Antimatter by Frank Close, a book of interest.

The book is aimed to physics amateur and is highly recommended. It's pretty easy to understand and also easy to follow as it includes no mathematical developments. While the early chapters can lose some interest because ot the lower specificity of the text, from chapter 3 where you start the story of the discovery of the positron, interest grows under a big dose of reality that scientific facts incorporate  about how events occurred and the good explanation that makes the author in chapters 3 and 4. The story about the investigations of Paul Dirac and the successive or parallel investigations that led to the discovery of antimatter are of great interest to the reader.
Frank Close is today essential in popular science literature. The themes of his books are on the edge of known science and knowledge and open us to potential areas of research in the not too distant future.
The book answers the reader's expectations and if you have some knowledge of physics, the book is even more enjoyable.

The concept of real void.

As we now know, void is not such a void but is filled with quantum fluctuations. It must also have some electromagnetic feature that allows light as a wave to spread with a speed of 300,000 Km per second. Clearly, it has no mass and no charge in a state of energy that could be called repose. But we're being accurate to call it empty?. Vacuum is really empty by the fact that it does not contain any mass. The current answer is no. The void is the medium from which the known universe seems to have emerged. Therefore, we must agree that the void is something and has its own properties and one structure that today is still unknown. This void that can be called physical space is far from intuitive three-dimensional Euclidean space which we usually represent and with which we feel comfortable. It is a medium very different to that space. In fact, in Euclidean space light could not spread and it could be called real vacuum when nothing were in it contained. Thus arises the need to redefine the concept of physical void. We might call real void to that region of space that contains nothing, no mass, nor charge, nor fields, nor fluctuations, absolutely nothing, and consequently the light could not propagate in this real void. It would be really nothing though by the fact of being able to define it, it would be something. Currently  whether this real void can exist in the universe is unknown and so if we can obtain it physically. The question is: are we able to create a region of space that contains no mass at which light can not propagate?. Currently we can not. Would it be physically possible?. We do not know.


Copyright Antonio Armero

Waves, waves and more waves

The universe as we know it is full of waves of all kinds. The sea surface is the best example.Two of our senses, hearing and sight are specialized in the detection of waves and we have two eyes and two ears. Not a coincidence. Some waves are visible, but most do not. Louis-Victor de Broglie formulated the hypothesis that all matter also has an associated wave. Hypothesis has been confirmed experimentally. At this time some physicist believe that matter is also made of waves.

Some waves are hard to spot. If you look at the sea surface, the waves constantly change their geometry. As an example we can imagine  a surface beneath the waves. If we were two-dimensional beings living in that area, would not easily detect the crests and troughs formed above and below our surface world. In this case, only the continuous change of values ​​in the velocity field of water in our surface world would give us idea of ​​the existence of the wave motion over our heads. But the wave pattern would not be easy to detect. The continuous wave interactions with others and the interference between them would cause a random velocity field impossible to model. The most significant direction of our velocity  field  would be the one  perpendicular to our area. This dimension is outside of our particular universe and would be harder to detect if the surface were flat. It would be easier if the surface were nearly spherical as is the case. At this point we could detect how the velocities perpendicular to the water points changes sign, up when it comes a peak and down when it reaches a valley.

Going up one dimension we can compare the sea surface to the volume of space. In space electromagnetic waves do vary continuously in all directions. As with the sea, these oscillations would be much more visible from a fourth dimension perpendicular to our space.

We know three spacial dimensions in our universe but new theories point out that probably there are more than these. It does not seems that one further dimension is a problem for mathematicians.(Four-dimensional space).Albert Einstein showed in his theory of general relativity that space is curved by the gravitational effect. Does curve on what? We need another dimension for that.

Copyright Antonio Armero

First input and introduction

This blog is a continuation of my first website entitled "A physical place" and created in 1996. At that time the site was dedicated to light as a physical phenomenon. It was a small project for my spare time and due to other occupations did not last, but achieved the objective of discovering the Internet, learn its operation and intuit their potential. At that time Internet was not popular at all. The purpose of this blog is to continue writing on this subject and also about the medium that makes it possible, that is the void. The light uses the vacuum as a medium of propagation. Therefore we need to know the structure of that medium. The aim is also to discuss news, books and articles related to this subject.