Quantum Vacuum Quotes

I wouldn't have thought that a wrong theory should lead us to understand better the ordinary quantum field theories or to have new insights about the quantum states of black holes.

There is no place in this new kind of physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality.

Quantum field theory, which was born just fifty years ago from the marriage of quantum mechanics with relativity, is a beautiful but not very robust child.

That is, you can have nothingness, absolute nothingness for maybe a tiny fraction of a second, if a second can be defined in that arena, but then it falls apart into a something and an anti-something. And that something is then what we call the universe. But can we really understand that or put rigorous mathematics or testable experiments against that? Not yet. So one of the big holy grail of physics is to understand why there is something rather than nothing.

If I understand Dirac correctly, his meaning is this: there is no God, and Dirac is his Prophet.

Photons come out of nowhere, they cannot be stored, they can barely be pinned down in time, and they have no home in space whatsoever. That is, light occupies no volume and has no mass. The similarity between a thought and a photon is very deep. Both are born in a region beyond space and time where nature controls all processes in that void which is full of creative intelligence.

The choice is: the Universe...or nothing.

The Europeans and the Americans are not throwing $10 billion down this gigantic tube for nothing. We're exploring the very forefront of physics and cosmology with the Large Hadron Collider because we want to have a window on creation, we want to recreate a tiny piece of Genesis to unlock some of the greatest secrets of the universe.

Dark energy is perhaps the biggest mystery in physics.

There is no space without aether, and no aether which does not occupy space.

Empty space is a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time scale so short that you can't even measure them.

Every subatomic interaction consists of the annihilation of the original particles and the creation of new subatomic particles. The subatomic world is a continual dance of creation and annihilation, of mass changing into energy and energy changing into mass. Transient forms sparkle in and out of existence, creating a never-ending, forever newly created reality.

When you look at a vacuum in a quantum theory of fields, it isn't exactly nothing.

Quantum physics fluctuates all the time. But now the fluctuations are not just particles coming into and out of existence, which happens all the time. It's whole universes coming into and out of existence.