This is the clearest explanation of virtual particles I've seen.

I love how the more advanced physics gets, the more it sounds like you're just making stuff up. :)

9:29 It’s great that Dr. Don reminds us that there’s plenty of room to understand all this better. That scientific theories are our current best understanding, not absolute facts.

There are channels that provide pretty satisfactory explanations, but yours always shines in that regard, I'm so glad I stumbled upon it, thanks for the video!

More of the deep dives please, great to get to field theory which does explain this tricky subject and clears the mind.

That cover of Beach Boys “Good Vibrations” at the end is brilliant. Props to whoever made that!

I thought that was one of your best videos, especially the bit right at the end.

Im just a layman but this dude makes THE best explanations I have ever heard. Are these seriously free videos? These feel like they should be behind a paywall.

The real question, I think, is "are particles real?". The more I learn about QFT, the more convinced I become that particles are just an emergent phenomenon at macroscopic scales. Virtual particles aren't any less real than particles on the mass shell, but that doesn't actually make them real.

Finally an explanation that is understandable and not intentionally "mysterious".

0:42 - "I mean, just look right there. Do you see particles appearing and disappearing?" Me: "Oh, those particles? I thought we were calling them floaters. Maybe it's time I got my eyes checked."

I can't wait for the next string of videos. Sounds like they are going to be epic. Thanks!! 🎉

I still miss the mustache😋

This was a really great video, thank you. Appreciate all the work you do to make advanced topics accessible to curious laymen like myself.

Love this channel. Great explanation.

always a fun day when fermilab uploads!

Thank you, Don, you are always worth watching!

I find it such a wonderful *relief* to learn about Quantum Field theory in this way. I very much appreciated the assertiveness, driving home the validity of this model. I know the standard joke is that the more one learns about QM the less one understands it, but here I find it actually *quite intuitive*. I am waiting with bated breath for more videos discussing these concepts further! I'm actually enchanted. Great video.

With all of space being full of virtual particles, how do things move through space without any drag/friction?

Great and straight forward explanation

Fermilab upload! Today is a good day :) Much love for Dr. Don and much love for physics 😁

So many of my questions answered in just one ten minute video. I love you

Informative and intriguing. Can't think of a better way to explain advance modern physics. Thank you very much.

That was incredibly helpful and clear. Thank you.

Great video. I've always been super fascinated with this virtual particle subject.

The mustache went virtual my friends

Banger, after banger, after banger. Thanks Don, Ian, and Fermilab once again for an excellent presentation!

doc don lays it out again so clearly and patiently with us civilian physics phans. thank you doc!

Thank you Dr Don scientist man! I enjoy all your videos!

Brilliant and effective explanation, one of your best. Even I understood, or, at least, I could follow. I am curious now about how fields interact and what the outcomes are. Thank you.

Great explanation of virtual particles. Thanks.

Thank you as always sir.

Dr. Don is a very good science communicator. This video clearly and concisely removes the mystery around virtual particles. He even makes clear that there is of course a lot more specifics available in other videos, AND makes clear that theories are changeable to match the experimental data. In my opinion, a good experimental physicist usually has very solid grasp of the first principles and foundations, while many theoretical physicists seem to falter, in my opinion.

Fantastic deep dive, Don. This physics student has a better understanding of what's happening at the sub-atomic level

Good vibrations indeed :-) I hope to one day really understand particles and energy. Fascinating subject.

9:24 And that's just a theory. A Field Theory!!!!

Dr Don is a hero

Lovely explanation for us mere mortals ❤

Gotta love that Guitar Pro 6 midi outro! Good vibes are yours boy!!

I love these videos. I quit working on cars and I’m in college studying physics because of these. Thank you.

Thanks, truly informative. I've wondered a long time what virtual particles were. Now I know 🙂

I always see scientists saying in QFT that electrons are excitations in the electric field, and so with every particle that has its field. However, shouldn't these fields all be a single, complex quantum field? This was worth a video explaining, and showing, for example, why an electron could not be an excitation in a Higgs field, for example. I'm newbie to these physics questions but I love how you explain everything in a simple way!

THANK YOU... PROFESSOR DR.LINCOLN...!!!

What he said at the end there is so important! These are models. We don't necessarily know what is actual

Fascinating!

This is so great.

Please do a video on how the different quantum fields interact

Bring on the deep dives

Excellent....❤ thanks 🙏.

Didn't learn anything new, just was reassured that my view is in line with modern physics view. Anyways good value video!

There is a school of thought that says the casimir effect is similar to the Van der Waals force, caused by polarization of the surface atoms.

Love your channel and this video in particular. Congrats to you and your team. One criticism: near the end, you said, ‘just a theory’. We all know what you mean, but some people might hear that and say evolution is just theory. Maybe, ‘not a highly Confirmed theory’?

That is a great explanation! I have a couple of followup questions, if I may: 1. why are the fields jiggling with random energy all the time? 2. how, when a virtual particle appears, is it always particle/antiparticle? what are the mechanics that conspire to maintain that neatness?

I would love to see a video about the spin of quantum particles and the Pauli exclusion principle, I think it is fascinating but really hard to understand 🔬😇

Don rocks!

Thanks again dear professor. Another easy class for people like me, basic Physics apprentice. I only have a question, an eternal question: Where does Energy come from? the Energy that keeps fields and particles in constant activity.

This is a good explanation of the "pair creation" phenomenon, but from what I've heard, virtual particles are also used to mediate the interactions (for example, a static electric or magnetic force doesn't use real photons, it uses virtual ones instead). It would be nice to get an explanation how it works...

That idea of virtual particles being like, "imperfect"/"partial" manifestations of particles - rather than complete individual particles we usually think of - makes so much sense, I think the lightbulb that appeared above my head was brighter than the sun.

Excellent video, as always. I watch it, rest my head in the pillow, close my eyes and rest in peace as your class reverberates inside my brain. And no, I do not fall asleep or else I would waste that moment of truly peace. 🙂

Thank you, Don Lincoln, that video has got real substance. I propose to delete all those recent Shorts about The World Quantum Day, which have zero content.

It is interesting that these particles give such excellent answers to physics systems in QM but terrible for space in general. Turns out that this issue can be solved.

EXCELLENT 😅

Notification squad!

More explanation, please ! Do the virtual particles originate at the same point? What determines their velocities? Do their velocities have equal magnitude but opposite directions? What causes them to disappear? If their masses are positive, how does Hawking radiation reduce the mass of a black hole?

Speaking of the crazier corners of physics... I've heard that there's a hypothesis that all electrons (and, presumably, all of each other distinct type of lepton or quark) are the same particle traveling through spacetime. A video exploring this idea would be very interesting.

Don Lincoln, you noted at 4:04 in your Fermilab video [1] on virtual particles that _“… even with virtual particles, some of the usual rules apply. In this case, matter and antimatter particles appear in pairs.”_ My apologies for violating the usual UKposts physics etiquette of never asking serious questions. My three questions are so simple that I hoped you might make an exception for a poor, bewildered computer scientist. Producing a pair of virtual particles requires them, however briefly, to have equal and opposite momentums to achieve separation. That, in turn, requires them to originate at a point in space where their total momentum is zero. *Question #1:* In what inertial frame is the virtual-pair origin point motionless? *Question #2:* Since special relativity requires empty space to be identical from in frame of motion, won’t every moving observer, regardless of speed, see pairs of virtual particles that are motionless in their frame and thus moving relative to any other frame? *Question #3:* Since observers moving at close to lightspeed must observe virtual pairs similarly moving at close to lightspeed from any other viewpoint, how do you keep the indefinitely increasing relativistic energy of these fast-moving virtual particle pairs from forming an infinitely energetic gas that instantly incinerates the universe (Fig. 1)? ---------- *References* [1] D. Lincoln, What are virtual particles? Fermilab (UKposts) *2024,* 0417 (2024). ukposts.info/have/v-deo/mamCnISDqJiFp58.html

A physicist finally said something I've always wondered about, i.e that an anti-particle is a different vibration of the particle field. Plus something that I never even considered, i.e that virtual particles are also vibrations of the particle field.

It feels like there is a lot missing here. Is there a difference between the vacuum energy churning which produce virtual pair particles, and the virtual particles, say photons, that exist between two electrons, a la the basic Feynman diagram?

🎸🎶✨🎸 Thanks a lot, Don! I have a few questions and a comment: - Do virtual particles interact with the Higgs field, or does the way they "vibrate" make it impossible to interact with the Higgs field? If so, what about virtual particles that "normally" have no mass (photon, gluon)? Or is interaction with the Higgs field another story altogether? - Is there, then, only ONE way for particles to vibrate that allows them to become "real" but, perhaps, a multitude of ways to vibrate that allows them to remain virtual? - And why do you speak about the "uncertainty principle" and not the "indeterminacy principle" ? Knowing that the 1st way of naming it can be misleading. 🎸🎶✨

Hi Dr. Don! Another mind bending hypothesis is that gravity is an entropic force. Would you like to make a video about that? I'd be very interested in your take.

sometimes I speculate on a version of kaluza klein theory where instead of an extra compactified dimension its actually an extra scalar field with its own 1D hamiltonian metric. And that the dirac field is actually this field, which is what gives particles spin. Spin is basically a quantized motion in 1 dimension and the dirac field is a zero spin scalar field with imaginary mass. It has translational symmetry with the higgs field in the same way that real numbers and imaginary numbers have translational symmetry on a number line, and due to this it is a slower than light version of imaginary mass which does not violate causality. Basically from the perspective of an imaginary mass field our real mass field would appear to have imaginary mass and vice versa. Which implies that black holes, the universe, and even particles all have complex mass. (solving the large electron problem for kaluza klein theory and the gap problem for yang mills theory) But dirac field interactions are interesting as they behave in a soliton like manner and that not only is electromagnetism and gravity unified under this model (meaning that all electroweak symmetry interactions are just products of gravity and the topology of space) but that magnetism is basically the warping of the dirac field itself and behaves in a way that we can attribute to current virtual particle speculation. These 1D interactions are why magnetic field lines appear to expend no energy until they make contact, and why virtual particles can seemingly be emitted from a source with no loss in energy until they make contact. Because there are no virtual particles at all. This is just electromagnetism behaving in 1D where it can't spread out over an area and does not obey the inverse square law. Instead it creates these soliton like feedback loops that appear to lose no energy.

i NEED that video on how quantum fields interact

Dr. Don, why do you need so many fields, it's sounding like a Field Zoo, why not just a single field, the spacetime field, that behaves/vibrates as needed? Great video.

almost figured it out I need a couple more Up Quart's

Ok. It's time to catch up with several months of "farming chapters" from Fermilab =) Cheers Dr. Don!

Everybody can make the noise of virtual particles audible. The only thing it takes is an operational amplifier (OPAMP), connected to a positive/negative power supply, (e.g. two 9V-Batteries in series) connect the positive input to GND, solder a resistor of about 470kOhm to 1MOhm between the output and the negative input and place a low voltage (6.3…10VDC, 10…100µF) tantal-, or MLCC-capacitor between GND and the negative input. Connect the output and GND to the line-input of a computer. You will hear a 1/f-noise in the speaker as the result of virtual charged particles banging the capacitor's dielectric causing tiny electrical charge changes. The spectrum strictly follows the Heisenberg inequation, as shown in the video. And no, this is not kB·T·R-noise, because neither the amplitude, nor the frequency distribution changes when the capacitor is placed within liquid nitrogen or even liquid helium, because this *is* the noise of quantum vacuum fluctuactions.

I’ve heard the story that the Casimir effect was originally computed using van der Waals forces and only later someone pointed out that you get the same result using virtual particle hypothesis. Also afaict the virtual particles arise mostly only in the pertubative calculations from qft, which at least for me, cannot be considered a fundamental aspect of the theory (as they completely break down for strong coupling). The field itself can be measured, which means that in some sense you are measuring virtual particles. Also the fact that you can find weird things inside a proton or neutron speaks in favor of “virtual particles”, but I think in those cases we are actually colliding against on-shell particles.

I would love to see a video about ghost particles and gauge fixing 😉

Excellent video! I have heard that the fundamental forces are “communicated” through virtual particles. Are these the same kind of virtual particle? Because I don’t see how something that only exists for an instant could, for example, cause one macroscopic magnet to be attracted to another. It seems to me like that would imply a constant stream of these particles being emitted by the magnet and travelling macroscopic distances, which seems implausible.

Another outstanding video. Please include more math in these videos

Very nice homage to Mr. Wilson.

Consider the phase conjugation of waves in fields and how it seems to mask the presence of real particles as quantum potentials with no vector components. For example, 2 photons which conjugate perfectly in space and time are everywhere zero amplitude in E and B field, but they cant annihilate because of energy conservation, they must deposit all their energy in the region of constructive interference on the surface of particles or other boundary conditions. You can only ever see such waves under relativistic transformations or with very non-linear boundary conditions. An example of tricky hidden quantum potentials is the electron phase shift caused by the magnetic vector potential around an infinite solenoid. The casimir effect is another. The Stark shift is yet another effect attributed to virtual positrons caused by vacuum polarization around electrons in atomic nuclei. Anapole antenna also does something weird. Anapoles are known as zero pole antenna, they emit radio waves together in pairs in order suppress the far field radiation completely and become perfect absorbers. The pairs of photons cancel the E and B fields but this creates non-zero vacuum expactation value for the propogating quantum potentials (Phi the electric scalar potential and A the magnetic vector potential). The 2 photons are copropogating but in perfect destructive interference, so all the photon energy is deposited in the anapole antenna near field where constructive interference occurs. But this implies that quantum potentials can be used to beam power in ways that mask the power flux by phase conjugation. 4-wave mixing and 8-wave mixing are the basis for many futuristic technologies that manipulate the light-matter interaction.

Is there only one unifying field with different types of vibrations accounting for the many types of particles and interactions? To extend the metaphor- the guitar string induces different and varied notes in the air that are travel differently at different pressures and temperatures in the air in a room through the breeze from a window from a storm brewing outside to a tornado down the street to a hurricane seen from above to a thin skin of air enveloping out planet. The effects of the elastic medium of air, from cavitation bubble to supersonic heating, from music to thunder are related by medium. Is there a common medium at quantum scales that relates all things?

Deeply fascinating, and excellent explanations. More questions, we can say - What is a field? And, What is a vibration? (Really, what causes it, and what is a field in reality outside of our mathematics?) Classically we have real empty space, quantum we have fields - where is the merging of these realities? The field that strikes me is the photon field. Light is endlessly mysterious.

For a long time now my thought has been that they're just crests and troughs of transient waves scattered throughout the universe

Casimir effect in a nutshell. Also, the ultimate opening titles!

Thank yiu❤❤❤

Do you have videos on gauge theory gravity? I can't seem to find any and I think that would be a good topic. Geometric Algebra I think is the tool we need to solve quantum gravity

We have it so wrong... Please someone change Einstein's postulate from "Constancy of speed of light." to "Constancy of space-time stretchiness/expansion.". The photons are not moving in the system, their velocity is 0 not C. Instead, space-time stretches at C in all directions from a given point. Mass velocity relative to space-time is C and I can prove it! So we are at rest in our inertial frame, in this frame our momentum is p=mc and E=pc, and you can try it, is equivalent to E=mc^2. This proves that mass velocity relative to space-time is C, but not only that. Gravity is space-time flow at C towards mass, and space-time energy density increases towards mass by the inverse square law. When you stand still on Earth, not only that the space-time in the whole universe exert a pressure on your atoms, but space-time passes through you at the speed of light with enough energy density required to give Earth its actual mass. 99.99% of mass is given by space-time. This explains G force, rest mass energy, inertia, photon time, singularity, and much more. Not only that, but E from E=mc^2 is not just potential energy, but an exchange of KE experienced by a moving observer between a stationary observer and space-time. There are no particles and antiparticles in space vacuum, and the fluctuations are nothing out of the ordinary. All that happens is space-time stretches at C and the energy density of space-time increases by inverse square law towards mass. Fluctuations appear because masses are in motion and their mass distribution is not exactly equal everywhere.

QFT seems to make so much sense of the subatomic phenomena. Other than string theory - which has been generally abandoned - one might wonder what might tun up to replace QFT.

I have a hypothesis that virtual particles' behavior is part of the explanation for gravity. I won't spell it out here, but the keywords are compressed energy, equilibrium, entropy, and how matter travels across "empty" space. It does not involve gravitons but is somewhat analogous to magnetism.

I only come here for Don's content... he is strong in the physics 💪

How do the QED field(s) relate to the classical electromagnetic field ?

Why are these uploads times so perfectly on what I’m asking myself? Idk but thanks anyway. Maybe my brain sends waves to make the action field fluctuate which makes you guys upload exactly what I think about, or something like that 😅

Thx for an interesting explanation. So when one of these VP's falls beyond the event horizon how does it communicate with its partner across the EH to tell it to become real and carry away Mass? Logically the VP that falls into the BH must, itself, become real in some sense. Therefore it must have properties that add to the BH. So how does the BH evaporate?

What do we know about the energies and masses of virtual particles ? Those with mass must interact gravitationally (obviously very weakly, but there are a lot of them) with other particles. If only measurements are real, what have we measured about virtual particles ?

The most mind boggling thing is the quantum entanglement. Not the idea of it, but the proof of it. The thing about particles appearing for a moment is due to our shortcomings. There could be many things happening that we can't yet conceive let alone measure and prove. And we can't measure anything moving faster than the speed of light. Which brings me back to the quantum entanglement.

QFT is so cool, imo. Particles being concentrated perturbations in an expansive field just clicks.

Nice video.

Can you tell us more about just what a field is? I take it that it's basically a number assigned to each point in space, and a vibration is those numbers oscillating in certain spots, which gives a particle. Is that right? And then the vector fields, perhaps for particles with finite spin?