An noteworthy astronomy article was published recently stating that a large gaping hole called a void has been spotted not far from us, relatively speaking.
These voids are basically pure vacuums; Parts of the Universe utterly bereft of matter and energy or close to it. Their discovery, and this one in particular, is very interesting to me because I possess a morbid curiosity about the Universe as it relates to its own morbidness. Those who know me also know I have a certain fascination with the philosophical and theological concepts of self mortification. The former tends to feed the latter and vice versa. Please allow me to explain.
This massive gaping blank in the cosmos is so counter intuitively obvious. You have the great vault of Heaven filled with stars, galaxies, black holes and dark matter but then your telescope wonders to a section of sky where there is nothing. A great blackness. The Void. Conspicuous by its absence.
So absent in fact, that light, or rather photons, slow down when they enter and leave it. Odd, no? For those not so well versed in the major arcana of Physics, a photon is a discrete packet of information or energy, both terms are nearly interchangeable, that has very definite, specific measurable properties that make it what it is.
This mother of all holes was found because photons coming near it or from it arrived with less energy than they should. Think about that. A photon in essence is light, or rather the carrier for electromagnetic phenomena. It ranges though a scale we call the spectrum. On one end are the tiny wavelengths of gamma radiation, in the middle is the visible light spectrum from which we get to enjoy the pretty colors of the rainbow and at the other end are radio waves made bigger and slower still by manifold political talk shows. All this is the result of exciting photons so that they carry a different portion of frequency.
Now photons can only transfer their energy by interacting with matter. What, pray tell, did these poor, chilly little photons react with to have a lower energy state in the void if there is nothing to react with? This question is not only begged, but borrowed and stolen.
I bring this up because I once had a conversation with a friend about what could possibly exist outside of the material Universe. How devoid would the Void be? Before we could really get into it we were distracted by another tangent and I was left to stew about it. I'm now past simmering and have reduced quite nicely. I may even need deglazing now. Now that is an unpleasant thought, but I digress.
I theorized that the Void, having no material structure, no light, no mass, no temperature just vacuum, could be regarded as what is beyond the material Universe in the same way that space is just beyond the atmosphere of Earth. Finite, though quite large, but boundless, constrained by greater forces that allow it to expand at just such and such rate. That force is this Void I supposed.
Furthermore, I hypothesize that anything entering it would just simply cease to be. No longer enmeshed and immersed in the material Universe, the umbilicus severed, all physical components would lose there energy to such a profound degree that there would be nothing left. One couldn't even call it disintegration or decomposition because that implies there would be something left, be it its very elements or just a cloud of subatomic particles.
Annihilation? No, because something else would have to be canceled out and how do you cancel a chunk of Cancellation itself?
Fascinating and terrifying, yes? Fascinating for me because now I have to ask, is this the Universe's birthmark or a sign that the end is in sight? Perhaps it is merely a window, a point of exit or just a cosmetic flaw? Does it move within the Universe or does the Universe move around it? Terrifying because of the implications of the possible answers of those very same questions.
More compelling, still, for me personally because these questions may be imponderables for Science as it is now within my lifetime. I do hate not being let in on a secret.
Maybe it is even a fixed point, where the Universe is anchored to. The Universe tries to slip its moorings and rolls and yaws a little too much and the Void takes up the slack and steadies us.
With that metaphor in mind, I'm dying to know what happens when we run out of rope or the anchor gets fouled.