Everyone has heard the adage, “You can’t make something out of nothing.” However, the mechanics of our cosmos isn’t quite so black and white. Decades have been spent by scientists trying to create matter out of thin air. And now they’ve demonstrated that the notion put forward seventy years ago was right, and we can indeed make stuff out of thin air.
There are several conservation rules in the universe. The quantities of energy, charge, momentum, and so on are all governed by these rules. To better grasp these rules, scientists have spent decades attempting to synthesise matter from scratch, a task that is much more difficult than it first appears. Making matter invisible was easy; making it appear out of thin air was not.
Many different hypotheses have been proposed by quantum physicists in their quest to explain the Big Bang and how matter came into being. Sometimes, when two particles collide in space, new particles can be created. Some scientists even propose that a sufficiently powerful electromagnetic field may produce matter and antimatter from thin air.
However, it has never appeared conceivable to accomplish any of these goals. Scientists haven’t let it stop them from trying, though, and their efforts may now be paying off. According to Big Think, in early 2022, scientists were able to develop electric fields strong enough in the lab to normalise the unusual features of a substance called graphene.
These fields allowed the researchers to permit the generation of particle-antiparticle pairs out of thin air. In doing so, they confirmed the idea put out by one of the fathers of quantum field theory, Julian Schwinger, that it is conceivable to create matter out of thin air. Plus, now we have a clearer idea of how the cosmos creates matter out of non-matter, which is exciting.
