Schwinger Effect

[Thomas Wilson]

In a cosmic electromagnetic tug of war, you can create something from nothing. Even better, it is called the Schwinger Effect.

And, there is experimental confirmation using the two dimensional effects of graphene. https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/something-from-nothing/

[Perry Hilbert Jr]

And about ten minutes before I logged on, I was thinking about the movie Weird Science. Now there is some matter to create.

[Lee Schierer]

In a cosmic electromagnetic tug of war, you can create something from nothing. Even better, it is called the Schwinger Effect.

And, there is experimental confirmation using the two dimensional effects of graphene. https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/something-from-nothing/

That's one of the reasons I decided not to become a Physics major in college........

[Thomas Wilson]

That's one of the reasons I decided not to become a Physics major in college........
Don’t sandbag yourself. I went down hill from physics to nuclear engineering to mechanical engineering. But, articles like this one make me wonder what would have happened if I had stuck with physics. This is really fun stuff.

[Jim Koepke]

Mind blowing.

jtk

[Steve Demuth]

In a cosmic electromagnetic tug of war, you can create something from nothing. Even better, it is called the Schwinger Effect.

And, there is experimental confirmation using the two dimensional effects of graphene. https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/something-from-nothing/

The Schwinger effect as a way of "creating something from nothing" is a bit of a bait and switch. It does indeed create new particles from space that is otherwise empty of mass, but it does so by converting the energy of a strong magnetic field into mass. E being equal, per Dr. Einstein to mc2. This is pretty amazing physics, to be sure, but it's not something from nothing, but rather something (massive particles) from something else (strong electric fields). No conservation law is violated, any more than one is violated when fusing two Hydrogen atoms into a Helium atom violates conservation of mass-energy, when it does the inverse of what the Schwinger reaction does, transforming mass into energy.

[Thomas Wilson]

The Schwinger effect as a way of "creating something from nothing" is a bit of a bait and switch. It does indeed create new particles from space that is otherwise empty of mass, but it does so by converting the energy of a strong magnetic field into mass. E being equal, per Dr. Einstein to mc2. This is pretty amazing physics, to be sure, but it's not something from nothing, but rather something (massive particles) from something else (strong electric fields). No conservation law is violated, any more than one is violated when fusing two Hydrogen atoms into a Helium atom violates conservation of mass-energy, when it does the inverse of what the Schwinger reaction does, transforming mass into energy.
The effect does create a pair of fundamental particles from the energy. It would be much bigger news if it created a particle from nothingness without energy. But creating fundamental particles purely from energy rather than from breaking apart composite nuclear particles is newsworthy. Sorry you are not impressed. The news is that the effect was experimentally demonstrated using the unique properties of graphene. Headline writers can be forgiven for their lack of precision in achieving their aim of drawing in readers.

[Steve Demuth]

The effect does create a pair of fundamental particles from the energy. It would be much bigger news if it created a particle from nothingness without energy. But creating fundamental particles purely from energy rather than from breaking apart composite nuclear particles is newsworthy. Sorry you are not impressed. The news is that the effect was experimentally demonstrated using the unique properties of graphene. Headline writers can be forgiven for their lack of precision in achieving their aim of drawing in readers.

Yes, I agree, the experimental work to confirm the Schwinger effect is darned impressive, and unexpected, at least in our time, physics. But the actual effect - converting energy into matter is not startling, nor unique to the Schwinger effect. Brookhaven National Labratory has, e.g., created matter-antimatter pairs from collisions of photons. As I understand it, the Schwinger effect does the same - turns a photon (the gauge boson of the electtromagnetic field) into a matter-antimatter pair.

[Tom M King]

I've been saying for a long time that matter and energy are just different states of the same stuff. Energy repels, and matter attracts. My theory of the Universe expansion is that matter is being converted to energy at the center of every galaxy so mass is going down as energy is created/released for a total increase of energy. Once it goes that way long enough, things will start collapsing again. That's just my possible theory though, and no one is working on proving it.

[Tom Bender]

Don’t sandbag yourself. I went down hill from physics to nuclear engineering to mechanical engineering. But, articles like this one make me wonder what would have happened if I had stuck with physics. This is really fun stuff.

How is it downhill? Any of us can read about the fun had by those who do, but few physicists actually produce anything fun in a lifetime. Engineers create fun stuff daily.

[Kev Williams]

Pretty cool stuff...

However, there is no such thing as "nothing"... in interstellar space there's one atom per roughly every cubic meter floating around. There may be a lot of nothing around them, but every atom is 'something' ;)