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Comment by dmoney | Hacker News Reader

a high-energy electron beam combined with an intense laser pulse could rip apart a vacuum into its fundamental matter and antimatter components

I'm not a physicist, but this sounds wrong. Vacuum doesn't have "matter and antimatter components", it's vacuum.

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This is going to be a bit weird when you're used to interacting with the universe at a macroscopic level, but the vacuum is actually more like a cosmic bank account. On balance it is at '0', but locally there can be small 'offenses' which create pairs of particles that spontaneously annihilate (again, in pairs) before anybody gets a chance to notice.

As long as the books balance (particles and anti-particles created in equal proportions) the universe does not seem to care, it even does not care if these particles are in existence for a longer period of time, or are separated by distances large enough that you can notice them.

This also apparently is one of the more interesting pieces of the puzzle about where all this stuff came from in the first place and has been used to postulate the existence of an 'anti-universe'.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67O3TH20100825

I am not a physicist either, but your concept of vacuum does need updating.

The idea of matter and antimatter particles popping up out of vacuum has been around for some time, and appears to be the driving force behind black hole evaporation (hawking radiation) . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation

According to wiki, there's a few other natural processes where we can detect particles forming and disappearing again in vacuum, but my understanding of these processes is nihil :-). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_fluctuations#Virtual_par...

Anyway, to me the article is exciting.

Sure it does.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle#Pair_productio...

(for a particularly cool consequence see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casmir_effect)

Although a vacuum is devoid of physical matter, it's not actually empty. In fact a vacuum is host to a seething "ocean" of virtual pair-production (a particle and it's anti-matter counterpart locked in a feynman loop) giving rise to the "Vacuum Energy" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy, potentially a vast untapped reservoir of essentially limitless power - if it can be harnessed :)

It case you're sceptical, the "realness" of the vacuum energy is revealed by the wonderful Casimir Effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect

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