A DC Science Café Event

Seething Nothingness:

Imagine removing every single object from your living room. Everything must go, down to every single atom. Same goes for light. Not a single photon can remain. Now for one more subtraction: the room itself.  It turns out that that the empty space left behind (and that really was there all along) sparkles with virtual photons and teems with particles of matter and anti-matter that spontaneously appear and disappear, as if through Alice's rabbit hole.  We normally are oblivious to this quantum sea of particles and light, just as we usually are unaware of the theater of marine life that unfolds under the ocean’s surface. It takes precise laboratory experiments to discern the fullness of empty space and force us to conclude that this unseen world—that is, the quantum vacuum—underlies fundamental aspects of our everyday experiences.  Join John Gillaspy, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in a discussion that will displace what you used to imagine as nothing at all with an expansive realization of how empty space has everything to do with the ways of the universe and everything in it.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

6:30  -  8:30 pm

Busboys and Poets, 5th and K St., NW, Washington, DC

www.busboysandpoets.com/about_5th.php

For info, contact Ivan Amato: DCScienceCafe@dcswa.org

This, the tenth of an ongoing series of DC Science Café events, is brought to you with support from DC Science Writers Association, the USA Science and Engineering Festival, the Join Quantum Institute,  and encouragement from Busboys and Poets.