I was watching the Richard Dawkins debate against Cardinal George Pell and in it Richard Dawkins refers to a theory that matter and anti matter combined makes nothing but nothing can produce matter and anti matter. I thought it was really interesting and could revolutionise our understanding of what nothing is but he doesn't name the theory in his speech. Any help with this would be much appreciated :)
Subscription Note:
Choosing to subscribe to this topic will automatically register you for email notifications for comments and updates on this thread.
Email notifications will be sent out daily by default unless specified otherwise on your account which you can edit by going to your userpage here and clicking on the subscriptions tab.
Do you have a link to the debate. I'd need more information. Perhaps watching it would help me more.
But, what you have posted, it sounds like RD might have been trying to describe the beginning of the universe shortly after the Universal Expansion Event (a.k.a. Big Bang). During that time there was huge amounts of matter and antimatter being created. They were being annihilated creating large amounts of energy. Basically, there was more matter than antimatter and we have the universe as we now see.
As for the name of the theory, if there is one, I am going to need time to research it. Provided I remember. I go back to work tomorrow and will be busy all day long. I have to fly to and from work tomorrow, off Tue and Wed. I'll try and look for it as I am able.
rmfr
Thank you soo much! The link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8hy8NxZvFY. If that does'nt work the name of the youtube video is "DEBATE: Atheist vs Christian (Richard Dawkins vs Cardinal George Pell)". I'm pretty sure he talks about it mid to near end of the video if that helps :)
@ AUS-LGBT
Do you mean at this point in the video?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8hy8NxZvFY&t=1260s
If so, then he is trying to describe the Universal Expansion Theory, also known as the Big Bang Theory. For a much better description, although it may be a bit boring, unless you are scientifically inclined, read Laurence Krauss's book A Universe From Nothing.
At Amazon
At Wikipedia
Official Web Site
rmfr
EDIT: I saw this video quite some time and loved it. Off to finish watching it...
Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krause did a tour together., Richard is a biologist and probably should not be discussing physics. Lawrence talks about Physics all the time... That's his job. You want to listen to Lawrence Krause talk about "Nothing." You can find videos on YouTube. He is a good public speaker and will not bore you. Try "Something from Nothing" and look for his name.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUe0_4rdj0U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo
A universe from nothing.
Nothing is actually something..... There is no Nothing.
Probably the simplest formal answer to your question would be the unhelpful phrase: QED vacuum, or stated: how the vacuum is represented in the theory of quantum electrodynamics.
I can try to give a quick, high altitude summary (in a post to follow).
A state is all the information that can be known about a system; the mathematical representation of a system. If you got 1 neutron in a box, the state of the inside of the box is just the fact that you have a neutron. Neutron's have certain attributes, and that is what the state is composed of.
Neutrons have a mass: if you look it up it is something like 1.674929 * 10^(-27) kg, that mass has an associated energy (use E=mc^2). That is part of the state.
The neutron has an electric charge (or maybe say it is missing an electric charge) of 0. That is part of the state.
By postulate: any state can tunnel (kind of like change) into any other state; so long as the conserved values of the states are identical.
We started with 1.674929 * 10^(-27) kg worth of energy with our neutron. Maybe during the night our neutron changed into something else. We won't know what until we open the box and look. However: we do know that the energy of what we find in the box in the morning will be exactly equivalent to 1.674929 * 10^(-27) kg. It will be identical to what we started with. Same goes for electric charge, we started with 0 electric charge, we had better have exactly 0 electric charge in the morning.
So far this doesn't really help us because getting a particle and an anti-particle out of the vacuum would change the energy; which is not allowed. But a different part of the theory becomes important here, that tells us we can not know the time and energy exactly in any state. When the time is very small, the uncertainty of the energy is very great. That allows reactions that take place very quickly, do so in a way to does not respect the conservation of energy. This is where you get particle pairs tunneling out of the vacuum, in seeming violation of the conservation of energy.
A footnote: if you try to do an experiment to detect those particles 'pulled by magic' from the void, to see if they are "really real"; you will find that to do that you need to essentially hit the system with a very high energy photon. The minimum energy required will be the same amount of energy needed to create the particle pair in the first place. So the punchline is: any experiment designed to show these particles do not exist; will in fact confirm their existence.
/e It should probably also be mentioned that failure to include these kinds of reactions while trying to predict the outcome of standard experiments, will cause the theory to make the wrong predictions. People argue until they are blue in the face about how to interpret this situation; all I can tell you is those parts must be included mathematically to get an answer that matches experiments. What that means philosophically is up to you.