Why Shouldn't The Universe Exist?

neither your family nor your neighbors nor the person who served you today in the supermarket should

exist

the world should not

exist

there should not be any great art or music there should not be hunger or the horrors of war there should not exist there should not be any That, there

shouldn

't even be a

universe

, let's start at the beginning, with the big bang and the plausible and improbable event, one between 10 to 10 to 123 in graphs 10 to 10 to 123 is sometimes called the Penrose number , named after the Nobel Prize-winning British physicist and mathematician Sir Roger Penrose, measures the remarkable level of order and precision with which our

universe

was created.

Order and precision are known to decay over time. A pair of headphones becomes more and more tangled as time goes by. You see it in the ruins of an ancient city. Magnificent buildings carved thousands of years ago by our ancestors reduced to dust and rubble by the passage of time knew how our universe should behave. Likewise, its order and precision decline over time like the cities of ancient Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica. He knew that black holes were the crumbling ruins of the cosmos, the place where everything eventually ends, where order and precision finally give way to the In the abyss there are about 10 to the power of 80 protons, neutrons and other similar particles scattered about. for our universe that still evades the abyss of black holes that still clings to its order and precision, this makes our universe special like an ancient artifact that has not yet fallen apart. into dust and when he crunched the numbers, Penrose realized that our universe must have been carved with a level of precision that simply didn't make sense, an incredibly low entropy, a probability of one in 10 between 10 and 123, and this number impossible is Not only antimatter is like the mirror image of matter and when the two combine they destroy each other and although there are 10 out of 80 protons, neutrons and other particles of matter in the universe, there were only a hint of antiparticles, but this is just as good.

If an equal number of particles and antiparticles had been created in the Big Bang, they would have annihilated each other almost instantaneously, and yet there is nothing in our best models of the universe that seems to give matter sufficient preference over matter. antimatter in fact when we extrapolate the results of the experiments it seems that the universe should have been born with an equal number everything should have been annihilated you and I should not exist the universe should not exist and yet it exists but there is a prediction that worries physicists a lot More than the lack of antimatter or the remarkably ordered state in which the universe was born, it is the weight of the universe.

When theoretical physicists put quantum mechanics together with G-relativity in a controllable way, they discover that the Universe should have folded into oblivion. At one point in creation it should have been crushed by an overwhelming weight, most of which comes not from the planets and stars that are scattered throughout the galaxy, but from empty space, the void, our entire universe should have been crushed by the weight of nothingness. This is a mystery known as the cosmological constant problem and has dogged physicists for almost 100 years. The James Web Space Telescope's mirrors are aligned at about 10 nanometers, or 110,000 of the width of a human hair.

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They also have a new addition that combines a roller ball and a fountain pen in one stylish package, so click the link in the description. and use code H Tu for 10% off and free shipping on any hoverpen with worldwide shipping thanks to novium for supporting educational content on YouTube Julius Von Major was the Doctor of a ship that served on expeditions to the Dutch East Indies In the middle of the 19th century, whenever a sailor fell ill on one of the ships, Von Mayor often resorted to bloodshed. This was not unusual. Bloodshed was a common practice at the time and, in this case, led Von Mayor to make a groundbreaking discovery in hot water. sun of Indonesia, he realized that the blood that ran through a sailor's veins was as red as the blood that ran through his arteries in his native Germany, where the climate was not as warm, the blood that ran through the veins of his patients was always a little He believed it was darker than arterial blood because it lacked oxygen, which had been used in the slow combustion of food to help keep the patient warm in Indonesia.

The sailors were bathed in the tropical sun. They didn't need to burn as much fuel. to keep warm, so their veins carried blood with higher levels of oxygen and appeared much redder in color. The elder Von realized that the heat generated by the combustion of food in the body must be equivalent to the heat absorbed from the sun. He realized that heat was simply Another form of energy, but what is energy and what does it have to do with the weight of the universe or even the cosmological constant? Energy is the most precious commodity of all.

We need energy to power our vehicles, heat our homes, watch videos on YouTube. and as Von Mayor realized it comes in many different forms in the 18th century, early industrialists looked for ways to convert trapped energy into useful work that could power their machines. That's what energy is, things we can convert into work. Old waterwheels store potential. energy by lifting a heavy bucket of water high before dropping it converting the energy into useful kinetic energy the energy of motion the steam engines of the Industrial Revolution took the chemical energy stored in coal and converted it into heat before creating motion again and It was Einstein who realized that mass was also another form of energy and understood why we must remember the cosmic speed limit.

The speed of light. Nothing can go faster than the speed of light, which is approximately 299,792,458 m/s. This limit applies. at all, at the speed of a bullet or a particle whizzing around a collider, it even applies to Usain Bolt, the legendary Jamaican sprinter, of course, despite his notable talent, Bolt never managed to come close to the speed of the light, but what if he had? If he were a supercharged version of Usain Bolt capable of accelerating up to the speed of light, how could he do this to accelerate to higher speeds? The supercharged bolt would need to take in energy, presumably in the form of food, as it approached speed. of light you would find it increasingly difficult except to accelerate, this has to be the case, if it were not the case you would be in danger of breaking the speed limit and we know that cannot happen, but what is stopping you from accelerating it?

It must be that its resistance to acceleration its inertia is increasing the energy it consumes not only disappears but becomes inertia as it approaches the speed of light no matter how much energy it takes on board its inertia simply grows and it grows and stops you from accelerating past the speed limit with a thought experiment like this. Einstein understood that inertia was just another form of energy and that had to remain true even when Bolt wasn't running when he was at rest, but what is it? Bolt's inertia when he is at rest is just his mass, so mass and energy are equivalent and Einstein captured this fact with his most famous equation and equal mc² this equation tells you how much energy e you should associate with a certain amount of mass m c in In this case, the speed of light is around 300 million m/s, which is a fairly large conversion factor, meaning that just a small amount of mass equals a large amount of energy .

For example, a small dog weighing about 9 kg stores energy equivalent to almost one million billion jewels or 200 megatons of TNT, which is approximately the energy that was released in the Katoa eruption in 1883. Every time it occurs In nuclear fusion, a small amount of mass is converted into an enormous amount of heat. This happens inside a thermonuclear weapon in the form of hydrogen isotopes. they fuse to form heavier elements with a net loss in overall mass. It also occurs in the core of the Sun, fueling the life-giving glow that keeps our planet warm. The conversion of mass into other forms of energy is one of the most powerful forces in nature. and so, when a physicist asks you how much you weigh or how much the universe weighs, they are not asking you if you have eaten too much on vacation, they are asking you about the force of gravity that attracts you or even the universe.

Of course, how big it is. It may depend on how much you ate on vacation because we normally think that gravity attracts mass and the more mass you carry, the more you weigh, but this is only half the story that gravity doesn't have. just pull the mass once Einstein realized that mass and energy were equivalent he realized that gravity should attract any form of energy, light for example has no mass but it does have energy and that's why gravity pulls it in a curved path. When we ask the sun how much you weigh or how much the universe weighs, we are actually asking how much energy there is and there is an enormous amount of energy hidden in all the mass and radiation that we see in the universe, hidden in the stars. and the planets that populate the galaxies is in the same radiation that spreads through the cosmos, but this is only a small fraction of the total energy budget.

Much of the universe is made from an unknown invisible source, the so-called Dark Universe, this is where it gets most of its working weight and so, just like looking at the scale after the holidays or measuring how much flour you need for your cake , it is time for us to weigh the universe in the city of Syracuse in the 3rd century BC. Aredes, possibly the greatest mathematician of his time is to contemplate the size of the universe, there are those who think that the number of sand is infinite in multitude and I am referring to the sand not only that which exists around Syracuse and the rest of sic but also that which It is found in all other inhabited or uninhabited regions, but Archimedes is not convinced of this infinite number of grains of sand and sets out to calculate how many could actually fit within the universe.

This is his famous sand counter and it starts with a poppy seed placing seeds next to each other. Archimedes points out that 40 of them would form a single Greek dactile a finger width equivalent to about 19 mm in modern units, and within each seed he imagines a myriad of grains of sand (a myriad is 10,000, the largest unit he had available). Archimedes at that time to calculate). How many grains of sand were there in the universe? He had to invent a new system of numbers and he also had to estimate the size of the universe for our comedies.

The universe reached up to a blanket of fixed stars that formed an enormous sphere centered around the sun, with a series From ingenious and crude approximations, he estimated that the diameter of this sphere was equivalent to 100 billion Greek stadiums or about two Li years; For us, adding it all up, he triumphantly concluded that the Universe could not accommodate infinite space. number of grains of sand the number would not exceed 10 to the power of 63. How much would such a universe weigh? Archimedes wasn't really worried about that, but if we imagine that each grain of sand weighs about 10 mg, then the Aredes universe would be filled with sand.

We weigh around 10 billion billion billion billion billion kilograms, interestingly that's not very wrong, but it was just a coincidence. Archimedes greatly underestimated the size of the universe and the reality is that it is not full of sand, the universe is big when we ask how much it weighs. We are really asking how much energy it contains, energy stored in the mass of stars, planets and interstellar gas clouds, energy stored in radiation or even in empty space, to calculate how much energy it is, we must be clear that by Universe we mean the universe observable, which is a large region of the universe as far as the eye can see or anything else it can see.

The universe was born about 13.8 billion years ago. This may seem like a long time, but it is not. There has been enough time for us to receive signals from the deepest corners.distant from the cosmos, they are simply too far away, even if they emitted a light signal traveling at the maximum possible speed, that signal still would not have reached us during the life of the universe. The boundary between what we can and cannot see is known as the observable universe. You might think that it must have a size of about 13.8 billion light years, since that is the distance traveled by light during the life of the universe, however, this does not take into account. the expansion of space when you consider this, it turns out that we could have received signals from objects that are up to 46.5 billion Li years away, so that is the size of the observable universe, approximately 93 billion light years in diameter, of course, the universe doesn't actually stop at this point, there's no giant cosmic wall 46 A2 billion light years away, but we have no way of knowing what it really looks like.

Beyond this point, it could be that the Universe continues to extend eternally to infinity or perhaps it eventually returns on itself as a magnificent Cosmic Sphere extending far beyond the observable realm. This giant sphere would bend the shape of space. A small light traveling great distances toward us could be sensitive to that curvature and we could hope to detect it, but so far we haven't detected anything. If the universe really was shaped like a sphere, it would have. be undetectably large with a diameter of at least 23 billion light years, but whatever the size and shape of the universe, there is no way we can attempt to weigh the Unobservable Realms because we have no way of knowing what they contain. grains of sand or they could be empty, without stars or planets, the laws of physics could even be different there, we just don't know and we can never know, so if we really want to take the weight of the Universe seriously, we must move on.

To the observable part it extends 46 and 1/2 billion light years in all directions and weighs, let's start with the stars, the sun is quite typical with a mass on the order of 2 million trillion trillion kilos. Observations suggest that there are between 100 and 400 billion stars. In our galaxy, which combine to weigh up to a billion ions, trillions of trillions of trillions of kilos, there are at least 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe, each containing an average of 100 billion stars. , which suggests that there are at least 20 billion trillion stars together weighing a grand total of around 20,000 trillion trillion trillion kilos and it's actually not a bad estimate for what we can actually see, but The problem is that it ignores mass from other sources, such as interstellar gas, a better way to measure the mass or energy of the universe is to study its effect on the shape of space-time.

One way to do this is to study the cosmic microwave background radiation, the so-called CMB. These are primordial photons left over from the time the first atoms were formed. These photons have traveled great distances. the entire universe from all directions and for most of cosmic history they could even be detected among the static in the old days of analog television using state-of-the-art satellite telescopes, astronomers measure the temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation in different parts of the sky by measuring statistical correlations in temperature fluctuations in the CMB and understanding how radiation from matter and other forms of energy affect the shape of space and time, astronomers can discover what the universe is made of and the cosmic microwave background.

In combination with other methods and probes, it reveals that the observable universe has about 150,000 trillion trillion trillion trillion kilograms of mass stored in the things we can see, stars, planets, interstellar gas clouds and even the human race, that's about 7 and a half times our previous estimate. It seems like a lot, but what we can see is only 5% of the energy that is out there. There are two more ingredients and first they dominate the universe. There is dark matter. This is like the ordinary matter that makes up atoms, humans, or stars. planets except it's completely invisible if you shine a torch on it the light will just pass through if you try to hit it with a baseball bat it would be like you were just swinging the bat in empty space we have no way to touch it or feel it Dark matter except through Gravity carries mass and energy like ordinary matter, so we can feel its effect in space-time, but although dark matter is five times more abundant than visible matter, it is still not the dominant ingredient in our universe, What is dark energy.

It makes up a huge 70% of the universe, another invisible substance, it is responsible for separating the universe causing cosmic expansion to accelerate over time. We see this through the light of a distant supernova. These explosions are reasonably well understood and yet the most distant. They are dimmer than expected, this dimming is easily explained by the accelerated expansion of space by the push of dark energy, so what is dark energy? All the data points towards an exotic substance whose energy density is more or less constant throughout the universe and as we will come to understand that this is just what you would expect from the energy of empty space.

It turns out that empty space is not empty, it is actually a bubbling broth of virtual particles that can never be tamed and always appear and disappear. weighing the universe giving it energy giving it weight this energy of empty space has many names in the early days of quantum mechanics most people called it nul seni which in german means zero point energy today people often call it called vacuum energy or sometimes the cosmological constant mean the same thing and are what most scientists associate with dark energy. Our observable universe may contain dark energy equivalent to about 46 trillion trillion trillion trillion tonnes of TNT and when you put it all together, the planets, the stars, are dark.

Never mind dark energy, you find a universe that contains energy equivalent to 67 billion billion billion billion tons of TNT and that's how much the universe weighs. This may seem like a lot, but remember that all of this energy is distributed evenly in a large Universe, the density is Very low dark energy is so diluted that a full cup of coffee does not contain enough energy to swat a fairy fly, the most smallest of the world, and the best thing is that this low density is what allowed the universe to grow and age. But as we weigh the universe we now encounter one of the greatest cosmological enigmas: the problem of the cosmological constant.

If you really want to think of dark energy as the energy of empty space, why is there so little of it when we take dark energy? our most tested and trusted physics theories to the letter, we find that Punk null energy should be absolutely enormous, our universe should not be the gently evolving Cosmos we see today, it should have been born as a super heavyweight instantly crushed under the weight of its emptiness. bent into oblivion in time and space, torn apart by the tides of gravity and gone in the blink of an eye, our universe should never have grown or aged, should never have allowed intelligent life to evolve, should never have allowed you exist, but our universe grew and aged, it allowed you to exist, in fact, the truth is that the universe is not a heavyweight, it is not even a flyweight, so the question is why is there so little dark energy, where is all the NP Punk energy? destroyed the universe to understand the play on words and the puzzle it creates, we have to travel back 100 years, to the German city of Hamburg, to a cafe overlooking the banks of the inland river.

Hamburg is a vibrant city resurrected from the ashes of the World War. I am a bustling metropolis and a center of intellectual thought and in the cafe there are two physicists two friends uto Stern is a bon vion enjoy the good things in life good food good wine good company sometimes take a flight to Vienna just for lunch Wolf However, Gang poy is a very different character. He is currently sporting a black eye that he suffered the night before at the Reaper Barn in Hamburg's Notorious San POI district. Poy had been fighting as he often did, fueled by alcohol and a fierce personality.

Stern takes a sip of his Brandy and turns to his old friend. I'm telling you that Wolf Gang the Punk's energy is real. I have calculated its effects on the vapor pressure of neon isotopes. If it were absent, as you say, it should be the difference in the vapor pressure of neon 20 and neon 22 would be enormous but poy is not convinced he begins to scribble a calculation on a napkin when he finishes he looks up triumphantly but what would happen to the Otto gravity if Punk's null energy were real, how do you say it? should be the universe would not even reach the Moon Moon the null energy Punk is the energy of empty space the energy of the vacuum consider the universe around you is full of stars that shine with their light throughout the cosmos from the Menace of the giants red to the sickly glow of white dwarfs there are hostile planets orbiting these giant stars and minnows that are too hot and too cold there are warm, welcoming planets like Earth jewels in the solar system where life can thrive there are towering gas clouds monuments of colored nebula where stars are born and all this carries mass, carries energy, but suppose a cosmic bayith entered the universe and took it to the end, it takes every star, every planet, every human being and all other forms. of complex life they take. far away the nebula, the black coals, the bacteria and the dust, take away everything living and dead, big and small, what would remain as a dark and silent place of true desolation, the emptiest space.

One might naively expect this void to be weightless to be free of all the energy it has been stripped of its wares by the Cosmic Bayth, but that is not true, at least we do not believe it to be true. Quantum theory has taught us that empty space does carry energy, it carries the energy of null puns, the energy of the zero point, the energy of the vacuum. the cosmological constant the famous German physicist and father of quantum mechanics Max Plank had played with the idea of ​​the seni nun as early as 1911 and shortly after it was another German Walter Nerst who suggested that the vacuum of empty space was not empty but an exotic place. half filled with an enormous amount of energy but perhaps the most famous German physicist of the time Albert Einstein had a turbulent relationship with the nun and also separately the idea of ​​a cosmological constant at first he was a champion of both, in fact it was he who He came up with the idea of ​​a cosmological constant in 1917 that required a repulsive force present throughout space to counteract the effect of gravity in what he believed at the time was a static universe.

He also teamed up separately with Auto Stern and calculated the effects of the null pun on hydrogen molecules, his results agreed with the experimental data, but he did not connect the two and within a decade, Einstein had switched sides on both the cosmological constant as in the seni nun, supposedly calling the constant his greatest mistake and stating that no theorist can pronounce it. the word Zero Point Energy without breaking into a half-embarrassed, half-ironic smile, but it would turn out that Einstein was right to invoke a cosmological constant and wrong to dismiss nun energy, and the idea of ​​Zero Point Energy really took hold.

In the mid-1920s, legendary German physicist Vera Heisenberg entered the sport suffering from severe hay fever. In the summer of 1925, Heisenberg had fled to the island of Heland, where she checked into a guest house overlooking the dunes. Her allergies were so bad. that the lady who ran the guest house assumed she had been in a fight. Heisenberg used his escape to think deeply about the spectral lines of the hydrogen atom, thoughts that often led to insomnia, and indeed it was in the early hours of one particular night that a breakthrough finally came and Heisenberg finally began to understand.

How the hydrogen atom behaved. She was beginning to understand the witchy world of quantum mechanics where everything was a game of chance and when Heisenberg realized it was a game it led to Zero Point Energy, the null. Punk zeni to understand how Zero Point Energy emerges, go to the kitchen and take out a large mixing bowl, throw a marble into the bowl and wait for it to settle, eventually it will appear to be at rest at the bottom of the bowl. but is that really true? Can we really tell exactly where it is and how fast it is moving if we zoom into the microwave world?

The answer is clearly no, there are air particles that constantly collide with the marbleand they hit her from side to side. Okay, but what if she sucks all the air out of the room and cools it to absolute zero. So what happens when the marble finally stops at the bottom of the container or moves? Wiggles Heisenberg realized that there was always some uncertainty, the key to remember is that quantum mechanics is a game of chance, you can only deal with probabilities. It turns out that the more you know about the position of a particle, the less you know about its momentum, so if we know where a particle is we cannot tell how fast it is moving and vice versa, this means that if we reduce the marble to the size of a particle Fundamentally, we will never be able to say if it is exactly at rest at the bottom of the bowl, since that would mean that we would have exact knowledge of both its position and its momentum.

Understanding uncertainty and the laws of quantum mechanics means that it is simply not possible to know both exactly in the microscopic world, something always has to move and so we can now return to our cosmic bayth determined to empty the universe of all its stars. , planets and Little Green Men before their arrival, the universe is full of particles, electrons, photons, quarks and gluons, Gage bosons and Higs bosons and maybe even some particles we don't know about yet. These particles are actually just waves in the fundamental fields of nature. the photon is a wave in the electromagnetic field the electron a wave in the electron field the higs boson a wave in the higs field you can imagine these fields as the waves of an ocean and the particles as the waves on top of it What the baith is really trying to do is get rid of all the waves, all the excitations of these fundamental fields, he is trying to silence the ocean of reality to make it perfectly flat, but as we know, he can't do that, and the uncertainty principle It means you can never completely silence the ocean there.

It is always that Quantums move small short-lived waves in the Fundamental Fields, but these remaining waves do not correspond to real particles like electrons or photons that you can touch and maybe even hold on to them if they were real, if you could hold on to them yourself. day. bayith would just grab them and carry them away, instead they are something more mysterious, they are virtual particles, these virtual particles always appear and disappear like a bubbling broth in the vacuum of empty space, they are not the type of particles that can be cling to but they give the vacuum its energy they give it zero energy, but is this energy really real or was it just a figment of Heisenberg's imagination?

There is a fascinating macroscopic example that helps answer this question: the gecko as it runs freely across walls and ceilings is believed to have its seemingly magical ability to defy gravity having its roots in null eneri punk. It turns out that the energy stored in the vacuum through the bubbling broth of virtual particles depends crucially on the shape of its environment, change the shape and you can change the energy, which means that the vacuum will push and pull on the walls around it while try to reduce your energy. This pushing and pulling of the vacuum is a force known as the Casmir Force, named after the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casmir.

When the walls of the vacuum are far apart, this Casmir force is small, but when they are close together, this force is large enough to measure changes in zero-point energy and also lead to Van Deval forces between atoms and molecules, and this is what some biologists believe is responsible. For the gecko's ability to walk on walls, microscopic projections on the soles of its feet surround small pockets of vacuum and, by altering the shape, the gecko creates a force strong enough to defy gravity, and now that we have accepted that vacuum energy is real we can estimate how big we think it should be how much energy you would expect to find in a cup of coffee in empty space to solve this we need to divide space into many small pieces like a spectacular cosmic puzzle the size of the pieces This will affect our estimate, so we should think about what size we should use.

You might think that the pieces should be as small as the eye can see, which would make them little boxes about a millimeter wide, but why would we let them hold us back? Due to the limitations of the human eye, when Poy was doing his calculations in a Hamburg cafe, he imagined puzzle pieces with sides about a trillion times smaller, about a phentom meter, this corresponds to the classical radius of the electron that was in the limit of experimental physics in time and this is where Heisenberg comes in with his uncertainty: whether the universe can be resolved into jigsaw pieces.

With just a diameter femometer you can have extremely precise knowledge about where and when a virtual particle appears and disappears. Heisenberg says that must come in a way to set the price, you must lose knowledge of the particle's momentum, this means you must also lose knowledge of its energy as you make the puzzle pieces smaller and smaller, the virtual particles. they can reach increasingly higher energies for templates or pieces like Poe's, about a feter wide. These energies reach up to a few billion jewels for each of our little boxes, which doesn't seem like much, but remember that the boxes are small, so the density is dangerously high for a coffee cup with empty space with lots of them. are. small boxes the total energy stored inside the cup equals a whopping 100,000 billion billion jews, that's enough energy to boil all of the oceans on Earth, but why stop there?

Almost a century has passed since Poy made his calculation in the Hamburg café. Since then physics has advanced we have developed technology that has allowed us to probe ever deeper into the microscopic fabric of the universe in the tunnels under the mountains on the border between Switzerland and France is the Large Hadron Collider at CERN particle accelerator a machine which recreates the first moments of the universe colliding subatomic particles head-on at almost the speed of light. These collisions allow physicists to perform PE in the depths of the microworld with unprecedented resolution breaking the universe into pieces that are 10-19 M wide i.e. 10,000 times smaller than an electron. 10,000 times smaller than the puzzle pieces I had imagined.

When you break down the universe into pieces this small, you can resolve virtual particles that appear and disappear every billionth of a billionth of a nanometer filling the void. With huge amounts of ambient quantum energy at this estimate, a cup of coffee in empty space would have enough energy to blow up an entire planet and not just once more than 100 million times, wiping out every planet in the galaxy, but Again, why do collisions stop there? in the CERN tunnel are on the edge of experimental physics as it is today, but that is only limited by our technology and of course by funding, there is no real reason to believe that physics could not go beyond this point with better machines we can imagine. even deeper into the Microworld resolving the Universe on an even smaller scale, so how far could we go?

We could imagine dividing the universe into pieces as small as the length of the table, which is more than a million trillion times smaller than the scale of According to our experiments at CERN, the length of the table is the distance at which The structure of space and time becomes meaningless as it becomes overwhelmed by quantum effects if we try to divide the universe into pieces smaller than the length of the table. The very notion of space and time would begin to disintegrate, but Plank and small boxes of size are more than enough to worry us.

If we divided the universe into such small pieces, we discovered that our coffee cup of empty space would contain a giggle of Google energy and that's enough. blow up every planet and star St in the observable universe over and over again more than a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times, so should we worry if we are terrified to know that empty space must contain such gigantic energies lurking around us? around us among the air molecules even in the empty space between the atoms of your body in a world without gravity there is nothing to fear for this null Punk's energy is constant the energy density of empty space is the same everywhere that's why we sometimes call it the cosmological constant create weapons that destroy planets and galaxies you need energy differences gradients in energy density that allow you to generate a force the true underlying vacuum energy of our entire universe has a constant density throughout space there are no gradients you can't use crush a grape it doesn't matter a galaxy without gravity this vacuum energy can't touch you but with gravity that's a very different story with gravity vacuum energy goes crazy to understand this we need to understand how gravity works Einstein taught us that the gravitational force is very Unlike the other fundamental forces in nature, in some senses it is not really a force at all.

Gravity is really the shape of spacetime and therefore it is not just mass that bends space and time. Mass is just a form of energy, all energy bends space. and time around it creating the warped shapes in space-time that we perceive as gravity, the energy of null puns is no exception, the energy of the vacuum, the cosmological constant, whatever you want to call it, will bend the shape of the space and time even if it is the same everywhere and of course, the more energy you have, the more space-time should bend. That's why Poy declared that the Universe wouldn't even reach the moon, calculated the energy density in empty space, and calculated how much it would fold spacetime quickly. seeing that space-time would bend backwards so that the observable realm could not even reach as far as the moon, but we have already seen how poy had underestimated the energy of the vacuum guided as he was by the limits of experimental physics in its time, modern estimates. suggest that the Universe would contain so much energy in empty space that it would bend towards Oblivion crushed by its own weight that it wouldn't even reach further than the tip of your nose, never mind the moon and now we have to state the obvious that the universe does . reaches beyond the tip of your nose, in fact, it reaches a billion billion times farther than the moon, the edge of the observable universe, as we have seen, is about 462 billion light years away, if the cosmological constant is there, it is much smaller than us.

In fact, it was expected that it should be smaller than Google once. The energy stored in a cup of coffee in empty space cannot be enough to destroy a planet or a star. It

shouldn

't even be enough to crush the world's smallest insect. This is cosmology. constant problem our best and most reliable theories of fundamental physics come together to predict that our universe should be so overwhelmed by the null pun eni by a terribly large cosmological constant that it simply should not exist and yet it does, why the 3 of September? In 1949, filter paper on a weather plane flying from Japan to Alaska detected unusually high levels of radioactivity.

The filter paper was sent to the American scientific laboratory at Los Alamos for further analysis and on September 23, American President Harry S. Truman announced that the Soviet Union successfully detonated an atomic device. The bomb was detonated a few days before the flight of the weather plane at 7:00 a.m. local time on August 29 at the Semipalatinsk test site, in present-day Kazakhstan, 10 km south of Ground Zero, where there were eight men. among them Yakov Zeldovich head of the theoretical division at the Soviet Nuclear Development Center in aramas 16 Zeldovich recalled seeing a bright cone-shaped flash with a tongue of fire emerging from the dust and smoke before descending into the safety trench after 30 seconds.

The sound of the explosion reached the trench like thunder that some of the men celebrated in Praise of Comrade Stalin. Zeldovich was silent before the Soviets. Zeldovich was a quiet superstar, a legendary physicist who played a pivotal role in their nuclear weapons program and one of only 16 people have been named heroes of socialist labor on three separate occasions, while Robert Oppenheimer became less active in physics after his involvement in the development of the nuclear bomb. Zeldovich went on to make important contributions to particle physics, astronomy, and cosmology, and it was Zeldovich 20 years later, in 1967 and 1968, who madethat the world would realize the problem of the cosmological constant.

It's unclear whether Zeldovich knew Po and his enigmatic calculation in the Hamburg café in the mid-1920s, but it didn't matter. Zeldovich was armed with far more powerful tools than he had at his disposal. By the late 1960s the general theory of relativity was well established along with its applications to cosmology. Quantum field theory was rapidly becoming the description. dominant of a subatomic world; In reality, it was Zeldovich who saw that the void should be a bubbling broth of virtual particles that appeared and disappeared endlessly, weighing down the void that folded the universe back into oblivion.

Zeldovich knew that something had to be wrong with our understanding of the universe and he sensed an opportunity for physics to claim that elucidating the cosmological constant will be of tremendous fundamental importance to the theory of elementary particles, so what can we make of this cosmological constant problem? Maybe we should just take an empirical approach. The energy of empty space is whatever we measure. If it's small, it is. small who cares about zeld doich and the predictions of quantum field theory who cares about poy and his idiosyncratic coffee calculations this may not be how nature chose to do things but this is not very satisfying the quest is to discover how How the universe works, and a wealth of empirical data points toward a microworld precisely described by quantum field theory, the relativistic version of quantum mechanics developed in the years after World War II, we can't just abandon it, not after all this time. experimental success elsewhere, and then there is the general theory theory of relativity the zenith of Einstein's genius that describes gravity as the shape of space-time accurately predicting exotic phenomena such as the bending of light around the sun and the procession perah heliana of the planet Mercury a slow but relentless change in its elliptical orbit also has a To the enormous wealth of data that supports it is added even to this day by the detection of gravitational waves by Ligo in 2015, another feather in his hat, but together these two great pillars of 20th century physics predict a universe destroyed instantly by the overwhelming weight of the vacuum by a Herculean cosmological constant by the nul punk eni as zeldovich realized more than 50 years ago we are obviously misunderstanding something Something very important the problem of the cosmological constant is such a crisis in our understanding of fundamental physics its resolution is expected to lead to something profound a radical change In our picture of how the universe really works, another example of something similar is the famous paradox of black hole information.

Another problem that Zeldovich had to do with is the question of what happens to all the information you throw into a black hole, does it disappear? violation of the laws of quantum mechanics or does it survive and, if so, where does it go? Like the solution to the constant cosmological problem, the answers to these questions are expected to reveal something profound about the fundamental fabric of our physical world and, therefore, theoretical physicists. They are always searching for the solution to the problem of the cosmological constant. In the half century since Zeldovich formulated the problem in modern terms, many solutions have appeared, but many have also disappeared.

A common thread is to assume that the calculation of the cosmological Zelich constant is only one part of the story. History says that elementary particles contribute an overwhelmingly large vacuum energy, but that there is another piece, another constant, of some hitherto hidden sector of the microworld that cancels out the parts that zel doich discovered, how and why could it cancel them to such an extent. an astonishing level of precision is the key piece of the puzzle is how to balance the weight of a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion suns with a precision of the mass of a single electron the most popular idea makes use of the multiverse the idea of that our observable universe is simply one of many possible universes, each with a different value for the set cosmological constant and perhaps other fundamental constants in most of this theoretical Multiverse the scales are unbalanced and the overall cosmological constant is large and overwhelming, but in some rare corners of the Multiverse the balance works and the overall cosmological constant is small just as in our universe String theory, our most promising candidate for a theory of everything, predicts that such a multiverse could exist;

It has all the right types of hidden sectors with a multitude of different possibilities, depending on who you ask. String theory predicts between 10 to the power of 500 and 10 to the power of 272,000 different vacuums different universes with a range of vacuum energies a spectrum of cosmological constants this Multiverse is known as the string theory landscape and is just what we would need to address the problem of cosmological constants with an innovative but controversial idea but if small cosmological constants are rare in this possible Multiverse, how come we find ourselves in a universe with a tiny cosmological constant?

This is where some physicists defend the anthropic principle: the idea is that those universes with a large and overwhelming cosmological constant are uninhabitable due to the enormous weight of empty space. If the cosmological constant is too large and positive, the universe is destroyed too quickly, to the point that matter is unable to clump together and stars and planets never have a chance to form if the cosmological constant is too large and negative the expansion of the universe quickly gives way to an apocalyptic crisis a universe crushed again before it stars and planets come to form it is only in these rare universes like ours where the cosmological constant is unexpectedly small the conditions are perfect goldilux universe with a slow and smooth cosmic evolution that allows time for stars and planets to form and provides a home for complex life.

In fact, it's only in these Goldilocks worlds that someone or something like poy or zeldovich can eventually be born smart enough to ask the hard questions. questions about the cosmological constant about the energy of empty space but not Everyone likes this explanation some people say that the Multiverse and anthropic selection are not scientific and cannot be falsified although that is not entirely true in 1997, the prize Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg and his collaborators argued that if the vacuum energy was less than 60% of the total energy budget of the universe, anthropic arguments could not explain why it was so small, this was a testable prediction of the anthropic solution to the problem of cosmological constant and as it happened less than a year later, astronomers announced the discovery of dark energy which represents about 70% of all energy in the observable universe.

The anthropic principle had passed its first test, but people are still looking for alternative ideas that are not based on anthropic reasoning. These ideas are accepted by many. names super symmetrical large dimensions extra vacuum sequestering energy pan cosmic relativity to name just a few, however, there is no consensus and at this moment the mystery of the cosmological constant remains unsolved, so we set out to weigh the universe and stumbled upon one of the most embarrassing problems in fundamental physics we wait for stars and planets and clouds of interstellar gas we wait for the halos of dark matter that surround our galaxies and we weigh the vacuum of empty space and it weighed so little where was the weight of the bubbling broth of what virtual? particles that frantically appear and disappear, should have crushed the universe in an instant of its creation, but it did not.

Our universe is light, a gentle giant that allowed you and me to live on a rocky planet orbiting an ordinary yellow star somewhere on a planet. galaxy called the Milky Way you have been watching the entire history of the universe don't forget to like and subscribe and leave us a comment to tell us what you think thanks for watching and see you next time