Imagine walking into the deepest, emptiest place in the universe, arriving at a perfect, complete void. Will you be surrounded by emptiness? The answer to this question is much more detailed than you think.

The modern vacuum journey began in the 17th century with a striking experiment developed by Otto von Gerike, mayor of Magdeburg in the Holy Roman Empire. As part of a political demonstration to show that his city had survived the ravages of the 30 Years’ War, von Gerike organized a demonstration for the Emperor and other dignitaries to demonstrate his newly invented vacuum pump. By connecting the two hemispheres and pumping all the air out, Otto showed that even a team of horses could not separate the hemispheres.

Contrary to millennia of thought in Europe that followed Aristotle’s argument that “nature cannot tolerate emptiness”, von Gerike showed that emptiness is possible. For decades after von Guerike’s demonstration, philosophers and scientists wondered whether vast swathes of space were filled with a material known as aether that would serve two purposes: first, it would still prevent a true vacuum from forming, and second, it would be filled with a material known as ether. He wondered if it would happen. It will serve as a medium for the propagation of light waves.

But in the late 1800s, two Cleveland physicists, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, devised a clever experiment to measure changes in the speed of light as the Earth moved through the ether. No changes were detected, and Einstein soon showed that the speed of light was always constant, so scientists eventually moved away from the concept of ether and accepted the possibility of a true vacuum.

And yet it’s so far away SoilThere’s a lot of stuff floating around: charged particles jumping here and there, wandering around atoms Hydrogen, fluff and dust particles go about their business. Although interstellar space is billions of times less dense than even our emptiest man-made vacuum chambers, it is not 100% empty.

To reach the emptiest places in the universe, you must travel into the void of space, the vast regions of nothingness that dominate the vastness of space. You can stand hundreds of millions away from the depths of the largest voids light years from the nearest galaxy. Empty nuclei are so empty dark matter The mysterious, invisible form of matter that makes up the bulk of every galaxy doesn’t even exist.

But still the space wouldn’t be empty. The entire cosmos is filled with light neutral particles called neutrinos, as well as radiation left over from the early days of the universe. This radiation, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), is responsible for more than 99.99% of all radiation in the universe, and there is no escape from it. So even in the darkest spaces you are not completely alone.

Let’s say you need to build a giant box thick enough to block neutrinos and CMB while keeping you inside. (Technically the walls of the box emit their own photons, but let’s leave that to this thought experiment.) Will you be alone then?

Quantum physics gives a surprising answer: No. Physicists have discovered that quantum fields permeate all space and time, and that these quantum fields give rise to the particles of everyday life. However, when quantum fields are left alone, they have an internal energy known as gap energy. This energy exists everywhere in the universe. Even if there were no particles around you, you would still have this energy to be your only companion.

What if you could invent a device that would nullify the energy of the vacuum (which is technically impossible, but let’s continue the imaginary experiment)? Will you end up truly alone in the universe, surrounded by a perfect all-encompassing ideal of nothingness?

The answer to this question… depends. You will still be an object in space, and some believe that space itself exists. We like to think of space simply as a mathematical abstraction, a way to measure location and extent. However, with the work of René Descartes, the genius of the 17th century who invented a mathematical basis to describe space, the concept of space began to gain a more concrete character. If you wrote down the x and y axes of a Cartesian grid, you have Descartes to thank for that.

Isaac Newton He elevated the concept of space to serve as an absolute background for the motion of objects and the physical laws that govern their behavior. This is modern physics in a nutshell: Objects move and interact with each other against the background of space where they are assumed to exist.