Monday, 14 November 2022

MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION (OTESSA MOSHFEGH) AND THE CONCEPT OF VACUUM

 “Mind over matter, people say. But what is matter, anyway? When you look at it under a microscope, it’s just tiny bits of stuff. Atomic particles. Subatomic particles. Look deeper and deeper and eventually you’ll find nothing. We’re mostly empty space. We’re mostly nothing. Tra-la-la. And we’re all the same nothingness. You and me, just filling the space with nothingness. We could walk through walls if we put our minds to it, people say. What they don’t mention is that walking through a wall would most likely kill you. Don’t forget that.”

First of all, these words come from the mouth of an extravagant ‘psychologist’ who in fact looks more like a witch or a fortune teller­. Vacuum has always been a controversial concept, not only from a scientific perspective. Torricelli experiment, so simple, so smart, proves the existence of  vacuum. But the text doesn´t speak about vacuum as a no-matter space, which is what Torricelli showed, but about the emptiness inherent to the matter, a gap, a hole inside the matter. And that´s what Rutherford exposed with his famous gold-foil experiment. Furthermore, the woman in the text is fully right when she warns us that we´ll probably die if we go through a wall


No comments:

Post a Comment