Hi Cobra,
Before I get to the thread's topic, just thought I'd say the clarification you posted about Baugh in another forum is appreciated.
Cobra_snake writes:
Well, I can't really get into deep discussion here due to ignorance, but I have to ask one thing. If material "spontaneously appears", then why haven't we gotten rid of the first law of thermodynamics?
You'll have to pardon me for picking just one small topic to address. I'm only operating on three cylinders tonight due to a cold, and I'm trying to kill some time waiting for a basketball game to start, so I thought I'd troll for topics I understand well enough to not screw up, and this one qualifies.
The 1st Law of Thermodynamics (henceforth 1LOT) says that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. But thermodynamics is a 19th century science that, while accurate in its own realm, does not extend to relativity, quantum mechanics or matter/energy equivalence. So naturally 1LOT isn't the whole story since from E=mc
2 we know full well that both matter and energy can be created and destroyed by converting from one form to the other. Since E=mc
2 tells us that matter and energy are just different expressions of the same thing, if energy can neither be created nor destroyed, then neither can matter (excepting conversions between the two).
But as I've already noted, thermodynamics doesn't include quantum electrodynamics, one of whose corrollaries is that it is impossible to know both the velocity and position of any particle with complete accuracy. The more accurately you know the velocity the less accurately you can know the position, and vice-versa. This is more familiarly known as the uncertainty principle, and it tells us that we can never be certain of what we measure about single particles. In fact, the uncertainty principle requires that even completely empty space is not completely empty because virtual particles are constantly flitting in and out of existence everywhere throughout the universe, which I believe is what Joz was referring to. This has been verified experimentally.
It's actually more complicated than this. You've probably heard of wave/particle duality, that both light and matter can be described mathematically as either particles or waves, with context determining which approach is most appropriate. Quantum electrodynamics prefers to describe particles as wave expressions that represent probabilistic functions of velocity and position. So even empty space isn't really empty, but only a probabilistic expression which, by reason of quantum uncertainty, can approach but never equal zero. Since the probability that matter is present can never reach zero, matter is always present everywhere. This takes the form of particle pairs (opposites in charge and spin) flitting into existence to temporarily borrow against the rules of 1LOT for a short period before combining to pay the debt and flit back out of existence.
--Percy
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