{"id":222539,"date":"2025-09-26T15:03:40","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T20:03:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/physicists-just-found-a-way-to-make-something-from-nothing"},"modified":"2025-09-26T15:03:40","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T20:03:40","slug":"physicists-just-found-a-way-to-make-something-from-nothing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/physicists-just-found-a-way-to-make-something-from-nothing","title":{"rendered":"Physicists just found a way to make \u201csomething from nothing\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/physicists-just-found-a-way-to-make-something-from-nothing.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Researchers at UBC have found a way to mimic the elusive Schwinger effect using superfluid helium, where vortex pairs appear out of thin films instead of electron-positron pairs in a vacuum. Their work not only offers a cosmic laboratory for otherwise unreachable phenomena, but also changes the way scientists understand vortices, superfluids, and even quantum tunneling.<\/p>\n<p>In 1951, physicist Julian Schwinger theorized that by applying a uniform electrical field to a vacuum, electron-positron pairs would be spontaneously created out of nothing, through a phenomenon called quantum tunneling.<\/p>\n<p>The problem with turning the matter-out-of-nowhere theory into Star Trek replicators or transporters? Enormously high electric fields would be required \u2014 far beyond the limits of any direct physical experiments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers at UBC have found a way to mimic the elusive Schwinger effect using superfluid helium, where vortex pairs appear out of thin films instead of electron-positron pairs in a vacuum. Their work not only offers a cosmic laboratory for otherwise unreachable phenomena, but also changes the way scientists understand vortices, superfluids, and even quantum [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":707,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-222539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/707"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222539\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}