What type of Matter is in a vacuum?

This might be a stupid question, but here it goes.

If we create a vacuum in a glass jar, what type of matter is left inside the jar? What’s left after we remove all the air from the jar? As there must be something in there, otherwise we would create a small hole in the universe and I don’t think light would be able to travel through that type of vacuum.

Pax Vitae

Matter can not exist in a void. otherwise its not a void.

I’ve heard of a theory that states that space has its highest “density” in void, and its lowest, in matter. (It probably has something to do with the fact that space is discrete). Weird…

h20 if thats right then space travel as we know it(man on the moon) is impossible.

I don’t know, BuTGI. Can’t quite imagine space being denser than matter…

Or here’s another one. Matter is only a property of space, so where’s no matter, there’s no space. It’s quite simillar to the previous one, though…

Void, space, all these terms give u the answer, they all mean nothing. Vacuum is quite literally the absence of matter. I think you’re getting a little confused, when we say it’s in a vacuum, we do not mean it is in something, we mean quite literally it is surrounded by nothing. There tends to be all these phrases like the fabric of space/time and such which are all a little misleading, understandable in that they do make some seense, buton the other hand there is no “fabric” there’s just nothing interspersed by little bits of matter. In fact heard a very good example of how little matter there is in the universe from Dawkins “Unweaving the Rainbow”. Take a room 20 miles wide, 20 miles high and 20 miles deep, remove emerything from it so there was nothing (no air, etc.) inside. Then take a grain of sand and put it in the room. Then split that grain of sand into 1 thousandd million million pieces, and scattered them all aroiund the room (with no gravity), you would have a model of our universe. That’s how little matter there is coimpared to nothing.

For h2o, I think u are talking about what is known as Einstein’s biggest mistake, which has actuially become vaguely popular again as a theory that vacuum has some energy potential, which accounts why a big bang spontaneously happens. I know very little about that thopugh, so I can only hazard a guess as to that’s what you’re talking about. As for space being denser to matter, the word dense can’t be applied to space, it doesn’t make sense. Dense is how closely packed molecules are in matter, as there is no matter in space, there is no density. Note, however, there actually molecules flying round in space (for example in the sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf they have a huge hydrogen chute on the front picking up the occasional molecules to power the ship), so it’s not, I suppose, technically a complete vacuum, but they’re so far apart it’s crazy to call space anything apart from a vacuum.

What’s left after you’ve removed everything from the jar is literally nothing. Well apart from the electromagnetic waves, neutrinos, and all those other little particles that can fly through (and back out) of the glass jar without anything stopping them.

Hope that helps with the understanding.

Yes, that is what I’m talking about. And don’t worry, I’m not a professor of Physics at Hardvard, either.

I used this term, “dense”, quite unproperly. I only wanted to emphasize that some consider space to be the ‘real thing’, and matter - holes in space. In our case here, if you removed everything from the jar, the ‘hole’, you only get more space, more potential energy.

I didn’t know, though, that this was one of Einstein’s mistakes.

Thanks for the Info.

I’ve been reading about Zero Point Energy, which seem to always exist even in vacuums. And the idea of a vacuum in the literal sense is impossible as at a quantum level there is always “something”.

Here’s a small quote from a paper on Zero Point Energy. (ldolphin.org/zpe.html)

One of the recent charges that’s been levelled against modern philosophy is that it hasn’t kept up with science, or that if it does use science, it tends to use it badly. I suppose it’s hard to be a renaissance man these days. While I originally was very much a science man, i moved to philosophy about 3 years ago and have found it very hard to keep up with both subjects. There are a few areas I know quite well, but for the most part I’ve fallen behind I must admit :slight_smile: Also quite a bit of my knowledge is A-level, which is still at the “white lies” level where they don’t quite tell you the entire truth! I’ve always thought that a major flaw in the education system.

I know very little about zero point energy, I must admit, just that it’s looking to become the new promise of unlimited power. As far as I can tell however, the writer of that paper is guilty of what Dawkins calls “Bad poetry”, where the examples they use actually confuse more than they clarify. Scientists can be very bad writers when they want to be :slight_smile:

I believe the answer Pax_Vitae may be looking for is the concept of ‘ether’. Not the stuff that you inhale to kill brain cells. No, this is different. Ether is supposedly, ‘the stuff that light makes waves in’. If you were to take a jar and remove all matter, it would still be full of ether. Ether is not itself matter, for it has no mass. It also doesn’t interact with matter. It is more of a theory than accepted science. Because light moves both as a wave and a particle, a lot about it is still largely unknown.

If you were to truly create a vacuum in a glass jar it would implode but obviously this was not your intention in asking the question. Theoretically, however, if you were to have an absolute vacuum in a jar, I believe light would not be visible as it passed through the empty space. This does not mean that light would become trapped in the vacuum, just not visible. Light is only visible when reflected off matter. In fact, I would think that light is continually passing through vacuum. And only when it ricochets off of an atomic particle that blocks it’s path which then redirects it’s path towards the lens of our eye, does it become visible. Why would light not be able to pass through a vacuum? There is a big difference in a complete vacuum and a black hole. There is vacuum all around us, in between each and every particle. If there wasn’t then light would never be able to move. Unless, as Asok_Green suggests that light travels on this “ether” medium.

I’ve never heard of this “ether” concept but of course I know very little when it comes to physics. In fact, anyone who finds error in the above, please feel free to correct me. Does “ether” replace the previous concept of “nothing”? Does it have any attributes? I will try looking it up on Google and see what I find. Anyways if there were ether in a vacuum, I would think that it wasn’t truly a vacuum. Right?

the nonexistent type…

I think Pax_Vitae said it best when he made note of the fact that there is evidence to believe that a vacuum in the conventional way it is thought of actually doesn’t exist. You cannot have something with nothing in it, or have it be made of nothing. This is why some of you may have noticed I take issue with terms like everything, nothing, forever, never, infinity, perfection…I still have to find out what it is about our minds that makes us want to jump onto the ‘nothing’ answer when we can’t detect anything, instead of just saying ‘we lack the technology or the means of detecting whatever it is made up of or whatever it has inside’ - for some reason we must always think we always hold the answers. :imp:

What’s your take?

Okay well ether has not been an issue for quite a while since I have never met anyone who actually believed in it. What is the point of it if it only describes what a vacuum is and has no attributes other than a vacuum? Anyways I have no idea what Skeptic is talking about light only being visible when reflected off of matter. What light do you know of that is not reflected off of matter? Light is “seen” because it is a certain wavelength and it enters the pupil and hits the retina with a certain concentration to be above the threshold of stimuli. If light was passing through the glass then you could just put your eye up to it and see it. lol. Well the whole space thing… look up quantum foam which is probably the easiest understood zero potential theorem. You guys need to read more modern physics. some of the stuff you mention is quite outdated. Oh yeah and light doesn’t only travel through the vacuum between molecules and atoms. It is absorbed by every one and then retransmitted as the electron changes orbit again hence the inconsistencies of the speed of light through air. W/e

One thing is for certain; I need to read up more on modern physics

Any light source, that’s a bit of an obvious one isn’t it? When I look at the Sun (don’t), that light’s not reflecting off anything.

Matt stated:

Isn’t it? Doesn’t the light from the sun reflect off a myriad space particles, dust, earth’s atmosphere (Ozone layer), then there is the air itself, transparent beginnings of cloud formation, etc?

For instance, the reason the sun looks red when it is sun down is because the the other colors of the spectrum, especially blue, reflect too much so that they are not visible by the eye. Red being the predominant color that reflects, but not so much that the eye cannot detect it. Or so I remember learning in Astronomy class.

I don’t know if this is what Yossarian was referring to, though it seems that it is.

What’s your take?