Fred Alan Wolff, PhD
The Spiritual Universe
Published 1999
Page 97 “Accordingly, even if you extract all the energy from a vacuum and suck out every bit of matter, and even cool the vacuum to absolute zero temperature, an enormous amount of energy, called the zero-point energy in reference to that point on the absolute temperature scale, will remain in the vacuum.”
Page 98-99
“Physicists deal with existential questions not so much in terms of definitely what something is, but in defining how it is observed to behave. Generally, when we say we are observing matter, we are actually observing whether or not something is changing its energy. We call that something that changes energy matter. However, the division between matter and energy was wiped out many years ago when Einstein proposed, based on some very unusual arguments regarding space and time, that energy and matter were actually the same thing.
Heretofore, people believed matter was “stuff.” It consisted of something. As science progressed, the search was for ultimate stuff of matter. As experimental methods improved, exploration began of the minutest corners of space and the tiniest fractions of time. Matching the search, physicists discovered that matter, seemingly so solid when observed on a scale of inches and seconds, was actually mostly empty space with tiny bits of something called probability clouds filling that space. These clouds are fundamental particles’ “tendencies to exist,” to somehow pop out of nothing and become coherent matter. Matter’s ability to cohere provides the stability needed to form atoms and molecules.
The search for ultimate matter continues. We now know that if enough added energy is present, empty space itself is capable of spontaneously giving birth to bits of matter and antimatter that will persist for long periods. But even if extra energy is absent, the vacuum will spontaneously create electron-positron (the antimatter form of an electron) pairs and then quickly bring them together, causing them to vanish. Thus, we suspect the vacuum produces matter from the zero-point radiation field, or, in other words, matter is just another temporary state of the fluctuating fields called the zero-point energy. “