Frank Wilczek, MIT professor and winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics, gave a public lecture on May 6 entitled “What Is Space?”
According to Wilczek, space is the “primary ingredient of reality, of which particles are secondary.” Refuting the passive container theory of classical physics that describes space as pure nothingness, Wilczek argued that space has mass and “fills time.”
Wilczek explained how space – which he calls “the Grid” – composes the “primary stuff of physical reality.” The Grid is charged with quantum activity that Wilczek describes as “spontaneous, unpredictable, and subterranean,” subterranean meaning it needs to be excited by radiation to become apparent.
Wilczek showed that the Grid is made up of “material parts” called condensations that are invisible to humans because they are on the scale of 10^(-14) cm and 10^(-24) seconds. The matter that humans can perceive consists of “small, more-or-less stable patterns of disturbance in the Grid.” Instead of the classical view of “hard, impenetrable” atoms that make up matter, Wilczek described matter as a “persistent deviation” in the Grid that is caused when a quark disturbs the gluon field.
Quark-antiquark pairs are one type of the condensation that make up Wilczek’s Grid. Further, he explained that these pairs have negative energy, meaning they gain energy when they combine even when they start with none. He then used this idea to discuss how the Grid fills up with these quark-antiquark pairs to reach its most desirable energy state.
Wilczek discussed how he and his colleagues – despite a lack of physical evidence – speculate at the presence of another type of condensation he refers to as the “strong-weak superfluid”, to make their equations more symmetric. While recognizing the flaws in this argument, he spoke of the explanatory and predictive power of such a postulate. Observations at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Swizterland, will be able to check these predictions.
Astronomers have recently calculated that the Grid makes up about 70 percent of the mass of the universe, according to Wilczek. Even though the universe is expanding, the density of the Grid remains constant. However, Wilczek and other physicists have been unable to effectively estimate the density of the Grid because contemporary equations generate values that have been experimentally determined as far too large.
Overall, Wilczek redefined the meaning of space for attendees of this public lecture. By explaining space as the most fundamental component of reality, he compared humans to fish that just realized that they live in water. The implications of this discovery are being added to and modified all the time by modern physicists.