Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea: Chapter 7–∞

For physicists, however, zero and infinity seemed utterly irrelevant to the workings of the universe. Adding infinities and dividing by zeros might be a part of mathematics, but it is not the way of nature.

In quantum mechanics, a zero is responsible for a bizarre source of energy—infinite and ubiquitous, present even in the deepest vacuum—and a phantom force exerted by nothing at all.

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science.

In the 1850s, however, William Thomson, a British physicist, noticed something odd about Charles’ law: the specter of zero. Lower the temperature and the volume of the balloons gets smaller and smaller. Keep lowering at a steady pace and the balloons keep shrinking at a constant rate, but they cannot go on shrinking forever. There is a point at which gas, in theory, takes up no space at all; Charles’ law says that a balloon of gas must shrink to zero space.

It is impossible even to get a machine to run without wasting energy, frittering some of its power into the universe as heat.

The water bobs up and down, and crests and troughs spread outward in a circular pattern.

To physicists, vacuum has all particles and forces latent in it. It’s a far richer substance than the philosopher's nothing.

Einstein solved this quandary—the puzzle of the photoelectric effect—but his solution was even more revolutionary than Planck’s hypothesis.

To measure something, you need to prod it. For instance, imagine that you are measuring the length of a pencil. You could run your fingers along it and measure how long it is; however, you’ll probably give the pencil a nudge, disturbing the pencil’s velocity slightly.

Particles are constantly winking in and out of existence, like tiny Cheshire cats. The vacuum is never truly empty. Instead, it is seething with these virtual particles; at every point in space, an infinite number are happily popping up and disappearing.

This is the zero-point energy, an infinity in the formulas of quantum theory. Interpreted strictly, the zero-point energy is limitless. According to the equations of quantum mechanics, more power than is stored in all the coal mines, oil fields, and nuclear weapons in the world is sitting in the space inside your toaster.

If you put two metal plates close together and some of those particles aren’t allowed between the plates, then there are more particles on the outside of the plates than on the inside. The undiminished zoo of particles presses on the outside of the plates, and without the full complement on the inside, the plates are crushed together, even in the deepest vacuum.

If you put two metal plates close together and some of those particles aren’t allowed between the plates, then there are more particles on the outside of the plates than on the inside. The undiminished zoo of particles presses on the outside of the plates, and without the full complement on the inside, the plates are crushed together, even in the deepest vacuum.

During most of its life, a star is in an uneasy equilibrium: the propensity to collapse under its own gravity is balanced by the energy that comes from the fusing hydrogen in its center.

The sun has about five billion years of fuel left, but don’t let that make you complacent. The sun’s temperature will increase gradually before that, boiling off the oceans and turning Earth into an uninhabitable desert like Venus.

After a drawn-out series of death throes—the precise sequence of events depends, again, on the mass of the star—the star’s fusion engine fails, and the star begins to collapse under its own gravity.

Further calculations showed that when collapsing stars are a little more massive than the Chandrasekhar limit, the pressure of the resulting neutrons—similar to the pressure of electrons—can stave off collapse for a little while; this is what happens in a neutron star.

In 1998, NASA held a symposium entitled Physics for the Third Millennium, where scientists debated the merits of wormholes, warp drives, vacuum-energy engines, and other far-out ideas.

To get even to the nearest star, you would need an enormous amount of fuel to jettison out the back of the rocket—a tremendous waste.

According to Millis, astronauts might harness the energy in the vacuum to push a spaceship, just as mariners harnessed the wind to drive a frigate.

“If there were any way to get asymmetric forces out of that, where you get force in one direction and not the other, you’d get a propulsive force.’’

Our universe has lasted billions of years, and it’s improbable that we are living in such a precarious state; cosmic-ray collisions would probably already have “sparked” the vacuum with enough energy to cause such a disaster were it possible.

In theory, scientists can get energy from the Casimir effect even at absolute zero in the bleakest part of the vacuum of space.

However, Puthoff’s device is one in a long line of “free energy” machines—none of which, in the past, have withstood scientific scrutiny.

But for many mathematicians, an equation discovered by Euler is the paragon of mathematical beauty, because this extremely simple, compact formula relates all the most important numbers in mathematics in a totally unexpected way.

Though the Semitic biblical cosmos toppled the Aristotelian one, the idea of an eternal, unchanging universe was not expunged completely, enduring even to the twentieth century.

Galaxies would become ever more distant from one another, and the star stuff that drives all the energetic reactions in the universe would become more rarefied. Stars would burn out as they exhausted their fuel, and galaxies would become darker and darker—and then cold and silent.

The only way out was to “correct” his equations of general relativity to stave off the impending destruction.

The cosmological constant’s push would balance out gravity’s pull; instead of collapsing, the universe could stay in a steady balance, neither collapsing nor expanding. Postulating the existence of such a mysterious force was a desperate act.

“I have...again perpetrated something about gravitation theory which somewhat exposes me to the danger of being confined in a madhouse,” wrote Einstein, but he was so worried about the impending destruction of the universe that he was forced to take such a dramatic step.

The Nobel committee tends to reward painstaking and careful experiments more than important theory.

The higher energy state of the zero-point energy makes it inherently unstable, and very quickly—in less than a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second—the false vacuum would collapse, reverting to the true vacuum, with its everyday zero-point energy that we observe in our universe.

The mysterious force, once again, might be the force of the vacuum. The tiny particles that seethe through space-time exert a gentle outward push, stretching the fabric of space-time imperceptibly.

Other studies, which analyze plumes of gas or the number of gravitational lenses in a given field of view, also support the supernova results, implying that the cosmos will expand forever.

With the scientific revolution, the purely logical world gave way to an empirical one, based upon observation rather than philosophy.