I'm no scientist, but the field of quantum physics has always fascinated my arts-loaded head just because of the sheer illogic of it all. There's a lot of poetic stuff happening in the physical world the smaller and deeper you go--things that both exist and do not exist at the same time, things that move from place to place without appearing in between their starting point and destination. The world is made of a whole lot of weird. And physicists have just found a way to manipulate the oddity to create light from nothing.

I use the word "nothing" somewhat lightly here because it's becoming clearer and clearer that there's really no such thing. We once thought of vacuums as the absence of pretty much anything--no matter, no particles, nothing. But newer insight into the behavior of matter has shown that vacuums are full of particles that blip in and out of existence all the time. Matter and anti-matter can spontaneously happen and then disappear back into the aether. "Nothing" as we once thought of it is actually filled with tiny objects that only exist for a tiny fraction of a second. And we don't really understand why. The more we discover, the less we know, it seems. 

We've proven the existence of these flickering particles by allowing them to move objects around. If two mirrors are placed very, very close to each other, the virtual photons outside of the mirrors will push them together. Scientists have physically measured the results of this effect, known as the Casimir force. It's a real thing. The barely-existent photons exist just enough to be physically detectable.

Now, physicists at the Chalmers University of Technology have found a way to channel those virtual photons into actual light. Theoretically, creating light from a vacuum should be easy enough provided that you can move a small mirror at the speed of light. The mirror would soak up enough energy from the virtual photons to emit real photons as light. Given that it's hard to get much besides light to go that fast, the researchers had to come up with a clever mechanism to create the same effect. They invented something called the SQUID, a superconducting quantum interference device that is extra-sensitive to magnetic fields. Inside of a superconducting circuit, the SQUID acted more or less as a mirror. By subjecting the device to a magnetic field that changed direction a few billion times a second, scientists could get the surrogate mirror to wobble at 5% the speed of light--which is still pretty darn fast. Fast enough to get the desired effect, anyway. The team could detect a splattering of real photons coming out of the device. The results matched the theory. It's possible, technically, to scrape light out of a lightless space. There's no real practical use for this yet, but it's a pretty awesome demonstration of the utter madness of how the world works on the quantum level.