NEW DISCOVERIES ABOUT THE NATURE OF EMPTY SPACE

This is the most complicated science post I've ever done on Theory Corner, but it might also be one of the most rewarding. Give it a try, and if what I write here doesn't make sense then watch the 45 minute video above, which is my source for most of what I'll say here. Watch it soon though, because it could be withdrawn by YouTube at any time.

So what's the video? It's an episode of "Morgan Freeman's 'Through the Wormhole' " series on the Science Channel. It's a show about new discoveries in the nature of empty space, which we now realize isn't really very empty.

This directly contradicts an older TV documentary I saw which claimed that the amount of energy in space is small, so small that the amount of space contained in a volume the size of the Earth would be only that which was needed to make a paperclip fall on the ground. Who's right? I'll have to go with Freeman since his is the more recent explanation, and physics seem to change every six months nowadays.

Outer space is now known to be swarming with neutrinos which wouldn't appear in older measurements, and our part of space is shielded from intense deep space radiation that we only discovered a few years ago when Voyager hit the the heliopause barrier (above).  But we can ignore that that for now, because the amount of energy from these sources is small potatoes compared to the energy Freeman's talking about.

According to Freeman outer space is now believed to be 10 to the 120th times more energetic that can be accounted for by understood sources. That's enough to boil off the  entire universe. Since we're obviously not boiling off, something must be restraining it...but what?

One theory, favored by the creator of the Super Symmetry theory (whatever that is), posits that ordinary matter sends off energetic waves in every direction, including into deep space, and that these waves are countered and neutralized by other waves coming from the opposite direction. Is that the "restraint" we're looking for?

In another part of the show Freeman posits that The Big Bang was really a sort of explosion that occurred when the highly energetic and very hot "empty" space in the previous universe could no longer sustain itself and it dropped to a colder, lower energy state. That's the  universe we live in now. In our present energy state particles of matter are able to form creatures like us, but our time is limited. About a billion years from now the universe will convulse into an even lower, even colder energy state where the kind of matter we're familiar with will no longer exist...in other words, another Big Bang.

How does he know this? He claims that it follows from Quantum Mechanics which claims that all elementary particles constantly vanish and reappear again as particles in a different location. Every time they change location they move to a lower energy state. Even "empty" space is constantly devolving this way. Over time this means our whole universe will reach a crisis point where old laws of physics no longer apply, and we  violently transform to a lower, colder state. Geez, another thing to worry about!

Fascinating, huh? Is it true? How should I know? Watch the show on YouTube and judge for yourself.