AaS! 214: Is Empty Space Really...Empty?
Ask a Spaceman!
Paul M. Sutter
4.8 • 853 Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2023
⏱️ 45 minutes
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Summary
What’s floating around in space between all the stuff? Are there any truly empty places in the universe? What is the “fabric” of spacetime? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
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Thanks to Cathy Rinella for editing.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The date is May 8th, 1654, the location the city of Regensburg in the Holy Roman Empire. |
| 0:16.7 | The audience included several nobles and notables, including the emperor, Ferdinand III, himself. |
| 0:24.3 | And the man of the hour, Otto, mayor of Magdeburg, who is ready to put on a show. |
| 0:31.8 | This was no mere science experiment to impress and dazzle. |
| 0:36.4 | This was a political stunt. The town of Magdeburg |
| 0:39.9 | had been ravaged just two decades before losing over 20,000 people during one of the worst |
| 0:45.5 | atrocities of the 30 years war, which, for those of you not steeped in European history, |
| 0:51.1 | was a conflict initially about whether Central Europe should be Protestant or Catholic, |
| 0:55.4 | with the answer to be decided by, you know, slaughtering each other. |
| 1:00.2 | But Magdeburg was making a comeback, thanks to the able leadership of Otto, and he wanted to |
| 1:05.1 | show the Emperor just how far they'd come. |
| 1:09.0 | Otto, it so happens, was more than a local politician. He was an avid scientist |
| 1:14.4 | and inventor, and he had devised a device that many, if not everybody, before him in European |
| 1:21.1 | history had considered outright impossible. The device was a vacuum pump. |
| 1:28.3 | And Otto's showy demonstration didn't just convince the German elite that Magdeburg |
| 1:32.8 | was back, baby, but it showed the scientific and philosophical world that the vacuum was real. |
| 1:41.8 | The debate about the nature of the vacuum stretches back into antiquity, and probably before that, but we don't know about it because past a certain point we don't have any written records of anybody's thoughts, either because A, those records didn't survive to the present era, or B, they didn't write them down in the first place. |
| 1:59.9 | Anyway, my point here is that the discussion of the nature of the vacuum has a long, |
| 2:04.3 | storied, world-spanning history, and we're only going to examine a small slice of that history |
| 2:10.5 | in today's episode, especially the parts that intersect with modern scientific thinking. |
| 2:16.9 | The reason that talking about the vacuum has such a long-storied history |
| 2:21.2 | is because talking about the vacuum means we're going to be skirting around the edges of a very |
... |
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