#122 – The Void (Panimating)

They’ll say the sun is dying
And the fragile can’t be saved
And the cold, it will devour us
And we won’t rise up and slay giants

It takes a leap of faith
To awake from these delusions
You are the coder and avatar
A star

They’ll say, no one will find us
That we’re estranged and all alone
They believe nothing can reach us
And pull us out of the boundless gloom

They’re wrong
They’re wrong
They’re wrong
Babe, they’re wrong

Muse – The Void

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Techniques: SoundSpectrum G-Force

This song from Muse has really made an impression on me, and it’s been the occasion to realise how much the imaginary landscape of this English band is close to mine, I am now in catching up mode. The inflexions and accents of this album “Simulation Theory” are just great, an awesome kick in the butt for the teenager in me who grew up in the eighties. The ominous synth waves keep me bouncing between Jean-Michel Jarre’s Equinoxe, Vangelis’ Blade Runner and Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, like a mad silver ball in a spacetime pinball.

The song questions how lonely we, Mankind, appear to be in the dark immensity of the Cosmos, largely made of void. Of course we are not alone, who can doubt it … I don’t! And with the musicians I am full of joy and hope that one life form will find its way to another one.

But it also teases in my mind the question of the nature of the void: Thanks to Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Richard Feynman and a few others, we now very well know that the emptiness of space between star systems and galaxies is only apparent. And I am not talking here about dark energy or dark matter, which are still highly conjectural concepts. I am simply referring here to the fact that, despite its low local energy, space void is able to see particles of matter being spawned spontaneously. This has been well proven for instance by the Casimir effect, which demonstrates the residual energy of vacuum as per the predictions of quantum theory. More details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect

More recently, Stephen Hawking has used the same logic around the residual energy of vacuum, and its ability to spawn entangled particles, to prove that black holes necessarily radiate energy: When spawned at the event horizon, one particle being swallowed by the black hole, the other entangled one is ejected on an escape velocity, therefore generating a radiation for external observers. If one lives long enough, they would be able to see the black hole ultimately evaporate. More details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation

Therefore, what is named “void” might not be that empty, and what is called black might only be dark red, things are not always as manichaean as we would like. Yet, we like to be able to put a definitive label onto distinct concepts, and it appears that “void” or “null” is more radical than just “zero”, from a mathematical perspective. Hence why mathematicians have agreed on a particular symbol to describe it:

More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_sign

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