For so long as we have now tried to determine the character of actuality, we have now grappled with the idea of empty house. Round 400 BC, when the traditional Greek thinker Democritus conceived of small, indivisible our bodies known as atoms, he supposed there should additionally exist a void surrounding them: a featureless, unchanging vacuum wherein they moved.
Right this moment, the void stays a potent concept for understanding the universe, however we have now come to understand that it’s something however featureless. Greater than a century in the past, Albert Einstein’s idea of gravity revealed that space-time is stretched and warped by the matter it comprises. Later, quantum idea launched the concept of digital particles, which momentarily seem and disappear in a vacuum, making pure nothingness appear to be an intangible, effervescent soup.
This alone would certainly have shocked Democritus, however I consider we must always go additional nonetheless. I’ve spent 4 many years looking for a solution to mix Einstein’s idea of gravity and quantum mechanics. This lengthy journey has led me to a startling conclusion: there’s one other wealthy construction hidden inside the void, which could be traced to ethereal entities known as digital black holes.
The affect of those stretches throughout the complete cosmos, linking space-time in delicate ways in which finally trigger Einstein’s idea to fail – forming a bridge between the smallest scale of the quantum realm and the cosmic considered one of gravity. Enticingly, I’ve now begun to understand how this hidden property of space-time stands out as the supply of darkish power, the mysterious power that’s tearing…