Let’s say I have a box. I remove the air, every single elementary particles, to the point that there is absolutely nothing in it. It is absolutely empty.
I would reckon the laws of physics still apply in that box, I mean the box still resides in this universe afterall.
But what exactly would be carrying those laws? I mean what would be carrying time for example, does time pass in that box like it does outside of it?
Or am I high.
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To reword your answer: “why are laws of physics the way they are? Who created them and the whole world?”
Now you might see why you’re not getting answers here lol
I think there is still pervasive ‘fields’ that exist as a volume, it’s just nothing is interacting since you removed all matter. . and virtual particles popping in and out. It is never truly devoid of ‘something’.
and you are High. ;p
The underlying fields that “host” those particles.
Removing everything from a space is the equivalent to removing waves from a lake. The underlying medium – the fields (e.g. electron field, higgs field, and the other 15 fields) still exist.
Time and space are the same thing. If you didnt remove space from that box then time would still exist in that box.
Space itself is the “carrier” or well the fields that extend through it, even in a perfect vacuum particles will constantly pop in and out of existence because of very small fluctuations in their respective fields.
So as long as you can’t build a box that blocks those fields from permeating the space inside of it. The rules of physics remain active within it. If you can build a box which either eliminates or changes the value of those fields on a local level then the laws of physics would also change.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_(physics)
Fields and waves within them. Quantum particles can bubble in an out of existence spontaneously even within a vacuum.
The laws of physics are what they are, we don’t know why and what made them.
In a vacuum time does exist, but what’s the point of having time if there won’t be a change? Doesn’t matter if your box is empty for a day or for a billion years, it’s the same
You are breaking the laws of physics to get to your hypothetical. As long as anything in the universe exists it will always be leaking something into that space.
I think the issue here is we’re down to phenomena. Why do the laws of physics apply and happen? It just does. It’s a force of nature we’re observing. There’s no REASON why it works it simply just does and we’re describing that constant and ever present factor as we observe it.
Much like a synndrome in medicine, we don’t necessarily know the cause but we can describe the symptoms.
In general, fields. You are removing everything that can be removed, but that doesn’t mean nothing is left. Space is still there, after all, and the presence of anything else means that the warping of spacetime will give rise to gravity. Other forces have their own fields.
Now, those fields may be very boring with nothing there, but they are still there. And due to quantum mechanics, you can’t say with certainty that you’ve removed all the “stuff.” There is also a small probability that something is still there. But in general, at a minimum the fields will still be there.
I’m not a physicist, but a bit fan of science! Here’s my understanding:
Most physical laws are about how things interact with each other. So, assuming you could create an absolute void, empty of all things, there wouldn’t be anything to do physics off of each other. The laws would still apply, but there wouldn’t be anything to follow them. There isn’t exactly a “medium” of the universe which provides laws.
This is really the “If a Tree Falls in a Forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Philosophical thought experiment.
What laws would apply to an empty vacuum? The laws of the universe are really only detectable for us through observations and interactions. In this theoretical box with nothing inside, there are no observers and nothing to interact with the laws, so whether the laws still exist or apply doesn’t really matter much, does it?
Space can be described as a sum of fields, each of which carries an elementary force.
If space were two-dimensional, you can imagine these fields as a flat surface, with a vector value (direction and strength) at any given point.
What we observe as “matter” can be described as large values in these fields. e.g. an electron could be described as a set of large values (relative to vacuum) in the electromagnetic field.
In the absence of any matter, these fields still exist. And they are not entirely 0 values! There is a concept of “quantum foam,” which is the constant fluctuation of very small values in these fields, even in pure vacuum.
So yes, the laws of physics still apply, because the fabric of spacetime is still there – even if matter is not.
The laws of physics are models of something that we can observe. There is no carrier even if there is air or particles or something.
The question is: what physics studies? What is the subject? And the answer is: physics studies physical models. It does not study reality or nature, whatever you mean by “reality”. Thus – no carrier ever needed.
Metaphysics has a variety of opinions on this topic. 3 potential ideas.
The rules can exist independent of the system. They are a fundamental part of reality, even if there is no matter or energy for them to guide.
The rules can only exist because they’re part of the construct they guide, but in a static sense. You could freeze time and they would still apply. They are a fundamental part of the things, but they cannot exist without the things themselves.
The rules can only exist because the system is in motion, they are a part of the processes, not the things they guide. If you froze time, the rules wouldn’t exist. They are only a byproduct of a system in motion, they can’t exist without time AND a thing moving through it.
So either the rules exist because they exist, the rules are tied to the objects they apply to, or the rules are tied to the processes of objects in motion and not the objects themselves.
The answer is we don’t know, because we don’t even know why the laws exist in the first place, and we have no way to test between those three possibilities, to say nothing of other potential explanations.
You probably are high.
If you have nothing in the box, total complete 100% emptiness, no atoms, particles, molecules etc. Then there are no laws of physics in that box either.
It’s not until you introduce things into the box to where you would see any sort of physics be applied. Introduce light, you can witness the speed of light in a vacuum. Introduce a particle and you can see how gravity would work etc.
So in Physics, there is a concept called QFT, or Quantum Field Theory. It basically states fields are everywhere. And if you provide enough energy to a field at a small enough location, then it becomes excited, and these excited parts of the field are what we call particles.
If you want to know why the laws would still exist, you can think of fields interacting as a jigsaw. You can only have certain interactions with other pieces. Not all pieces can interact with all other pieces. Same with fields. The laws we have are based on these.
At a very small scale, these fields interact not with fixed results, but rather have a chance of specific interaction (like one jigsaw piece can attach to another in one or two different ways and we won’t know until we actually find out). Obviously, if you repeat it enough times, it has a fixed pattern (like a single die roll may be any number between 1 and 6 but roll millions of times and average is close to 3.5) so at larger levels, it behaves like it has fixed behavior instead of probable behaviour.
This large scale is called classical physics. But the same laws working at classical level don’t always work at small scales (called quantum level).
Now, if you want to know why the fields have a limited set of possibilities, that is something physics can’t truly answer. That’s like asking why the jigsaw piece is as it is. But why do laws remain the same? Because the jigsaw can interact in certain ways, or fields interact in certain ways. As long as this interaction remains unchanged, the laws won’t be changing either.
There’s no such thing as a vacuum.
Fields permeate that space no matter what (sic).
Those fields are capable of “creating” particles inside that space.
You can’t have a perfect vacuum, and hence that’s why the laws of physics still apply to an empty space, no matter how big, small or empty it appears to be to us.
Generally speaking, we believe the universe and physics applies in far more than the usual 4 dimensions which are the only ones that we can perceive. The maths simply doesn’t work unless we assume that to be the case, and only works perfectly when we imagine there are far more dimensions than the 4.
And even if we emptied all those dimensions of everything… the laws of the surrounding universe will likely still apply, just like the laws of gravity wouldn’t change just because you took the air out of a box. When air was put back into the box, it will still be subject to gravity just the same as it ever was.
But the simple fact of the matter? We can’t – even in theory – “remove everything from a space” and hence all further assertions are just supposition.
It’s like asking “What if we asked gods nicely to turn off gravity” and then pontificating over what they would do and how it would work.
Veritasium posted a relevant video recently, which sort of answer the question you are asking: https://youtu.be/lcjdwSY2AzM?si=iPBv07oevz2Fomtg
Very interesting and well worth a watch.
There is no nothing. What you think of nothing, is something. Its Space. Space may be empty, but it is still something and space IS the carrier.
You want to mess with the passage of time and cause/effect, you need to be moving near the speed of light.
i mean, you’re just describing a vacuum dude. why wouldn’t the laws of physics still apply?
It depends what you mean by “removing everything in space”. Empty space isn’t really empty, it’s actually full of activity.
Basically there is something (with a cool name) called zero point energy, it’s the energy that exists within a vacuum. But how does a vacuum have energy? There’s nothing in it! Well you have to change your view of what energy is or more importantly how we measure energy or rather measure anything.
Think about length, how do we measure length? We say something is half a metre, or two metres or 1 kilometre. These don’t mean anything if you don’t know what a metre is, because all our measurements of length is based on how long something is compared to a metre. Without the metre as our starting point, our measurements of length has no meaning! So there’s no “absolute” definite length, only lengths that we can compare to something else.
Energy is the same! We don’t measure energy in terms of some absolute value, we measure energy in comparison to something we know. And the lowest energy we know, is in the vacuum, so we can say that’s “0” energy because it’s the lowest energy we can get. But just because it’s the lowest energy we can possibly get, doesn’t mean there’s actually NO energy there, there could be a huge amount of energy hidden away in there that we can never have access to.
We do know that this energy exists because we have set up an experiment that shows this. We put two very small parallel plates very close together and noticed that they began pushing themselves together. The only thing that could push these plates together in this experiment was zero point energy, energy from the vacuum, because all other sources of energy were removed. (This is called the casmir effect if you’re curious)
Where there is energy there is activity! Einstein showed with the famous e = mc^2 equation that you can turn mass into energy and energy into mass! Well the zero point energy gets turned into mass all the time, these are called virtual particles. Virtual particles appear from NO WHERE, they come from the zero point energy in the vacuum, and then they disappear as quickly as they appear.
All of this is to say that in an “empty” vacuum is not really empty at all, space itself has a lot of stuff going on and thus there’s plenty of opportunity for the laws of physics to play out
The universe is expanding. inside this circle of expanding universe is a lot of stuff… In-between all the particles is space. This space is expanding too.
But outside the circle of the expanding universe… as far as I am aware there is nothing that fills it. Not a single particle. And not the space in-between.
It sounds like you’d enjoy the show Dark Matter.
As others have said more eloquently, even if the box is empty, you still have the box.
I’ll just add that it is also possible that you are indeed high.
You’d be removing only matter from the box. There’s still energy, time, space, forces, etc.
The laws of physics are just our observations of the way the world works. Nothing has to “carry them”. They are just the apparent rules of reality.
The laws of physics are the rules of this universe. Even if you remove everything from a space, that space is still part of the universe.
But to be honest, nobody knows exactly what is “carrying” all the laws, even if there is stuff in the space. For example, we know pretty much exactly how gravity operates, but we don’t really know the underlying mechanism behind it yet (there are some theories, but no finite, proven, answer). It’s just there, like magic.
It might or it might not.
The laws aren’t laws. They are the most accurate description of how things work based on our current observations.
It is entirely possible in your scenario that things would behave differently, there is no way of knowing for certain until we can observe that type of space.
There are no laws to be carried. The laws are simply models of how various particles and waves behave in our spacetime. So yes, once you reintroduced particles to the space in the box, they would continue to behave under the laws of physics. But in a completely empty box like you propose, there would be nothing to measure and therefore no observations to be made about the space inside the box. It would literally be a black box.
You ask about how time would behave in the box, but you would be unable to measure time inside the box because there’s nothing in the box to observe. In order for the passage of time to be measured there has to be an observable passage of events, and there are no events occurring inside the box if there is nothing in the box.
This is just a very extreme version of “if a tree falls in the forest…” etc.
The laws of physics govern the behavior of stuff in space. They aren’t “carried” by anything. They are the rules that the behavior of any bit of stuff will follow under any conditions.
The rules don’t stop existing when there is no stuff. Any stuff that enters your empty box will follow the same set of rules, because that’s what physics is. It’s the rules that stuff follows.
In fact, empty boxes are an important tool of physics, because they allow scientists to observe the behavior of stuff with as few variables as possible.
Similarly, this is why “the speed of light’ is actually “the speed of light in a vacuum”. The speed of light is affected by traveling through a medium, so the real speed has to be defined based on how light behaves in a vacuum.
The laws of physics are a description of how the universe works. It’s not as if someone carved “nothing can go faster than light” on a stone tablet and then empowered a cosmic highway patrol to stop anything from moving too fast, we’ve just observed that fast-moving objects behave in weird ways that imply it’s impossible to hit that speed limit.
I don’t think you’d be able to observe any physical laws in a space with nothing in it – you wouldn’t be able to observe motion without particles to move, or gravity without objects to be attracted, but why would the laws need to be “carried” by something to apply?
It feels like asking “if you don’t have any objects to count, how do the laws of arithmetic still apply?” Like, this is more a question of philosophy than physics.
As an interesting note in the history of science… there used to be a concept of “the ether”. It solved for the sort of thought experiment you outline in your question. The ether was thought to be the medium of light through the universe. We were unable to detect it because it was in everything.
The concept goes back to Aristotle, but was embraced by Newton and was the dominant concept in physics until the early 20th century. The concept of ether went away with Einstein.
I found this essay on the subject. But I haven’t vetted it:
https://medium.com/@GatotSoedarto/albert-einstein-began-by-rejecting-the-ether-theory-2e0d8ff8a812
You are removing the matter. Matter is a thing that interacts with higgs bosons. Light and similar things interact less with hggs bosons and thus they move in light speed. You can remove matter, light etc from the box but you cannot remove the higgs bosons.
Note that I did not study Phisics in university. If I am mistaken someone please correct me.
time is not a thing in the way you imagine. Time can be considered to be like “something happened” and then “something else happened”. When you string all the happenings together you create time. If the box is truly empty then there is no time. That is not really possible though. Everything is continuously being penetrated by neutrinos (example 100 trillion/sec for our body). The box is sitting in and affected by multiple gravity wells (ie: earth, moon, sun, solar system, milky way, etc)
It’s like trying to remove wetness from water.
If there truly is nothing in the box there is nothing the laws of phisics can apply to so they might as well not
Imagine you have a piece of canvas. On it, you can paint a glorious image. With no paint on it, though, it’s still a canvas.
In the same way, even with no stuff in it , space is still space.
XKCD did a youtube about glass half full / empty that asked and answered similar questions
https://youtu.be/0EytSWiKrFg?si=OkHR9e_eHGUSQ-ME
>Or am I high.
This.
>It is absolutely empty.
False.
It’s mostly empty, by your human frame of reference.
There’s negative pressure, not to mention gravity and any other radiation that may penetrate the box, as well as neutrinos that fly through it.
>But what exactly would be carrying those laws?
A little bit of empty space does not make a difference because the rest of the universe still exists. It all “carries” everything else.
>If we were to remove everything from a space
a space is the key there.
In other words, as per the above: The answer is nothing would happen, maybe a bit of implosion if you’re magically evaporating matter within a space. However, “empty space” is already a thing we have all over the universe.
You might then be thinking on a bigger scale, wondering if we removed everything from all space
At this point, you may as well ask what there was before the big bang. That’s a question that comes up on the sub a lot.
My feeling is that if the laws of the universe still apply, it can’t really be empty. There’s something there; we just don’t know what it is or how to detect it. My guess is that it’s what used to be called ether; maybe now they call it quantum foam.
It’s worth pointing out that “removing everything” from a given region of space is essentially impossible. If you took all the matter out there would still be electromagnetic radiation, from the cosmic microwave background if nothing else. If you tried to block out the CMB, whatever you used to block it out would itself emit blackbody radiation into the region. And even then if you somehow managed to get your shielding perfect, you couldn’t prevent virtual particles popping in and out of existence.
This is a question that physicists are still trying to answer, to be honest. It lies somewhere in the answer to a unifying theory of general relativity and quantum physics. Dark matter and energy may hold clues to this as well. We never actually know the answer, but the closer we get, the better we understand the universe with each step.
In early physics they called it ether. They were wrong.
Physics is physics. Here is more on ether.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories
I’m not entirely sure you could say that those laws do apply to the inside of an empty box. There would be no way to prove that something like gravity, or even time, existed in a place where nothing could be observed. You’d have to send something into the box, even if it’s just a photon. When the photon left the box, you could measure it and see that time and gravity influenced it, but then the box wasn’t empty at the time.
At that point, though, you’re really not doing science, you’re doing philosophy. It’s sort of like the question about a tree falling in the forest, and whether it makes a sound.
It’s an interesting thought experiment, though.
Well this gets in to the quantum realm because if the box is truly empty then there is nothing to observe and if there’s nothing to observe then there’s no way to know if physics are or are not working the same.
The best we could hope for would be to use a transparent box and pass massless particles through the box and measure them as they come out the other side.
One way to think about it could be that the laws of physics are just atoms being themselves. It’s not like a field or a law, it’s a description of what things do.
Random quantum fluctuations inherent to spacetime according to the QFT
In a weird way we’ve kinda circled back on the “Aether” theory of old, the idea of a ever-present medium through which forces operate, just in a new way as “Quantum Field Theory”
We no longer think that a complete vacuum is truly empty, at all times there’s the intersection of the universal fields that govern the mechanics of the universe. The Electromagnetic field, the Higgs field, etc of which the common elementary particles (specifically Bosons) are “quanta” of, or for lack of a better world, manifestations/force carriers of these fields in the universe we experience, such as the Photon, the quantum of the electromagnetic field. You can have a box be empty of photos, but an excitation of the field within the box may produce a photon under specific conditions.
A bit beyond ELI5, but the jist is space isn’t empty. That box seems empty, but contains all the raw creative energy of the whole universe within it, as does every seemingly empty patch of space.
Those laws are what reality is made of. You can remove everyTHING from a space, like in a vacuum chamber, but you can’t remove the underlying really of that space.
The fundamental fields of reality still exist inside the vacuum chamber, because everything is made up of those fields, even “empty” space. It’s only empty in that no physical matter is present. Reality still exists within that empty space.