A while back I made a video about "everything being energy" especially mass and I talked about how the proton weighs heavier than the quarks it is made of. Then a few months ago I made a follow up for another topic "How can Entropy explain the Formation of Planets and Black holes?!" to an older one "If Entropy increases, why does Gravity clump things together and FORM STARS?!?"
of which all of these previous videos led me to make one about vacuum energy!
It's simple really and I start with the wave-particle duality as we always do when we talk about quantum mechanics! From here we establish that there are inherent fluctuations in the scale of tiny objects, when we start dealing with individual particles instead of big objects we normally deal with in real life! I also talk about Ozawa's definition of error and disturbance to support the probabilistic nature of particles! Then I discuss virtual particles and how the smaller our interval is for trying to observe particles, the more we see that these virtual particles "exist" for a short time, but on average they don't really exist, and hence we return to the fact that in a vacuum there's an average energy of zero!
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Follow-up video:
Hawking Radiation: A Better Explanation (Creation, Annihilation Operators) • Hawking Radiation: Cre...
0:00 Intro
0:23 Wave Particle Duality
1:08 Consequences of Wave Particle Duality
1:57 Ozawa Formulation of Error and Disturbance
3:13 Quantum Fields
4:29 Virtual Particles
5:28 Vacuum Energy isn't Useful!
6:28 Introduction to Hawking Radiation
Leave a comment! Ask me questions for clarifications and even further curiosities!
References
Baez, J. (2011, June 10). What’s the Energy Density of the Vacuum? math.ucr.edu/home/baez/vacuum...
De Broglie, L. (1923). Waves and Quanta. Nature, 112(2815), Article 2815. doi.org/10.1038/112540a0
Furuta, A. (2012, March 8). One Thing Is Certain: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle Is Not Dead. Scientific American. www.scientificamerican.com/ar...
PBS Space Time. (2017a, October 19). The Nature of Nothing | Space Time. • The Nature of Nothing ...
PBS Space Time. (2017b, October 20). The Nature of Nothing | Space Time. • The Nature of Nothing ...
PBS Space Time. (2017c, November 3). The Vacuum Catastrophe. • The Vacuum Catastrophe
PBS Space Time. (2018, March 15). Hawking Radiation. • Hawking Radiation
Shetty, P. (2023, February 16). 3 independent proofs that quantum fields carry energy. Big Think. bigthink.com/starts-with-a-ba...
Siegel, E. (2022, October 28). Ask Ethan: How does Hawking radiation lead to black hole evaporation? Big Think. bigthink.com/starts-with-a-ba...
Strogatz, S. (2022, August 10). What Is Quantum Field Theory and Why Is It Incomplete? Quanta Magazine. www.quantamagazine.org/what-i...
Tretkoff, E. (2008, February). This Month in Physics History. www.aps.org/publications/apsne...