http://www.amazon.com/QED-Strange-Theory-Light-Matter/dp/069...

If you don't really understand what this article is talking about, Feynman can help you.

Oh god. This is what I get for reading new scientist...

People hear "virtual particle" and have no clue what that means and associate it with other "virtual" things. Or, more directly connected to the title of this story, hear that matter is "merely" "vacuum fluctuations", which, thanks in no small part to Star Trek, we think has connotations of instability or transientness.

No. Matter is matter. Matter is stable on a cosmological scale, and no amount of fiddling with English words shall add or remove one iota of stability. Matter may consist of vacuum fluctuations (where you probably know neither what is meant by vacuum nor what is meant by fluctuations), matter may consist of the infinite love of fuzzy puppies, matter may be divine farting, but matter is matter, it is what it is, and there is nothing more or less "real" about it today than there was yesterday.

I hate the pattern of:

1. In your ignorance, define X as Y. (Example: "My soul is a material thing that houses my consciousness and leaves my body when I die.")

2. Find out Y isn't real. ("We have weighed the body between life and death, and the mass is the same. Y does not exist.")

3. Declare that X isn't real. Usually with a whole lot of "aHA! Got you!" thrown in for good measure. ("Therefore, nothing like the soul exists and you religious people are morons for believing in anything supernatural!" If you can't see the logical flaw in that argument, look harder...)

We get this pattern in crappy articles about QM all the time. Consciousness too.

Note: I'm not saying I believe the definition or that it is complete, and I'm certainly not going to defend it, but maybe worth thinking about.

...nope, doesn't work for me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylogism

Physicists have now confirmed that the apparently substantial stuff is actually no more than fluctuations in the quantum vacuum.

So, if they have NOW confirmed this, why didn't the article cite the work that confirmed this? Also the article didn't mention anything on who confirmed and how. It talks about some computer simulations and concludes:

Although physicists expected theory to match experiment eventually, it is an important landmark.

Since when did physicists start considering computer simulations as experimental evidence?

You mean the theoretical proof?

It will be a sad day when the supercomputers we build to solve these equations gain intelligence and use their knowledge against us. Maybe they'll invent some cool null ray.

Solution to the equations of quantum field theory can be formally expressed using what's called a perturbation expansion. This is similar to using a power series expansion to solve an algebraic or differential equation. In a rough way of looking at things, higher order terms in the expansion correspond to particle interactions with more "stuff" involved. This equivalence is what Feynman diagrams represent.

In the case of electromagnetism, this technique is very effective. The term corresponding to a single photon exchange is 137 times larger than the term corresponding to two photons, and so on. As a result, perturbation theory works very well for these calculations.

However, for nuclear forces in a proton or neutron, all the terms are about the same size. You can't cut off the expansion and get a meaningful estimate. In the Feynman diagram view, this is saying that you can't think of it as just exchanges of small numbers of gluons, rather, you'd need to consider huge number of particles and diagrams of extreme complexity. This is the sense in which the equations are "too difficult to solve". You need to do something totally different from perturbation theory to get a solution. Lattice computations, as described in the article, are the best alternative technique we have available at this point.

Headline should be "It's nearly confirmed" as the LHC has not done this yet.