Ex nihilo!

Is it possible to create matter or energy out of nothing? As the universe expands, would there finally be areas which don’t even consist of matter plus antimatter (nothing)? If so, then would it be possible to create matter out of ‘that’ void?

 

Obviously it is possible. First things first: See, we know ‘pure energy’ never exists. It comes with fields and particles (like EM field). At most, Matter and energy can’t be called the same hence we do not call these photons as ‘matter’ (so we can’t call it energy either). Call them force (EM) carriers but you can’t say they are massive. They are just bosons and yes they will not go with Pauli’s exclusion principle (their integral spin).
Let’s exemplify it.

Remember those High School Feynman’s diagrams (Beware! He sometimes jokes with fellas)? Collide a photon with nucleus (they must interact; as boson (photon) does interact with fermion (matter in the nucleus)), you will get two leptons (you know: electron and positron), pair production was there.

*Did you believe in Hawking Radiation? Why did you then believe this pair production?*

Now photon is no matter but it created matter (fermionic electron and positron). It alludes to “From nothing to matter” enigma. Quantum Fluctuation comes in here. We still confide in it:

Take some quarks and some leptons (electrons etc.) you’ll get to know that you can make new atoms. Yes, new atoms; new matter; even surprisingly a new universe.

Was this perplexing? Is that ‘matter creation’ indigestible? Here lies the answer.

What I think is Quantum Fluctuation is somewhat more of a field theory claiming matter from nothing. You are right to think about the equivalence of matter and energy in case of their inter-convertibility but if you remember ‘Casimir effect’ you’d come to know what do they mean by ‘energy’ at the Planck’s scale. Our smallness and futility deride us. Our limitations. The distances in spacetime can’t be distinguished on this scale (or smaller ones, to be precise), welcome to Quantum World. Now quantum gravity cannot be demystified here. Haha, imagine you are Alice and Robert Gilmore can drive you anywhere.

*Ping: Black Hole entropy is ready to nosedive in*

Here using intuition: An electronic field shan’t exist in outer space because there are no electrons normally found there but still it is. It is pervasive. Every field is everywhere, everyone knows this. Also it is almost nothing because there are a lot of energy fields yet to be discerned, dark energy being one of them.