The 'emptiness' of it all

All that empty space is mind boggling.

As the British astronomer James Jeans (1877-1946) famously said, "Place three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars."

And so all the matter in the entire universe it is said would fit in a sphere a mere light year across.

Or put another way, if the universe were just a cubic meter big, all the matter in the cosmos would fit inside the size of one atom.

[As an aside, things being so far apart also means that man is to stay pretty much where he is.]

But all those empty space may not actually be that empty.

In the steady state theory in cosmology, empty space is where new matter originates, as the universe expands.

And in the so-called Standard Cosmology (i.e., Big Bang), empty space possesses dark energy which is the repulsive force that pushes the galaxies farther apart at an ever accelerating pace.

It bears watching what new theories will come out as regards the real nature of all that 'empty' space.

[Image credit: Wikimedia]

Technorati Tags: cosmology, dark energy, James Jeans, size of universe, space

Comments

[Roy]

Nor does the "all that space" observation become less mind boggling when one moves to the atomic world.

Make the proton of a hydrogen atom about the size of one's fingernail. At that scale one would have to go about a quarter mile away to find the electron (worse, actually, if one factors in quantum mechanics, for which the electron is not a point particle, but a probability function ;D).

Try going into a local bar and asserting "You ain't really there."

[Kosmiceggburst]

It is well-known that Einstein proposed the cosmological constant as the basis of general relativity theory, but he focused on the atomic level in doing this. It was his way to resolve some problems. So, Einstein himself viewed atomics as microcosms of the universe. This was done by him in order to baseline a static universe and proceed with it, but Einstein then recanted when Hubble's "proof" of celestial acceleration via redshift came out. Although Hubble's explanation really gelled in the minds of early 1900s cosmologists, it was inconclusive, portrayed though as conclusive, an immediate "principle", basically, redshift took on tachyon speed in progressing from the hypothetical stage to scientific principle in no time flat.

The result of Einstein's backpeddling then allowed for a cyclic big-bang hypothesis to emerge as the cosmological constant, which is proven to be rather eccentric if taken literally.

This all changed again recently on new evidence.

Related to this sizing question described, Planck's Constant proposes that all things constant, if c lightspeed was exactly 1/2, then Planck's length would increase by a factor of the square root of 8, but the approximate size of atoms would accordingly be bigger. We would not notice the effects of the re-sizing, dependant upon all things else remaining constant and adjusting proportionally. So, this is all perfectly feasible in physical reality. Planck's Constant implies scalabililty in this regard.

[MK]

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Try going into a local bar and asserting "You ain't really there."
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Interesting :)

That would be the quantum mechanical (Copenhagen interpretation) perspective I can see.

From the classical/Einstein-ian plain Rutherford atomic theory viewpoint without the is-the-moon-there-when-you're-not-looking angle, the remark can simply be:

"You're there but don't you know that you're mostly empty space?"

Ok. Whatever.