In our work, we deal with vacuum every day: we generate it, control it, and make it functional for industrial processes that require precision and reliability. But there is a vacuum that goes even further: it concerns the very structure of the universe.
Physicist Guido Tonelli, who played a leading role in the discovery of the Higgs boson, discusses this in his latest book, L’eleganza del vuoto (The Elegance of vacuum), in which he tackles an age-old question with modern tools: to be or not to be?
According to Tonelli, the answer to this question comes from physics itself: to be is not to be. The vacuum, as we understand it today, is not an absence, but an extremely active system where everything can take shape. It is a complex concept but, according to Tonelli, it can be understood intuitively when we think of ‘silence’, which can be the absence of sound, but can also be produced by adding together two sound waves in opposite phases.
In the same way, quantum vacuum hosts continuous fluctuations: particles that appear and disappear, energy that pulses invisibly but is real. The state of vacuum is the fields that are brought to their fundamental state, i.e., they have zero energy.
According to the most widely accepted theories, it is precisely from a state of vacuum that our universe was born. The most recent measurements indicate that the total energy of the cosmos is zero: matter carries positive energy, gravity negative energy. Their perfect balance explains how something—the Whole—can emerge from what, in appearance, was nothing.
This is not just about the origins of our world. Even today, the universe is expanding and evolving in an active vacuum: 200 billion galaxies move in a space that vibrates, emits gravitational waves, and participates in the processes of matter formation. The vacuum, therefore, is not a passive container, but a dynamic, essential, creative element.
Tonelli invites us to look beyond our instinctive idea of ‘nothing’. The vacuum is the other side of matter and without it, the universe – and everything we know – simply would not exist. It is not just a space between things: it is the condition that makes everything possible.
In short, the vacuum is not a lack. It is the purest form of possibility.
