Extra: Phonon III

A voice note about doing nothing

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PHONON III*

In physics there is no such thing as empty space.

In some sense, this is not counterintuitive. When you wave your hand through air, you know that it is not empty even if it might look that way and your hand may not encounter all that much resistance. You don’t have to be a quantum physics expert to know that some physical objects that exist around us cannot be seen with the naked eye, that they are hiding underneath the label “empty” because our eyes just can’t quite make it past that. 

But when physicists talk about empty space, they are really talking about vacuum, about removing every particle of air from somewhere, about removing all the particles that we cannot see, but can imagine well enough to figure out how to get rid of them. It is that space, the space that has been emptied out, that is still not exactly at a zero of some sort. And this does come off as odd. 

The culprit is the so-called Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It says that if you measure one thing with perfect precision, then some other measurement of yours must get messed up. For instance, as Heisenberg posited in the 1920s and no experiment has proven wrong since, if you know exactly how fast an electron is moving, your measurement of where it may be at the moment when it has that speed will be imprecise even if you use the most perfect measuring stick.

There is a trade off, according to Heisenberg, between knowing one thing very precisely or knowing many things sort of precisely. In this way, quantum mechanics is a science that alerts us to the limits of what we can know. And it is a science that tells us that zeroes, such as empty space, are impossible because a zero means a perfect knowledge of nothingness. 

Empty space is actually filled with pairs of particles and antiparticles that pop up into existence, then annihilate each other, then come about again and repeat in a never-ending cycle. Some physicists call this quantum foam. It may be bubbling around us at all times, without us ever knowing that our world is fuzzy like that.

I have been reading Jenny Odell’s “How To Do Nothing” and thinking about how it’s not just in physics that nothingness is complicated and fuzzy. Odell’s argument is not so much that social norms or societal laws forbid perfect nothingness in the ways the laws of quantum mechanics do, but the more she unravels all the forces pushing us towards always doing or, more importantly, always producing something, the clearer it becomes that a person in the modern world is very unlikely to spontaneously settle into just doing nothing.

In a reality filled with states marked by an all-consuming action, we are rarely nudged into those states where action nears zero. Odell writes about the attention economy to grab the contemporary reader, a reader like me who is never not checking social media or email of some sort, but her historical forays into ancient Greece, communes in the 1960s and labor movements in the 1930s, make it clear that the aversion to doing nothing, to zero production and zero action, is a throughline for a capitalistic world.

Of course, Odell’s nothing is not really a zero, just like the zero of empty space is not one either. What she is arguing for is more like the step of reaching vacuum, removing unnecessary particles that we can’t even always see, than fully abandoning all action. She argues for the slow and steady work of care and growth, for contemplation and recognition of how connected we are to our bioregion, for a training of attention that does not require external rewards we so often get from technologies that are actually often working against us. She is arguing for that foamy state where things come into existence or are allowed to disappear.

A few weeks ago, I went to a restorative yoga class for the first time. I have been struggling to find a yoga studio that feels right ever since we moved to New York and have been defaulting to attending practice that is physically challenging but forgoes the more contemplative parts of the discipline. This is convenient as I relish putting my body through hard things and struggle with keeping my mind from racing. The restorative class was then a different challenge, and the instructor acknowledged it immediately. 

Much like Odell, she foregrounded how rarely we are encouraged to rest, to keep a shape just to slowly grow into it without any utility other than feeling more at home there, to do nothing for a period of time, especially when that nothing comes with soft blankets and thick pillows.

I had a hard time. A hard time not clenching my jaw, not arching my back, not squeezing my glutes or my core, because she was absolutely right. I am almost never asked to just fold over a pillow and be there, doing nothing, thinking nothing, growing quietly still.

When I report on science experiments, I often default to comparisons with space. Space is as cold as nature gets and probably as empty as laws of physics allow, so bringing it in is a good signifier of extremeness. Space is also vast yet still expanding. And the common image of spacetime as a sheet bending and warping underneath the weights of stars and planets could easily make you think that space is also soft and malleable.

In movies, or science fiction books, being stuck in space is being immersed in nothingness and there is so much horror to that. But these days I think that maybe space is aspirational. That I should aim for its not quite empty but nearly emptied steady vastness.

Best,

Karmela

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P. S. The first Ultracold letter titled Phonon appeared here, on my birthday last year, and it also involve sound.

*In condensed matter physics, a phonon is a particle-like excitation in solids and some liquids. If a photon is a “chunk” of light, then a phonon can be best described as a “chunk” of sound, a sort of a narrow packet of vibration. Phonons are ubiquitous in studies of quantum fluids, where their behavior exemplifies how different these fluids are from classical liquids like water, and in many quantum devices, where they usually mean trouble in the sense of energy being inappropriately wasted on shaking and vibrating instead of whatever the device is designed to do.