14 - Holes in Nothing

Summary

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Tonight I will request your special attention, since the problems which I am going to discuss are as difficult as they are fascinating. I am going to speak about new particles, known as ‘positrons’, possessing more than unusual properties. It is very instructive to notice that the existence of this new kind of particle was predicted on the basis of purely theoretical considerations several years before they were actually detected, and that their empirical discovery was largely helped by the theoretical preview of their main properties.

The honour of having made this prediction belongs to a British physicist, Paul Dirac, of whom you have heard and who arrived at his conclusions on the basis of theoretical considerations so strange and fantastic that most physicists refused to believe them for quite a long time. The basic idea of Dime's theory can be formulated in these simple words: ‘There should be holes in empty space.’ I see you are surprised; well, so were all physicists when Dirac uttered these significant words. How can there be a hole in an empty space? Does this make any sense? Yes, if one implies that the so-called empty space is actually not so empty as we believe it to be.