My layman’s understanding is that virtual particles emerge from vacuum, but in ways that usually cancel out before affecting anything. Occasionally it does affect normal stuff - see the Casimir effect acting on surfaces very close together.
I personally suspect this is an explanation for dark matter and a possible origin of the universe.
If there’s tiny bits of stuff and anti-stuff blinking in and out of existence, anywhere there’s a big fat nothing, both halves should still exhibit gravity before blipping back out. It wouldn’t show up as normal matter because it spends most of its time not existing. The vacuum really is empty… on average. It just hums with enough short-lived quantum shenanigans to have nonzero mass.
And if this follows a steep curve for distribution, then it’s like blackbody radiation. A hot rock will overwhelmingly emit photon wavelengths near the peak, for any given temperature, but in theory any temperature can emit any wavelength. It just happens with vanishing rarity as you get up into the spicy photons. If vacuum will occasionally fart out a particle and antiparticle, then very occasionally it should fart out two particles and antiparticles, together. And with vanishing rarity it can theoretically fart out an arbitrary quantity of mass, alongside a negation that is presumably equal. But if that’s off by a little bit - if it’s allowed to be off by a little bit - then an equally arbitrary quantity of mass will remain. Even if the masses have to match exactly, they could recombine in ways that produce angular momentum and never properly rejoin. And if vacuum produces gravity, well, anything that’s left will accelerate away in all directions.
On cosmic timescales it’s possible that matter just kinda happens. We’d be left with the question of why the fuck that’s how anything works, and where all this quantum vacuum bullshit came from. But creationist cranks would have to retreat back to the first sentence. In the beginning, there was nothing. And it was slightly heavy.
It’s because we are three dimensional beings in a multidimensional universe. It would be like a 2D being trying to understand a 3D world. Things would blink in and out seemingly at random.
I’m not a physicist, but I’m pretty sure there are only three spacial dimensions. We can talk about time as another dimension, and I don’t know enough to say there aren’t other dimensions like that, but I’m pretty sure there are only three spacial dimensions.
I don’t pretend to understand it but string theory is one prominent scientific theory which suggests there are a lot more than 3 spatial dimensions.
My understanding is that string theory is a generalization of existing theories, but has no evidence distinct from existing theories.
but paywall won’t let us read this
but you can remove it
Worked for me, thx!
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I went digging for you. Which of these works for you?
- https://archive.fo/20260408123516/https://www.newscientist.com/article/2522324-particles-seen-emerging-from-empty-space-for-first-time/
- https://archive.ph/20260408194305/https://www.newscientist.com/article/2522324-particles-seen-emerging-from-empty-space-for-first-time/
- https://archive.ph/dbv9t
- https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newscientist.com%2Farticle%2F2522324-particles-seen-emerging-from-empty-space-for-first-time%2F
- https://removepaywalls.com/4/https://www.newscientist.com/article/2522324-particles-seen-emerging-from-empty-space-for-first-time/
- https://web.archive.org/web/20260408125945/https://www.newscientist.com/article/2522324-particles-seen-emerging-from-empty-space-for-first-time/
- https://web.archive.org/web/20260408235646/https://www.newscientist.com/article/2522324-particles-seen-emerging-from-empty-space-for-first-time/
- https://web.archive.org/web/20260409084910/https://www.newscientist.com/article/2522324-particles-seen-emerging-from-empty-space-for-first-time/
- https://web.archive.org/web/20260410023832/https://www.newscientist.com/article/2522324-particles-seen-emerging-from-empty-space-for-first-time/
The wayback machine worked, of course. Thank you, I really appreciate the effort.
“Remove paywalls” kinda worked but asked me to sell my soul instead.
Extra silly is that we have to traverse the paywall for this while the original paper is free for all: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09920-0
So anyway, the headline is misleading as always. Nevertheless, I think, the finding is quite cool - proper observation of virtual particles performing subnuclear reactions, experimental proof that the quarks first form as correlated particles, and then react to form other particles, and a way to gather information on all of these through these reactions. Looks neat.
