so slightly impeding the give and take of those virtual particles. Here and there, the frenetic exchanges are slowed just enough that they hang for a quantum instant longer in the world we know, giving birth to physics, matter and energy; the brick and mortar of the material world.
Metaphysical physics
Perhaps the sparks of energy we call electrons are merely the open end of a gravitational wormhole, tied to the nucleus by a twisting thread of space-time. Maybe, as Steven Hawkings has suggested, the gravitational wormholes connect to other universes, completely invisible from ours, and that the pull from these alternate worlds is the underlying cause of the cosmological constant which may drive the apparently accelerating expansion of the cosmos. The quantum weirdness seems boundless, confounding our view of a universe that is already stranger than we can comprehend.
The universe we see and sense about us, every atom and every star, is but a faint swirl of frozen mist in a dense, seething fog of quantum gravitation. The energy of an entire galaxy is only a spark in this immeasurable soup of virtual energy. If we could but tap the most astonishingly tiny fraction of the energy in a cup of pure vacuum we could power the earth for eons. Laboratory experiments can detect this zero-point-energy and in fact some physicists believe that the apocryphal results of cold fusion experiments actually result from dipping into the vacuum in a primitive and inadvertent way. The U.S. Air Force has even studied the possibility of engineering the vacuum for space travel, by surfing a wave of spacetime foam across an interstellar sea.
Caveat Empty
In the never-never land of quantum gravity, fact and theory seem to obey the same probabilistic jitter as does spacetime itself. The incredible is made real by theories governed largely by uncertainty, the models existing in a mathematics so complex that our metaphors can approximate reality in only the most superficial way. Scientists grapple with the unknowable, describing the bedrock of reality with allusions to strings, the mathematics of spinors and twistors, the topology of loops and knots, the compressed dimensionality of holograms and cold probabilities of information theory. In recent years all of these seemingly bizarre explanations have shown themselves to have similarities to the others, a clue perhaps that the universal theory of reality may, in part, encompass all of these theories, but in the end the only certainty is that the truth will be far stranger than we can imagine and portraying our quantum world in words will always be as much a work of art as it is of science.
The quantum computer
I look at the words that I have just written, framed by the sweeping loops and whorls of my desktop Quantum Foam. I sit at a nexus of art and science, literature and physics, information and silicon. Philosophy and mathematics bleed into a strange metaphysics of hard edged reality.
The unknown artist who created this desktop picture created more than a work of art, he somehow captured how I've come to view the cosmic fabric. Whoever he is, I thank him and I thank the world's most cosmic computer company for putting this work of art on my Macintosh.
###
The web is full of information on this intriguing, though necessarily technical subject. For further reading I suggest, roughly in order of increasing complexity:
-
- Super Space by Paul Davies
- http:superspace.htm
- Cosmology: The physical vacuum of space -- Space-Time: The Final Frontier
- http:VACUUM.HTML
- New Scientist 19 June 1999: Quantum foam
- http:qfoam.html
- The Cyclotron Notebooks
- http:qugrav.htm
- This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 109) by John Baez
- http:week109.html
- The Vacuum as the Source of Gravity and Inertia
- http:ZPEFLIGHT.html
- Tapping Zero-Point Energy
- http:zpe3.html
- Super Space by Paul Davies
copyright© 1999 by Del Miller. All rights reserved.
Del also writes the "Difference Engine" column at www.macopinion.com
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