Conversations about Virtual Particles

Conversations of Virtual Particles

Person A:

I don’t think we know enough about this cutting edge topic yet to understand.

Is it really popping in and out of existence?

Is it really just a higher dimension particle passing into our three dimensional space?  (i.e. it was always present)

Are they actually just a new particle that we have not yet understood

Is it part of string theory manifestations

I still struggle to understand what it means for empty space to have mass….

Unless it is just a bias (or relative) for everything…  sort of like:

If you are on earth, and walking down the road you are moving at about 5 miles and hour

but actually the earth is rotating so you are really moving about 1000 miles per hour 

but the earth is orbiting the Sun so you are actually moving 67,000 miles per hour

but the earth is actually spinning around the galaxy so you are actually moving about 480,000 miles per hour

So how fast are you actually moving?

Similarly with the mass…. if everything in space has mass then perhaps it sort of cancels out and looses practicality?

Me:

All good questions. Yes, this is new in some respects, but there actually is a lot of information out there to learn on it as well. Scientists have done a lot of work in this area of dark energy, empty space and electrons. (Arguably empty space makes up the electron cloud and dark energy of outer space is empty space too...but we need to define what it is this exactly means otherwise details are lost in glossy language)

I do think it is really going in and out of existence...but I could be wrong. But it depends on how you define existence? To us existence is the physical. There are things. But is this true existence? True reality? or is true reality something else? And the physical is just the illusion?

For myself, from what little I know -lol- I imagine that ghosts have a similar problem, lol.

In a way it kinda sounds like when we say this is a species A and that is a species B, but where do we draw the lines and is anything really this or that, because in time it will all change. It seems like it is a photo of a particular time and The particle seems like this. Nothing is a solid A, but always becoming or decaying and transforming...  

I think though that HeisenBergs UP is based on emptiness of space though, so even if other dimensions existed (I'm pretty sure they'd have to be lower dimensions though not higher mathematically?) the empty space of those dimensions would demand virtual particles too. 

They are not a new particles, as far as my reading goes. They know what they are. They are a virtual photon, a gluon, etc....they are just not quite a photon yet or not quite a quark or not quite the particles we know just yet---they are unstable, they are becoming or going back into non-existence in a sense.

They are not even particles. This is a bad name. They are more like bubbling waves? Maybe not even that, I've heard them described more of as a wave function only. 

I'm pretty sure photons don't have mass. 

The way I see it is all space is really a field, a gravity field and then other fields....so like a big checkered patterned -but a lot of them. (This space came out of the void in the very beginning of Genesis--or the "singularity" of big bang) 

And virtual particles are like breathes coming from god...breathing into the space. ..This breath offers all kinds of potentiality or probability and it grows sometimes into our space and becomes a particle, but more often then not it returns .... 

And the fields allow these particles to have mass- or to be "seen" (light of genesis) and then the light separated in genesis from the darkness so that it remains in our "space"

Void/Vacuum of empty space is akin to the void/darkness of Genesis 1 line 2. 

The Higgs turned on is kinda like when God said let there be light, LOL and particles gained mass, because this gave them distinction/order and each there own kinda name.

And then particles were able to intermix and combine and build from there and separate from the empty space and occupy real space and this is kinda like when God says, lets separate the light from the darkness. 

......

But it isn't so much the space that has mass, but the particles or virtual particles that interact with the fields that show mass. But it is because the space is empty. So it is kinda like a chicken and egg problem maybe. Virtual particles are there because it is empty, and it is empty and so we will have virtual particles. 

BUT in the early universe Higgs was off and so we didn't have particles with mass through Higgs. But I'm not sure if we still had the gravity field (I kinda think we did always but I need to look it up) and so some particles may have had mass through that field? But virtual particles may have not? That is interesting to find out. 

Currently, we have Higgs, so every particle and virtual particle (I think) will show mass...unless it is a special particle like a photon.  

But the physicist said in that long video --all particles are massless, but because of Higgs (think of your hand is a particle going through air, but now Higgs is like water and your hand has to travel through this same space, but it is effected now because of the interaction with the field).

So, you could say that space doesn't have mass --but that space doesn't exist just as space. It always exists with the water and filled with millions of hands moving through it. 

So, there is no such thing as empty space. 

Even without Higgs and in the early universe, virtual particles would still be doing their thing, we just wouldn't see any mass. So you could have massless space maybe, but not true empty space. ?

I'm just trying to work through all of it myself :)

BUT- it does seem to me that nothingness take a lot of energy and a lot of work to maintain. More so than something does. 

It seems like nature would have to work very hard to not have something pop out of it.