[SFW] Does matter matter? See detais.

Fair warning. To really appreciate this question, you need to take just under an hour to listen to this lecture by theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Lawrence M. Krauss, or you need to already know what the morphology of our actual Universe is at a quantum level. Only if you listen to Dr. Krauss explain what we now know of matter, or you’re already up to speed on the topic will you be able to answer the question, “Does matter matter?”.

Matter would certainly seem to matter a great deal. We are made of matter, right? So is the Earth we evolved on, the solar system our Earth is in, the Sun which gives light and life to our solar system, and the Milky Way Galaxy; where our solar system is just a tiny spec out on the Orion arm of the spiral galaxy—a galaxy so huge that its center looks like a massive ball of light and is held together by a supermassive black hole with 3.7 million solar masses.

If, on a clear night, you travel to a mountaintop away from any city light or air pollution and hold your hand out at arm’s length with a dime between your thumb and forefinger, that dime defines a tiny circular column rising above your head into the nighttime sky. Now if you observed the tiny portion of the sky that circle encloses with a telescope able to look all the way to the cosmic microwave background radiation, you would see 100,000 galaxies, many far larger than out Milky Way. Each large galaxy has its own supermassive black hole holding it together. And when you think how many dime-sized circles it would take to fill the entire sky all around the Earth, and how many galaxies that number of circles times 100,000 galaxies would equal, that’s a lot of matter.

But as Lawrence explains, we now know we live in a flat Universe that’s roughly 30% dark matter, 70% dark energy and around 1% visible matter and energy. And we further know that just such a Universe not only can come from nothing, it must come from nothing. Pure nothing is really a seething, boiling mass of quantum possibilities, and particles poof into and out of existence within it constantly. They just appear and are gone so rapidly we cannot observe them. But most of the mass of a proton is not from its quarks, but from the nothing that’s between the widely separated quarks. So how much does matter really matter, outside of being very interesting to observe? Isn’t it interesting that we owe everything to nothing, because without nothing, we wouldn’t exist?

For those who are thinking of more naughty matter/s, click to the NSFW version of this question. Perfect for those who want to play with the question but can’t spare the time to look at it from a quantum mechanical point of view.