Quantum Foam & Buddhism

Just an interesting article on the subatomic world from Answers.com. It is amazing how closely the concept of Quantum Foam fits with buddhiism.

When a man considers this world as a bubble of froth, and as the illusion of an appearance, then the king of death has no power over him."
-Buddha, Dhammapada, 170



Quantum foam, also referred to as spacetime foam, is a concept in quantum mechanics, devised by John Wheeler in 1955. It is sometimes likened to the old concept of the ether/aether.

The foam is a qualitative description of the turbulence that the phenomenon creates at extremely small distances of the order of the Planck length. At such small scales of time and space the uncertainty principle allows particles and energy to briefly come into existence, and then annihilate, without violating conservation laws. As the scale of time and space being discussed shrinks, the energy of the virtual particles increases. At sufficiently small scale space is not smooth as would be expected from observations at larger scales.


Foaming through the universe
Quantum foam is theorized to create masses of virtual particles. They are particle-antiparticle pairs, and prior to their annihilation, exist for a short period of time, on the order of the Planck time. They are created randomly from photons; the higher the energy of the photon from which they are created, the longer the time they will exist prior to annihilation.

These virtual particles make their existence known by the Casimir effect. It is thought that there are constant quantum fluctuations in "empty" space, even at the energetic homogeneity referred to as absolute zero. Due to this, quantum fluctuations are often described using the term "zero-point energy".

The "foamy" spacetime would look like a complex turbulent storm-tossed sea. Some physicists theorize the formation of wormholes therein; speculation arising from this includes the possibility of hyperspatial links to other universes. As far as realistic phenomena are concerned, it's thought that the hyperspatial nature of the quantum foam may account for such diverse physical principles as inertia, propagation of light, and time flow.

Reginald Cahill has developed a theory called Process physics, which describes space as a quantum foam system in which gravity is an inhomogeneous flow of the quantum foam into matter. According to this theory, the so-called spiral galaxy rotation-velocity anomaly may be explained without the need for dark matter.

Various scientists have theorized that quantum foam is an incredibly powerful source of zero-point energy. It has been estimated that one cubic centimeter of space contains enough zero point energy to boil all the world's oceans. However, estimates of this energy vary widely due to the huge disparity in the calculations of the quantum foam density, which vary more than 1:10100. Physicist Michio Kaku thinks that this enormous uncertainty in the estimation of quantum-foam density would represent the largest disparity for any quantity in all of physics.


See also
Dirac sea
Hawking radiation
Hyperspace theory
Planck time
"Rolling ball" topology
Vacuum energy
Wormhole