Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This book is a history of how it came to be that our best physical theories of particles, gravity, and spacetime are theories of the vacuum, of empty space. Today, physicists calculate “vacuum expectation values,” predict the influence of “vacuum fluctuations,” and describe universes and black holes composed of dynamic, yet empty, spacetime. More than this, vacuum physics seems paradoxical. Physicists depict the vacuum as by turns placid and roiling; as a rippling sheet and a crashing sea. More than Nothing provides new interpretations of seminal advances in the history of relativistic quantum theory, including Paul Dirac’s positron theory and Richard Feynman’s and Julian Schwinger’s Quantum Electrodynamics. It provides sustained analysis of understudied figures, including John Wheeler’s geometrodynamics, Roger Penrose’s diagrammatic methods, and Sidney Coleman’s false vacuum. These studies analyze physicists’ diverse interests. This reveals surprising connections between positron theory and mathematical beauty; between fluctuations and Marxian philosophy; between the psychology of “impossible objects” and drawings of black holes; and between symmetry breaking and science fiction. The development of the physics of the vacuum was inseparable from the development of aesthetics, art, psychology, fiction—from culture. By analyzing scientific practice—as documented in notes, correspondence, drawings, laboratory notebooks, and published material—this book shows that physicists chose to center the vacuum because of its utility. Over and again, theorists found the vacuum useful.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.319 | 0.202 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".