The Void [Hardcover]

Frank Close (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 23, 2008

What is the void? What remains when you take all the matter away? Can empty Space--nothing--exist?
To answer these questions, eminent scientist Frank Close takes us on a lively and accessible journey that ranges from ancient ideas and cultural superstitions to the frontiers of current research, illuminating the story of how scientists have explored the void and the rich discoveries they have made there. Readers will find an enlightening history of the vacuum: how the efforts to make a better vacuum led to the discovery of the electron; the understanding that the vacuum is filled with fields; the ideas of Newton, Mach, and Einstein on the nature of space and time; the mysterious aether and how Einstein did away with it; and the latest ideas that the vacuum is filled with the Higgs field. The story ranges from the absolute zero of temperature and the seething vacuum of virtual particles and anti-particles that fills space, to the extreme heat and energy of the early universe. It compares the ways that substances change from gas to liquid and solid with the way that the vacuum of our universe has changed as the temperature dropped following the Big Bang. It covers modern ideas that there may be more dimensions to the void than those that we currently are aware of and even that our universe is but one in a multiverse.
The Void takes us inside a field of science that may ultimately provide answers to some of cosmology's most fundamental questions: what lies outside the universe, and, if there was once nothing, then how did the universe begin?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Aristotle famously wrote that nature abhors a vacuum, but as Oxford physicist Close illustrates in this concise study, that depends on what you mean by a vacuum or a void. Greek and medieval philosophers gave philosophical arguments against the existence of the void, but an artificial vacuum was finally created in 1643 and quickly used to investigate atmospheric pressure. Scientific exploration of a vacuum's properties and applications took off in the 19th century, although ancient ideas like the concept of an ether that pervaded empty space masqueraded as serious science until Einstein explained them away via relativity. Close (Lucifer's Legacy) is a particle physicist at heart, and he hits his stride as he explains why scientists now don't think a void is really empty at all, but is teeming with particles popping in and out of existence and pervaded by a contemporary version of the ether, called the Higgs field. Close misses opportunities to make this a more rewarding interdisciplinary study that would attract a broader readership, and science buffs will find it redundant with other books in their collections. The moral of Close's book should be, as Nietzsche said, that when you look into the void, it really is looking back at you. 20 b&w illus. (Feb.)
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Review

"It's a nice read for people with little background knowledge"--New Scientist

"Close is a particle physicst at heart, and he hist his stride as he explains why scientists now don't think a void is really empty at all, but is teeming with particles popping in and out of existence and pervaded by contemporary version of the ether, called the Higgs field."--Publishers Weekly

"The Higgs boson remains the missing ingredient of the remarkably successful standard model of particle physics that describes interactions between the sub-nuclear elementary particles to an impressive precision, and The Void provides an introduction to the underlying concepts. It is nice to think that the explanations may help the physics community share its extraordinary excitement and anticipation with others."--The Times Higher Education Supplement

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; First Edition edition (January 23, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0199225907
• ISBN-13: 978-0199225903
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,257,693 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Frank Close, OBE, is Professor of Physics at Oxford University and a Fellow of Exeter College. He was formerly vice president of the British Association for Advancement of Science and Head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. He is the author of several books, including the best-selling Lucifer's Legacy, and the winner of the Kelvin Medal of the Institute of Physics for his "outstanding contributions to the public understanding of physics."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A-voids getting to the point, March 28, 2008

By 

mcerner "mcerner" (Princeton, NJ United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Void (Hardcover)

While a very well written book, The Void spends most of its 156 pages not getting to the point. But then the title is misleading -- this is not about voids or vacuums or the idea of nothingness. Instead, Close writes a summary, fairly historical, of the theories contributing to the current views of the universe. We hear a lot about Newton and Einstein, Lorentz and Michelson, and so on. Special and general relativity are explained again (as they have been in myriad other books). Something as important as the Higgs field is glossed over, while such things as inertial frames of reference or concepts of curved space-time are covered in a tad too much depth or too much repetition. This is really a book for someone who needs a quick overview, rather like it is the introductory chapter to a text with a lot more depth. And from my perspective, it seems to ramble here and there, as if the author doesn't quite want to make a point. Even at the end, the summary shows that the book was not about the void or vacuum but about what fills it and defines its boundaries/properties. Not quite what I was looking for.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good science, quick gloss, not quite what the title implies, May 23, 2008

By 

W. Metz "compulsive reader" (Michigan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Void (Hardcover)

This little book covers a LOT of science in a pretty short amount of time. Another reviewer said that it deals rather less with the void than one might think from the title. While this is true, there isn't much that can be said about nothing without understanding that in the real universe, nothing is truly something after all. That said, there is a lot of explaining of "stuff" to get to explaining nothing, which leads the book to have a lot less nothing than you might expect.

That said, the science is very solid and quite clearly explained. However, having extensively studied physics and chemistry years ago, this read more like a refresher course to me. I didn't have too much trouble making sense of most of the science because I have been exposed to it in great depth (even though I may've forgotten some things). I worry that to the lay reader, the book would be extremely hard going, even as there are many analogies drawn, so I would put it closer to three stars for a reader with little or no science background.

Still, written well overall and with great clarity. An interesting concept.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Touching the Void, January 15, 2011

By 

Dr. Bojan Tunguz (Indiana, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Void (A Brief Insight) (Hardcover)

"Void" seems to be the simplest of all notions, apparently requiring no thought whatsoever. It is what remains where everything is taken away. But a closer scrutiny reveals that "void" is not trivial as it may first seem. Is it physically possible to achieve such a thing as the absence of all matter? Even if possible, is what remains a truly empty space? And what is space anyway - is it possible to talk about it in the absence of matter? It is these and related questions that this short book tries to answer. It takes the reader on a journey from philosophical and speculative ideas of classic antiquity, to the most advanced frontiers of modern theoretical and experimental Physics. For a book of its size it covers a lot of ground. It explains where the notion that "the nature abhors vacuum" comes from, and how it took almost two thousand years to refute it by actually creating the first known artificial vacuum. The book explains how the ideas about the vacuum have evolved over the centuries, and in particular what an effect the discoveries of quantum mechanics and general relativity have had on it. Today we believe that even the perfect vacuum is strictly speaking not completely empty, and it is a rather complicated and complex entity. The book concludes with some of the current Physics speculations and how they may pertain to our ideas about "nothing."

The book is written in an interesting and easy-flowing style, and it does not overwhelm the reader with technical details and arcane jargon. There are hardly any equations in it, and the ones that are present are straightforward and used in order to illustrate a point that otherwise would be too cumbersome to describe. Overall, this is a very good book with a fresh and engaging perspective.