A Física do nada...

June 12, 2009, 4:14 pm
The Physics of Nothing
By John Tierney

A dispatch from my colleague Dennis Overbye:

As fans of the late, great “Seinfeld,” know, there is a lot to say about nothing.

At the World Science Festival Thursday night, four physicists spent nearly two hours under the jocular and irreverent grilling radio broadcaster John Hockenberry, cohost of “The Takeaway,” and barely scratched the surface of the void that is the background or perhaps the platform of all our experience. They did in the end offer an answer to the question that has plagued philosophers and scientists: Why is there something rather than nothing at all?

“Nothing is unstable,” Frank Wilczek, a physicist and Nobel laureate from MIT, finally said to a general murmur of agreement of his colleagues on stage, John Barrow of Cambridge University in England, Paul Davies of Arizona State and George Ellis of the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

Given a chance, nature will make nothingness boil with activity.

But that insight, which is unlikely to put theologians out of business, is getting ahead of a story that starts with the Greeks, who were so uncomfortable with the Big Zero that they didn’t have it in their number system. Along the way, as Dr. Barrow told us in a breezy history review, Nothing got replaced by something called the Vacuum, which the physicist James Clerk Maxwell defined as what was left when you took everything else away.

And that proved to be quite a bit ­– the laws of physics, for example. Where do they come from? For them to guide the universe into existence out of pure old-fashioned nothingness, Dr. Davies pointed out, would require them to have “a transcendent existence.” Nobody claimed to know what that would mean.

Read more here/Leia mais aqui.

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NOTA DO BLOGGER:

Isso me fez lembrar o mantra surrado do Dobzhansky - 'nada em biologia faz sentido a não ser à luz da evolução', quando o certo é 'nada em biologia faz sentido a não ser à luz das evidências'. Aqui no caso, "Nada em física faz sentido, se isso é o que você está sendo pago para estudar/pesquisar..."