Research Scientists prove that virtual particles are real? (Sabine Hossenfelder)

[C C]

SABINE HOSSENFELDER
https://youtu.be/U4gpio58908

VIDEO EXCERPTS: If you trust physicists, then you are surrounded by “virtual particles” that constantly pop into existence and then immediately disappear. That sounds crazy, I know, and yet a new experiment just proved that virtual particles are… real. That’s a big deal for our understanding of empty space, and just what quantum physics actually means.

[...] The question of what virtual particles are is symptomatic of the current problems in the foundations of physics. One perspective you can take is that it’s just a weird name we give to some parts of mathematics, it doesn’t mean anything: shut up and calculate.

[...] The presence of virtual particles, for example, very slightly changes the electric field around an atomic nucleus. It’s a tiny change yet it can, and has, been measured. But does that mean that there are really particles there, popping in and out of existence? How would you even test that?

This is where the new result comes in...[...] But this breaking of the string converts a virtual quark anti-quark pair into a real quark-antiquark pair. And that pair of particles is now contained in two separate particles.

[...] You can say the language of virtual particles is just a convenient way to describe that state, the virtual particles aren’t really there. I think this is nonsense because you could use the same logic to argue that real particles aren’t really there. They are “just” convenient maths that we use to describe observations.

For what I am concerned, if the maths describes observations correctly, that is what it means for something to be real. If not, I would like to reinterpret my tax slip please.

So this isn’t just philosophy. I think that the question of what the vacuum is matter for the question of what space is. Is there really anything MORE than virtual particles around us. Or is the relations between the virtual particles themselves that create space. I think physicists don’t spend enough time thinking about nothing...

PAPER: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09920-0
PRESS RELEASE: https://phys.org/news/2026-02-glimpsing-...sight.html

Scientists prove virtual particles are real ... https://youtu.be/U4gpio58908

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/U4gpio58908

[Syne]

Yeah, I've always thought the Casimir Effect was sufficient to prove the existence of virtual particles, at least for me, even though there are other possible explanations.