The Universe May Have Just Revealed the True Nature of Empty Space
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Nothing is complicated. By which I mean, everything is complicated, because in physics even completely empty space is described as being full of quantum fields doing complicated things even when nothing else is there. So if empty space has these exotic properties, what sort of crazy stuff can we make it do? One prediction that’s been around for a while is that under extreme conditions, empty space can be sort of crystalized. And there’s good evidence that we’ve observed this for the first time.
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Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by Matt O’Dowd
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Spacetime is a production of Kornhaber Brown for PBS Digital Studios.
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0:00 Can Empty Space Crystallize?
1:50 The Strange Physics of the Quantum Vacuum
4:00 How Crystals Change the Behavior of Light
6:34 Crystallizing Empty Space
9:19 The Most Powerful Magnetic Fields in the Universe
10:45 Did We Finally Observe Vacuum Birefringence?
11:53 How Magnetars Polarize X-Rays
13:02 How the Quantum Vacuum Aligns Light
14:05 Is This Really a Detection?
15:20 Our Best Glimpse of Crystallized Space