lets talk about nothing
 

So here goes :

nothing - what is it :

To get to a real form of "nothing", we need to go into outer space. Imagine that you go to the farthest, emptiest corner of the universe. This is as close to nothing as we are ever going to get. What we are looking for is a section of space that contains zero atoms. No atoms at all -- it is a perfect vacuum. That is the best approximation of "nothing" that we have in our universe today.

The girls asked another question: "What color is nothing?"

What we think of as "color" comes from light that hits our eyes. Small units of light, called photons, have to leave the object we are looking at in order for our eyes to see a color. Photons can either be produced by something, like a light bulb, or they can bounce off of something and get reflected into our eyes. Those photons are what our eyes "see."

Since "nothing" contains zero atoms, there is nothing in "nothing" that can produce photons, or reflect them - so there are zero photons. Our eyes see zero photons as black. So the color of "nothing" is black

But here's a deeper question: Is a section of space that contains zero atoms really "nothing"?

Not really. Space, even if there are no atoms in it, is "something." For example, photons can move through space even if the space contains zero atoms. So can gravity. So can radio waves. So can a magnet's field. And we can measure space -- a chunk of space has a length, a width and a height. And time elapses. In other words, empty space is a measurable framework that has the ability to transmit certain types of energy.

"True nothing" would be truly nothing -- no space. This is hard to get a grasp on, because we cannot imagine this kind of nothing. We have never seen it. It is, presumably, what existed before the universe existed. Apparently, at the creation of the universe, there was truly nothing. Space, with its ability to transmit different types of energy, was created when the universe was created. Then energy in this space condensed into matter -- the atoms that we find all around us today.

"True nothing" is that immeasurable, zero-energy, non-existent thing that did not exist before the universe, and all the space in it, came into existence.

Who knows what that was like?

Easily one of the best topics I've seen in this forum. And I don't think anyone would beg to differ ;)

What about dark matter?

p.s. Wow! smarty threads this weekend ;) are we improving?

Dark matter is the name cosmologist gave to the force that would be required to align the observable facts about the universe with the current physical understanding of it. In other words, we observe an accelerating expansion of space yet our understanding of how matter works suggests that this expansion should be decelerating - in order to 'explain' this they proposed a 'new' force which, when added to the current understanding gives the observed results. This force is known as 'dark energy' and the matter connected with this energy is known as 'dark matter'. Dark, simply because we cannot as yet observe it, not because of any mysterious evil force or metaphysical implication.

Quarks are subatomic particles - bits of atoms. Or rather bits of the bits of atoms. Atom is a word which literally means 'indivisible' from the Greek tome which means 'to cut' and the negative sign a- , as in amoral. It was first used by Demokritus over 2500 years ago to describe something that maintained it's properties even in the smallest amount. Today we consider the Chemical elements to be the equivalent of Demokritus's atom. Now we use the word rather loosely to describe the smallest particle of any chemical element that retains its identity amongst its constituent parts and arrangement thereof. The three basic constituent parts were described by Sir Arthur Rutherford at the beginning of the 20th Century as Protons Neutrons and Electrons. Later, as the field of particle physics advanced, even these constituent parts were discovered to have their own components. A quark is one of these components. More than 150 'subatomic' particles have since been discovered and the search still goes on.
The Large Hadron Colider - an enormous machine which 'crashes' subatomic particles together and then tracks and analyses the 'debris' is looking for particles so small that they are sometimes not considered as particle at all but traces of energy. The most exciting search at the moment is for the so called 'Higgs Boson' Which was proposed in the sixties by Scottish physicist Peter Higgs. These particles are considered to be zero mass and, according to Higgs, they are responsible for the phenomenon of mass itself. But that's another story!

With google i can be as smart as i want to be :)

Not true,gravity and radio waves are atoms as well.And we can create artificial nothing,it's by -273,15 degrees Celsius (0 Kelvin),that is the temperature when atoms of most things stop moving and when atoms stop moving,the thing stops exist,which results in nothing.

I reckon Dark Matter is just a fudge factor to make the maths work!

I do believe in Dark Suckers :D

OK I dont really believe in Dark Suckers but the theory makes me laugh!

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Has that been proven? ;)

I consider the guy who's billing you for Internet to be smarter :D at least he's getting something out of this ;)

There is more space inbetween the atoms than there are atoms. So we and everything else is basically, well nothing :eek:

The last time I was learning physics it still did work that way ;).That's why LHC uses a temparateru or 1.9 Kelvin,so that the atoms do not navigate into random directions and so that they can be aimed at each other better :)

Isnt it impossible to reach zero Kelvin?

It is,it's even possible to reach less than that,but they don't want the atoms to dissolve :)

I must say that the subject fascinates and confuses me :o

I took the stuff below from my forum at Siliconhell


How many Atoms are there out there in the universe?

Just to give you some perspective on how many atoms it might be:

* The number of atoms alone in the graphite in your pencil is about 25000000000000000000000 atoms.
* There are more atoms in a glass of water, than there are glasses of water in every ocean on earth.
* A human hair is about 1 million carbon atoms wide.
* A single drop of water contains about 2 sextillion atoms of oxygen (2 followed by 21 zeros, 2?1021) and twice as many hydrogen atoms.
* An HIV virion is the width of 800 carbon atoms and contains about 100 million atoms total.
* An E. coli bacterium contains perhaps 100 billion atoms, and a typical human cell roughly 100 trillion atoms.
* A speck of dust might contain 3x1012 (3 trillion) atoms.
* The number of atoms in 12 grams of charcoal (about 6 x 1023) is more than 1,400,000 times the age of the universe in seconds.


At this point you may be thinking "well how many atoms am I made up of?"


Well A 70 kg body would have approximately 7*1027 atoms. That is, 7 followed by 27 zeros:

7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Another way of saying this is "seven billion billion billion." Of this, almost 2/3 is hydrogen, 1/4 is oxygen, and about 1/10 is carbon. These three atoms add up to 99% of the total!


OK OK, So how many atoms are their in our universe:

Using the cosmic egg theory, the amount of atoms (or the energy equivalent) would be 1 followed by 89 zeros. That corrisponds to the primordial 'heavy' atom dividing by 2, 10 times in each of 27 steps. Yes that is 1 with 89 Zeros after it

Some other theories suggest that there are 4x10^79 hydrogen atoms in the Universe. But this is definately a lower limit calculation, and ignores many possible atom sources. That number is a 4 followed by 79 zeros.

Thats quite a few atoms isnt it

What I find even weirder is that there is more space in between the atoms than there are atoms. This means that you, me, and indeed everything largely consists of nothing.

Makes you think doesnt it :)