The empty space where the breathing of the sky takes place
Guido Tonelli recounts two thousand five hundred years of physics discoveries with exciting digressions that show how these have been reflected in literature and music
by Lara Ricci
4' min read
4' min read
More than two thousand five hundred years ago, Pythagoras of Samos imagined "an empty space in which the breathing of the heavens would take place and another empty space, which would separate natures from each other, forming the distinction between continuous and discrete; this would be found first of all in numbers and would separate their natures": Aristotle reports this in Physics, IV, 6.
While not wishing to give in to the temptation to interpret the claims of the ancients in the light of what was discovered thousands of years later, Guido Tonelli, a physicist at Cern, one of the discoverers of the Higgs boson, in L'eleganza del vuoto. Di cosa è fatto l'universo (Feltrinelli, pp. 192, euro 18) writes: "with a little imagination, one could find the intuition of a 'cosmic vacuum', the one in which the breathing of the sky takes place, and of a 'microscopic vacuum', the one that superintends the infinitesimal separation between increasingly smaller discrete numbers".
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In other words, in Pythagoras' thought one would find an intuition of what would only be discovered in the 20th century: 'the immense vastness of the vacuum enveloping our planet and, to the great surprise of the authors themselves of some of the first explorations of the infinitely small, that the vacuum dominates even the most infinitesimal distances, those inhabited by elementary particles'.
Tracing the history of the idea of the void in philosophy and science, with fascinating digressions showing how the discoveries of physics have been reflected in literature and music, in The Elegance of the Void, Tonelli summarises how man has come to know what he knows about matter, the universe and the laws that govern them with admirable simplicity and clarity, allowing even the layman to understand how such prodigious ideas could be developed and how they have become part of everyone's cognitive and emotional heritage.
It is surprising, for example, to think that even Einstein, until the mid-1920s, was convinced that the universe was reduced to the stars in the firmament: the Milky Way. He had then already discovered that mass and energy are different aspects of a single phenomenon, and with the theory of special relativity had revolutionised our view of the microscopic world. But he was still bringing into focus another, radical, change of perspective: that space-time was not two infinite entities, as Newton imagined, but a single entity, which deformed by bending in the presence of very large masses. The entire universe could then 'be described in a single elegant formula, linking mass-energy density to the geometric structure of space-time'.
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