**Ask a monkey a physics question thread**

[OngBonga]

"That would be very exciting. It would mean you could generate something from nothing," he explained.

What absolute fucking twaddle.

You're not creating something from nothing... you're creating a stable atom from energy. So it's not like it was pulled out of a magic vacuum hat. If there's energy there, it's not a true vacuum. So he's talking out of his arse.

Rip space apart indeed. You might as well be worried about blinding god with that fucking giant laser pen.

[MadMojoMonkey]

You think a Fox News article with this as the leading headline is "physics"?

Dude.

More telling was that the article was originally reported in The Sun. Not a bastion of scientific literature.

There is no such thing as a perfect vacuum. You are correct in what you say.

Even if there are no particles there energy is enough to make matter so yeah vacuums don't exist.

In general the energy is not enough to precipitate particles out of the "empty" space. However, in certain environments, like the extreme spacetime curvature near a black hole's event horizon, particle creation from the ambient, sloshing energy of that curvature can create particles, carrying away some of that energy.

What absolute fucking twaddle.

You're not creating something from nothing... you're creating a stable atom from energy. So it's not like it was pulled out of a magic vacuum hat. If there's energy there, it's not a true vacuum. So he's talking out of his arse.

Rip space apart indeed. You might as well be worried about blinding god with that fucking giant laser pen.

Despite the tone, this seems all good.

We can dicker over the phrase "true vacuum" and whether that should be a theoretical ideal or if that should be an observed quantity, but we're not really disagreeing on what anything is or means, just which collection of syllables means what.

Nothing in the article said it was going to create stable atoms. It'd be far, far more likely that it created random ions and isotopes, the vast majority will decay in nuclear reactions over time. Most of those decays will happen basically immediately, but plenty will have longer half-life times and will linger about slowly irradiating their surroundings.