La vie dans le vide

The void, the setting for every possible interaction, is a bubbling, inspiring force. Science and art history, in their purest forms and in dialogue with one another. The concept of the void was profoundly challenged at the beginning of the 20^th century by the emergence of quantum mechanics and relativity. In this previously unpublished, concise and lucid essay, Achille Stocchi traces the history of the vacuum, describing its nature and behaviour. The vacuum is a dynamic state characterised by fluctuating energy and filled with interacting particles. It has shaped the evolution and structure of the universe since the Big Bang.

Achille Stocchi is a particle physics researcher, a professor at Paris-Saclay, and co-founder and co-director of the annual TESHEP school in Ukraine and the WISHEPP school in Palestine. Since 2020, he has been head of the Irène Joliot-Curie Laboratory for the Physics of the Two Infinities (IJCLab) at Paris-Saclay. He has published numerous scientific papers on detectors, data analysis and phenomenology.