For so long as we now have tried to determine the character of actuality, we now have grappled with the idea of empty area. Round 400 BC, when the traditional Greek thinker Democritus conceived of small, indivisible our bodies known as atoms, he supposed there should additionally exist a void surrounding them: a featureless, unchanging vacuum during which they moved.
Immediately, the void stays a potent concept for understanding the universe, however we now have come to grasp that it’s something however featureless. Greater than a century in the past, Albert Einstein’s concept of gravity revealed that space-time is stretched and warped by the matter it comprises. Later, quantum concept launched the thought of digital particles, which momentarily seem and disappear in a vacuum, making pure nothingness appear to be an intangible, effervescent soup.
This alone would absolutely have shocked Democritus, however I consider we must always go additional nonetheless. I’ve spent 4 many years looking for a method to mix Einstein’s concept of gravity and quantum mechanics. This lengthy journey has led me to a startling conclusion: there’s one other wealthy construction hidden inside the void, which may be traced to ethereal entities known as digital black holes.
The affect of those stretches throughout the whole cosmos, linking space-time in refined ways in which in the end trigger Einstein’s concept to fail – forming a bridge between the smallest scale of the quantum realm and the cosmic one among gravity. Enticingly, I’ve now begun to understand how this hidden property of space-time stands out as the supply of darkish vitality, the mysterious pressure that’s tearing…