SCHEMATIZING (31)

By: Joshua Glenn
March 29, 2024

One in a series of posts via which HILOBROW’S Josh Glenn will attempt to depict the intellectual and emotional highs and lows of developing a semiotic schema.

Credit: Christopher Vitale of Networkologies and the Pratt Institute

In the 1960s, Julian Schwinger predicted that an intense electric or magnetic field can produce particle-antiparticle pairs… from out of the quantum vacuum, which is to say from the vacuum of space — which, though utterly devoid of matter or conventional forms of energy, seethes with activity. The point is that “empty space” is not the same thing as what we non-physicists rather clumsily refer to as “nothingness.”

No matter how far away you get from a point mass, the curvature of space (depicted in the image above) never reaches zero. Spacetime is a dynamic entity, the very fabric of which is curved by the presence and distribution of matter-and-energy. And wherever space is curved, you’ve got quantum field-energy.

Even if you create a perfect vacuum, devoid of all particles and antiparticles, and where the electric and magnetic fields are zero, Schwinger note, you cannot zero-out the quantum fields that permeate the universe. “Quantum theory is, in a profound way, weird,” writes James Gleick. “It defies our common-sense intuition about what things are and what they can do.”

(If this permeating-the-universe stuff sounds like the supposedly discrete ether theory, you’re right. Ether, in somewhat modified form, wrote Malcom Browne in a 1999 New York Times essay, “survived even the investigations of modern science, even though it seemed for many years that Einstein had consigned ether to the trash heap of obsolete notions. In its latest incarnation, ether has become a universal web of quantum fields.”)

Intangible quantum fields fill everything in the universe, from the infinitely small voids inside atoms and the infinitely vast space between galaxies. Even in a purely empty space, there will always be some amount of quantum-field energy. Every conceivable type of particle capable of existence has its own universal field extending throughout the universe, and when any point in the field is “excited” — tweaked with energy — it creates the field’s associated particle, say, an electron or a quark. According to Schwinger, this can happen even in a region of “maximum nothingness.”

“The Schwinger effect is now verified,” an essay at BigThinkcom exulted in 2022, following an experiment reported in Science that year by an international research team, “and teaches us how the Universe truly makes something from nothing.” We’ll see….

All of which may perhaps help semioticians to think productively about the mysterious inner workings of the semiosphere — which, although “closed” by definition (hence the “sphere” metaphor), remains constantly generative. Meanings not only evolve but emerge within (what I visualize as) the lattice-like confines of the semiosphere. How?

PS: Also see this Networkologies post on “Manifoldness.”

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SCHEMATIZING (31)

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