We’ve probably all heard the phrase you can’t make something from nothing. But in reality, the physics of our universe isn’t that cut and dry. In fact, scientists have spent decades trying to force matter from absolutely nothing. And now, they’ve managed to prove that a theory first shared 70 years ago was correct, and we really can create matter out of absolutely nothing.
Several conservation rules govern the cosmos. These rules control things like energy, charge, movement, and so on. Scientists have spent decades trying to figure out how to produce matter in order to properly comprehend these principles - a feat that is far more hard than it sounds. We've already rendered stuff invisible, but making it from nothing is a far different problem.
There are numerous hypotheses on how to make stuff from nothing, particularly as quantum physicists attempt to better comprehend the Big Bang and what caused it. We know that colliding two particles in empty space might sometimes result in the formation of new particles. There are even hypotheses that a powerful enough electromagnetic field might generate matter and antimatter from nothing.
Scientists have long attempted to explain how the Big Bang produced the cosmos from nothing. NASA provided the image.
However, doing any of these things has always seemed unattainable. That hasn't stopped scientists from trying, and their efforts appear to have paid off. According to Big Think, in early 2022, a group of researchers developed powerful enough electric fields in their laboratory to level the unique features of graphene.
The researchers used these fields to enable the spontaneous production of particle-antiparticle pairs from nothing. This demonstrated the feasibility of making matter from nothing, a hypothesis first presented by Julian Schwinger, one of the pioneers of quantum field theory. With such knowledge, we may potentially gain a greater understanding of how the cosmos creates things out of nothing.