I’m going to explain this one like you’re 5ish.
Physicists were trying to understand the universe, so they calculated the density of a vacuum and found it to be really really really tiny. Then, they took all of the stars and galaxies and quasars etc. that we know of in our universe and put it in a trash compactor and squashed it down to be the same size as the vacuum previously measured. This density of that thing turned out to be significantly less than what they calculated for the vacuum! 39 orders of magnitude less. That’s a 10 with 39 zeroes after it….
These days wikipedia reroutes “the vacuum catastrophe” to the “cosmological constant problem”. Here’s a few gems from this page:
- “Depending on the Planck energy cutoff and other factors, the discrepancy is as high as 120 orders of magnitude,[1] a state of affairs described by physicists as “the largest discrepancy between theory and experiment in all of science“[1] and “the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics.”[2]“
- Renormalizartion: The vacuum energy in quantum field theory can be set to any value by renormalization. This view treats the cosmological constant as simply another fundamental physical constant not predicted or explained by theory.[9] Such a renormalization constant must be chosen very accurately because of the many-orders-of-magnitude discrepancy between theory and observation, and many theorists consider this ad-hoc constant as equivalent to ignoring the problem.[1]
Renormalization is basically what they did to us in school. I’ve had to re-renormalize myself since then but anyways. They decided to pretend like it never happened, and then said since it can’t be explained by theory, it can be set to any value. Right.
The EPR paradox
This just reminded me of the EPR paradox AKA the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox. To quote wikipedia the EPR paradox “is a thought experiment witch which they argued that the description of physical reality provided by quantum mechanics was incomplete.”
I’ll have to explain this one later….like way later.
Some links for the curious:
Blockchain Moses's Blog 