Romun Nose

Fundamentals of Physics Part 2

Vacuum

The concept of vacuum is inherent to modern physics theory, whether at the sub-atomic, the atomic or the cosmic dimensions, and every aspect of modern physics theory was developed from, and is still based upon, a 2500 year old theory of the ultimate structure of matter.
This structure was one of matter in the form of distinct, indestructible particles that were separated by a non-material, empty space, a perfect vacuum. The theory is generally attributed to Leucippus or Democritus, who proposed that matter was ultimately indivisible and took the form of indestructible particles – atoms.
And it is important to understand the reasoning at that time for this assumption of a space completely devoid of matter.

Greek philosophers were well aware that there were three states of matter, the solid, liquid and gaseous states. And such atoms could logically explain the general rigidity of solid macroscopic matter as being composed of atoms in close proximity, such as a pile of sand or oranges. But to explain the fluidity of the liquid and the gaseous states required the atoms to be separated, in order that they could be ‘moved aside’ so that a macroscopic, solid body could, potentially, move through these states. And of course, with distinct particles, even in solid matter there would be a proportion of separating empty space.
Such a separation by a non-material space however raised a problem, in that in gases the atoms would naturally subside to the Earth’s surface under the influence of gravity, so further assumptions were necessary.
These were that these atoms were in eternal, kinetic motion at high velocities within an ’empty space’ and were colliding with one another, and further that these collisions were perfectly elastic, meaning that no energy was lost as a result of such interactions. And it was also necessary to assume that this separating ’empty space’ could not in any way inhibit the motions of atoms due to any frictional effects.

Thus it was concluded that this empty space was a perfect vacuum, the state of non-existence of matter, and this ancient concept of Greek philosophers remains firmly in place today, accepted by theoretical physicists as the core premise of the ultimate structure of matter today.
And it is this theory of ‘atoms and space’, i.e. the kinetic atomic theory of gases, essentially one of tangible, indestructible, material particles and ’empty space’, that was the basis from which all currently accepted theories have been developed, and are completely dependent. And not only those concerning the structure of macroscopic matter at sub-microscopic dimensions, but those relating to the wider structure of the universe.
Aristotle famously rejected the invention of the vacuum and, largely due to the subsequent rise to political domination of Western Europe by the Church of Rome, his views on this and the theory of matter suggested by him (along with a geocentric universe) was effectively enforced until the fragmentation and the dissipation of the church’s power during the Renaissance.
At this time, over two millenia later, Galileo was intrigued by the fact that water cannot be drawn up by suction above a height of more than around 10 metres and he suggested to a pupil, Torricelli, that he investigate this effect.

In 1643 Torricelli experimented with mercury instead and, filling an 80cm long, glass tube, closed at one end, with this liquid and, while holding a finger over the open end, inverted the tube into a bowl containing the same metal. On removing his finger the level of the mercury fell to a height of about 76cm leaving a space above it empty of the liquid.
The space thus produced at the top of the tube above the column of mercury was immediately accepted as being completely empty of matter, and so Torricelli was generally believed to have created a perfect vacuum.
This experimental result had wide repercussions, one of which was that it seriously undermined the, then widely accepted, authority of Aristotle.

And, it was of course no coincidence that, just four years later, in 1647, Pierre Gassendi resurrected Greek kinetic atomic theory, which was of course dependent on the ‘existence’ of vacua.
“As for the containing space in which atoms reside, Gassendi offers empirical and apriori arguments on behalf of a void. He takes the barometric experiments of his day, including his own at Toulon, to demonstrate the existence of at least a partial, disseminated void. Moving beyond such empirical argument, he echoes ancient atomists’ reasoning. Thus he rehearses the classical arguments that without a disseminated void between the parts of bodies, one cannot explain division and separation of matter at the level of basic particles, and that without the inane coacervatum (inter-particulate void) one cannot explain the motion of bodies through space.”1
Blaise Pascal’s subsequent experiments, by taking Torricelli’s apparatus up Mont Blanc in the Alps, demonstrated its value as a gauge of atmospheric pressure, the barometer. It was believed that the column of mercury was held up solely by atmospheric pressure acting on the external surface of the mercury, which led to the belief that the Earth’s atmosphere only extended to a certain altitude, whereafter the perfect vacuum of space began.

But it is now common knowledge that mercury freely evaporates at Standard Temperature and Pressure and, if it is subjected to lower and lower pressures, evaporation accelerates so, in the conditions of low pressure induced by the weight of the column of mercury, it is obvious that a rapid evaporation will occur at the top surface.
The so called ’empty space’ created is not a true vacuum and is a volume of low pressure containing mercury vapour, in other words it is full of mercury in its gaseous state.
Incidentally, this metal is extremely toxic, and today in laboratories where it is exposed, highly sophisticated breathing apparatus is employed. But Newton was unaware of this and at one period suffered a serious debilitating illness, which was no doubt mercury poisoning resulting from his many experiments with it, this was recently confirmed by an analysis of hairs taken from his body, which contain fifteen times normal levels.

However, as a result of Torricelli’s experiments it was generally believed not only that the vacuum occupied all of space above the Earth’s atmosphere, but that in line with Greek atomic theory it permeated down into these gases and into the liquid and solid matter at the surface.
“Torricelli’s invention did more than demonstrate the vacuum at the top of the tube. It supported the belief that the atmosphere is only a thin layer surrounding the Earth, and that outer space is empty”2
It was accordingly assumed that the supposed vacuum in the tube exerted no force, attractive or repulsive, on the upper surface of the mercury, and that the vacuum in the apparatus corresponded to the vacuum that occupied the celestial regions above the atmosphere.
That this view was widely accepted is indicated by Newton’s comment in one of his notebooks – “The height of the atmosphere may bee known from Torricellius his experiment”.

Thus it was assumed that above the earth’s thin cover of material atmosphere (extending, it was assumed, to an altitude of around 80-100 km) no gaseous matter was present and that, apart from the odd solid particle, a perfect vacuum occupied all the spaces separating the planets and the stars, and this belief remained embedded in scientific consciousness until the 1960’s, when near space exploration showed this to be false.
“The NASA Space Shuttle at 250- 300 Km altitudes ‘in space’ was found to be in air, with the same proportions of oxygen and nitrogen as at sea level, at a concentration of 1 billion atoms per m3 compared to 3 x 10¹⁹ per cc at sea level. – Thus in no sense could it be called a vacuum”.
“The sun too has an atmosphere, and because the sun accounts for more than nine tenths of the total mass of the solar system, its atmosphere is much larger than that of any planet. – The solar atmosphere extends far beyond the orbit of the earth, and at 80,000 Km our atmosphere merges imperceptibly with that of the sun”.3

But today it is still taught at secondary level physics that a barometer of this type contains a vacuum, for example a textbook states :-
“A mercury barometer works by stabilizing the level of mercury in the sealed glass tube with the atmospheric pressure on the open mercury chamber. The top of the barometer is filled with nothing (vacuum) – – – ”
Also if an online search engine is used to obtain images of barometers, in each case the volume above the column of mercury is described as a ‘vacuum’.
At this point it is necessary to define a ‘vacuum’, the word comes from Latin, meaning “an empty space, void”, derived from ‘vacuus’, meaning “empty”.
These are definitions from a scientific dictionary:-
Vacuum
1. A region containing no matter; free space.
2. A region in which gas is present at a low pressure.
3. The degree of exhaustion of gas within an enclosed space.
This is ambiguous and only the first is literally correct with respect to the Latin origin of the word. A true vacuum is the state of total non-existence of matter, in other words the non-existence of matter in any region/defined volume. I.e. ‘non-existence’, ‘nothingness’.
And while the word may be in wide colloquial use, as in ‘vacuum cleaner’, for professionals such as physicists and educators using the word ‘vacuum’ to describe compartments or regions of low or very densities, where matter is undoubtedly present, is misleading, low or very low pressure, would be more accurate.

As a result of Torricelli’s experiments, it was generally believed that a perfect vacuum was an integral part, not only of macroscopic matter, but was the dominant component of the wider universe. But this belief in a universal vacuum was, and still is, an insurmountable problem, an intangible barrier, for the transmission of forces, as articulated by Newton (in a letter to Richard Bentley at Cambridge):-
“That gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of any thing else by and through which their action or force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.” (Or, in less polite language, he would be stupid)
Newton was born in 1643, just prior to Gassendi’s revival of Greek theory, and around this time Descartes introduced his concept of an aether, a very dense medium of very small particles that pervaded all space. Later Hooke described light as a mechanical wave and then Huygens revised and expanded Hooke’s theory and hypothesised that light is a wave propagating through an aether, believing that it penetrated all matter and space.
Thus the purpose of this ‘luminiferous’ aetherial medium was to provide, or to ‘fill’ the vacuum with qualities that can transfer light, as a wave, between material entities or bodies, and this medium is discussed in the following paper.

1 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gassendi/
2 The History and Philosophy of Science, LWH Hull, Longmans, 1959
3 Air – The Nature of Atmosphere and Climate, Michael Allaby, Facts on File, 1992

Fundamentals of Physics Part 3

Aethers

Since Newton’s time innumerable aethers have been proposed, and new ones are presented frequently. But it needs to be stated that each and every such ‘vacuum filling’ compositions are pure speculations, they have no evidential basis and indeed are far beyond empirical investigation.

This from Wikipedia:-

“Aether theories in physics propose the existence of a medium, the aether a space-filling substance or field, thought to be necessary as a transmission medium for the propagation of electromagnetic or gravitational forces. The assorted aether theories embody the various conceptions of this “medium” and “substance”.”

Partly due to Newton’s apparent acceptance of outer space as a vacuum, and contrary to alternative suggestions, by such as Christiaan Huygens, in that light propagates as a wave, he proposed a ‘corpuscular’ (particulate) light, which was generally accepted up to 1801 when Young’s double-slit experiments proved conclusively that light propagates as a wave.

Today, despite many thousands of experiments attempting to falsify Young’s result and demonstrate that light is particulate, it is an indisputable fact that it is a wave.

“The period from Newton to Maxwell saw a bewildering variety of ethers which in many cases were introduced for specific purposes, such as explaining electricity, magnetism, light, gravitation, nervous impulses, and chemical action” (1)

“Æthers were invented for the planets to swim in, to constitute electric atmospheres and magnetic effluvia, to convey sensations from one part of our bodies to another, and so on, till a space had been filled three or four times with æthers.” (2)

Of course with Young’s findings the problem of transmission resurfaced, as all such aethers had to have remarkable properties, firstly, in accordance with the requirements of the kinetic atomic theory of gases, these ‘space-filling’ mediums could not inhibit the eternal, kinetic motion of atoms through or within it, while at the same time these were required to sustain the propagation of light and to somehow allow the force of gravitation to act attractively between material bodies of any dimension.

“Following the pioneering work of Thomas Young in England and Augustin Fresnel in France, by the 1820s the corpuscular theory of light was abandoned and replaced by a theory of transverse waves. The new “luminiferous” ether pervaded the universe and, according to most physicists, had to behave like an elastic solid that – strangely – did not interact with other matter. Although it had the form of a solid, and was sometimes likened to steel, the planets and comets passed through it without noticing any resistance. Strange indeed!” (3)

However one such concept, based on the assumption that there was an absolute reference frame in the universe, a ‘stationary’ aether, was dealt a fatal blow in 1887, when Michelson and Morley’s sophisticated experiments, which were designed to prove its existence by demonstrating that the motion of the Earth through it could be detected, failed to do so.

To explain this ‘null’ result some aether proponents then introduced an ‘entrained aether’, i.e. one that moved with the Earth, but the problems with this concept, in a celestial sense, were enormous, and it was generally rejected.

Following Young’s experiments, the next important development, with respect to vacuum theory, was Clerk Maxwell’s statistical treatment of the kinetic theory of gases, his ‘Laws of Distribution of Velocities’ published in 1860, theselaws were later generalised by Boltzmann and are known today as the Maxwell-Boltzmann Distribution.

When Maxwell formally postulated electromagnetic waves and identified light as being just a partof the spectrum of electro-magnetic radiation (EMR), he initially considered the possibility of an aether to sustain the transmission of such waves, but later distanced himself from this concept.

“Maxwell also introduced the concept of the electromagnetic field in comparison to force lines that Faraday described. By understanding the propagation of electromagnetism as a field emitted by active particles, Maxwell could advance his work on light. At that time, Maxwell believed that the propagation of light required a medium for the waves, dubbed the luminiferous aether.” (Wikipedia)

In 1900 Max Planck presented his solution to the “Ultra-violet Catastrophe” in that light exists in discrete quanta of energy. Later described as a ‘mass-less particle’,and named as the ‘photon’.

In 1909 in a lecture at Columbia University, Max Planck said: “In place of the so-called free ether there is now substituted the absolute vacuum, … . I believe it follows as a consequence that no physical properties can be consistently ascribed to the absolute vacuum” (4)

“Two years later Planck would suggest the notion of zero-point energy and thereby unwittingly initiate a development that led to the modern view of a quantum vacuum endowed with physical properties” (5)

The next development in this context was of course the ‘Einsteinian revolution’ at the beginning of the 20^th century, with the Theories of Special, and later General Relativity.

Einstein believed, along with all scientists at the time, that the universe was, what we now now as, the ‘Milky Way’ galaxy and that the Earth’s atmosphere was finite, above which space was an absolute vacuum. And in his paper introducing Special Relativity (SRT) in 1905 he dismisses the aether stating:- “ a luminiferous ether will prove to be superfluous”, and introduced the counter-intuitive concept of ‘wave-particle duality’, suggesting that light propagatesin some instances(e.g.through the vacuum of space) as a ‘particle’ and in others as a ‘wave’.

Around this time he also published a paper on Brownian Motion, a phenomenon that was accepted asexperimental evidence for both the existence of atoms and for the kinetic atomic theory of gases, and the core assumption of this theory in that gases are largely composed of a vacuum and thus that the vacuum permeated all macroscopic matter.

But 15 years later in 1920, following the publication of the general theory of relativity (GRT)in 1917, Einstein, in a lecture entitled “Ether and the Theory of Relativity” he says:-

“ – we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether. According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable”

Robert B. Laughlin, Nobel Laureate in Physics, later had this to say about the ether in contemporary theoretical physics:-

“It is ironic that Einstein’s most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed. The word ‘ether’ has extremely negative connotations in theoretical physics because of its past association with opposition to relativity.”

“The modern concept of the vacuum of space is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo.” (6)

The next important development for ‘vacuum theory’ was Rutherford’s analysis of the results of experiments carried out under his direction, which effectively obliterated Dalton’s indestructible, solid atom, suggesting that atoms instead were, by volume, composed almost entirely of a vacuum, with a tiny material nucleus andelectrons orbiting around it.

The initial discovery was made by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden in 1909 when they performed the gold foil experiment under the direction of Rutherford, in which they fired a beam of alpha particles (helium nuclei) at layers of gold leaf only a few atoms thick.

Their results showed that around 1 in 8000 alpha particles were deflected by very large angles (over 90°), while the rest passed straight through with little or no deflection. From this, Rutherford concluded that the majority of the mass was concentrated in a minute, positively charged region (the nucleus/ central charge) surrounded by electrons. (Wikipedia}

Like most scientific models, Rutherford’s atomic model was neither perfect nor complete. According to classical, Newtonian physics, it was in fact impossible. Accelerating charged particles radiate electromagnetic waves, so an electron orbiting an atomic nucleus in theory would spiral into the nucleus as it loses energy. To fix this problem, scientists had to incorporate quantum mechanics into Rutherford’s model.

Following Rutherford’s atom and the development of Quantum Mechanics and Electrodynamics, Paul Dirac proposed a model of the vacuum as an infinite sea of particles with negative energy to explain the anomalous negative-energy quantum states predicted by the Dirac equation for relativistic electrons.

Paul Dirac wrote in 1951: “Physical knowledge has advanced much since 1905, notably by the arrival of quantum mechanics, and the situation [about the scientific plausibility of Aether] has again changed. If one examines the question in the light of present-day knowledge, one finds that the Aether is no longer ruled out by relativity, and good reasons can now be advanced for postulating an Aether. . . . . . . .We have now the velocity at all points of space-time, playing a fundamental part in electrodynamics. It is natural to regard it as the velocity of some real physical thing. Thus with the new theory of electrodynamics [vacuum filled with virtual particles] we are rather forced to have an Aether”.

“A full quantum theory of light (QED) had been developed, and one of its features was a new understanding of the vacuum, of emptiness. Where before the vacuum had been understood as pure emptiness – no matter, no light, no heat – now there was a residual hidden energy. Take away everything, cool to absolute zero in temperature, and still the vacuum remains, and it is shimmering with a special kind of light. Called the “zero-point energy of the vacuum” it seems an essential part of quantum field theory.” (Wikipedia)

So, together with a Relativistic Aether, now we encounter a “quantum aether”, and, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, Nils Bohr is describing this aether as having “vacuum energy” and “vacuum fluctuations”.

It was Richard Feynman who first suggested that the basic partial-differential equations of theoretical physics might be actually describing macroscopic motion of some infinitesimal entities he called X-ons. He suggested X-ons as the unifying concept for description of physical universe, though he did not specify their properties.

So physics today is still based upon this pure assumption of discontinuous atoms in a vacuum, but now the hypothetical vacuum has been extended to occupy the atom itself, which would reduce the actual volume of matter almost to nothing. So, having dug a substantial hole for themselves, physicists now are left with ‘filling the vacuum’ and I quote a certain Dr de Rũjula:- “As it turns out the vacuum is not empty – there is a difference between the vacuum and nothingness” “Surprisingly, of all know ‘substances’, the vacuum is the least well understood” Rather an understatement for something that has never been isolated and, even if this were possible, it could not be examined or investigated by any technological means.

In addition to these there are a great number of other aethers, (below are listed just a few of the more well-known) all of which (along with all of the above) are purely speculative, in that there is no empirical evidence whatever for their ‘existence’ and the only motivation for these ideas is that physicists are forced to acknowledge that “there must be something, some medium that will permit transmission through the ubiquitous vacuum.”

Bohr’s Zero Point Energy

Dirac’s ‘Zero Point Field’

La Violette’s ‘Kinetic Aether’

Aspden’s ‘Liquid Crystal Aether’

Thornhill and Meyl’s ‘Cosmic Neutrino Background’

Tombe’s ‘Electric Dipole Sea’

Simhony’s ‘Cubic Space Lattice’

Correa’s ‘Ambipolar Aether’

Tewari’s ‘Space Vortex Theory”

But of course none of the myriad of vacuum filling alternative aethers, ‘strings’ ‘loops’, etc. etc., are remotely capable of investigation, as essentially the only method of investigating the sub-atomic dimension is by firing what are assumed to be ‘particles’ at something. And as this ’empty space’, by definition cannot react to such impulses, these are consequently unverifiable and speculative constructs.

But if the vacuum and/or its constituent aethers of any description cannot be proven to exist by any empirical means and, as it is not possible to define what matter ‘is‘ ultimately, then the currently accepted structures of both the sub-microscopic and the celestial dimensions are purely hypothetical, in other words they are speculative constructs based entirely upon a belief in the ‘existence’ of an all permeating vacuum and that ‘real’ matter is almost on the point of non-existence.

And ‘Belief System‘ is an accurate description of the state of the science of physics today as the (incompatible) bases of modern physics, Relativity and Quantum theories, are completely dependent upon this assumption of a universally permeating vacuum.

So the wheel turns full circle, first the vacuum is ‘proven’ to exist, extra atomically, and then it is ‘proven’ to extend down into the atom itself.

Then ‘space-filling’, non-material aethers are proposed to fill space, and now it is suggested that space is full of energy.

“There is no such thing as absolutely empty space. All space contains fluctuating fields and particles. Even in the emptiest space that the laws of nature permit, there are energy levels about which the energies of the fields and particles fluctuate; and these energy levels are never sharply defined” (7)

But in a later book by Frank Close “The Void” he states unequivocally that volumetrically the atom is composed of one trillionth matter, in the form of the nucleus and electrons, while the “rest is a perfect vacuum”. (8)

The facts are however that both these statements are purely speculative as these hypothetical, non-material spaces are far beyond experimental verification.

There is however empirical evidence that the creation of the state of the non-existence of matter in any situation, i.e. a space completely empty of matter at absolute zero pressure and temperature, is not possible.

1 (Cantor and Hodge 1981).

2 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Maxwell (1965, vol. 2, p. 763)

3 Helge Kragh (June 2013). Empty space or ethereal plenum?

4 (Planck 1915, p. 119).

5 (Kragh 2012).

6 Laughlin, Robert B. (2005). A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down. Basic Books.

7 ‘Nothingness’ Henning Genz, Basic Books 2001.

8 The Void, Frank Close, OUP, 2006

Fundamentals of Physics

4) Creating a Vacuum

For centuries scientists have been trying to create lower and lower temperatures and pressures, initially by evacuating gas from containers with mechanical pumps.

But today more refined technologies such as diffusion, ionisation, chemisorption etc. are used to produce ‘high’ partial vacuums for commercial and experimental use and it is possible to (momentarily) achieve extremely low pressures, termed as ultra-high vacuums (UHV), to within a fraction of absolute zero pressure and temperature.

“Ultra-high vacuum is vacuum regime characterised by pressures lower than about 10–⁷ pascal or 100 nanopascals (10–⁹ mbar, ~10–⁹ torr). (Wikipedia)

But there is no single vacuum pump that can operate all the way from atmospheric pressure to ultra-high vacuum. Instead, a series of different pumps is used, according to the appropriate pressure range for each pump. High pumping speeds are necessary and multiple vacuum pumps are used in series and/or parallel.

Pumps commonly used in combination to achieve UHV include:-

1) Turbomolecular pumps (especially compound and/or magnetic bearing types)

2) Ion pumps

3) Titanium sublimation pumps

4) Non-evaporable getter (NEG) pumps

5) Cryopumps

But the UHV’s produced cannot be sustained for any length of time, this is due to contamination of the sample resulting from such effects as ‘out-gassing’.

Out-gassing can include sublimation and evaporation, which are phase transitions of a solid or liquid substance into a gas, in other words at these extremely low conditions of pressure, atoms, either contained within, or vapourised from the surfaces of, the solid matter of the apparatus are drawn into the volume under examination.

“Out-gassing is a significant problem for UHV systems. Out-gassing can occur from two sources: surfaces and bulk materials. Out-gassing from bulk materials is minimized by careful selection of materials with low vapor pressures (such as glass, stainless steel, and ceramics) for everything inside the system. Hydrogen and carbon monoxide are the most common background gases in a well-designed UHV system. Both Hydrogen and CO diffuse out from the grain boundaries in stainless steel and Helium can diffuse through steel and glass from the outside air.” (Wikipedia)

And extraordinary preparatory steps are required to reduce these effects, which include the following:-

1) Baking the system (for one-two days at up to 400°C while the pumps are running) to remove water or hydrocarbons adsorbed to the walls.

2) Minimizing the surface area in the chamber.

3) High conductance tubing to pumps — short and fat, without obstruction.

4) Low out-gassing materials such as certain stainless steels.

5) Avoiding creating pits of trapped gas behind bolts, welding voids, etc.

6) Electropolishing all metal parts after machining or welding.

7) Low vapor pressure materials (ceramics, glass, metals, and teflon if unbaked).

8) Chilling chamber walls to cryogenic temperatures during use.

9) Avoid all traces of hydrocarbons, including skin oils in a fingerprint.

These preparatory requirements, together with the actual pumping processes, use an enormous amount of energy and, as it is not technically possible to completely eliminate out-gassing or other contaminating efflux, these very low pressures, or conditions, cannot be sustained for any length of time, it is therefore clear that there is a progressively increasing force of resistance to the decompression of a gas, and a very strong resistance to the maintenance of such levels of pressure.

Why should this be the case when the only external resistance is that generated by atmospheric pressure, which in theory should be easily overcome by modern machinery?

In the opposite direction, for example, there are sophisticated machines in regular use today that compress materials to upwards of 200,000 times atmospheric pressure, for example to produce industrial diamond from carbon.

This high level of resistance requires an explanation.

It is a core premise of currently accepted physics theory that a perfect vacuum cannot influence matter in any way, and accordingly nor can any of its hypothetical, aetherial constituents.

This being the case, the question is:-

What forces are operating in these circumstances to prevent the extraction of all matter from within the compartment, and what is the source of this resistance?

The simple diagram below illustrates this situation with a perfectly sealed piston cylinder apparatus, and a single atom within the cylinder.

The hypothetical, non-material, empty space which is believed to occupy virtually all the chamber, by definition, can have no influence and, as matter is undeniably present within the compartmental space under investigation (and in the surrounding structure), it can only be either the single atom, and/or the atomic structure of the apparatus which generates this exponentially increasing resistance.

In other words it is matter, and matter alone, that is the cause of this resistance.

As mentioned earlier, today it is being said that the vacuum is not empty, but is permeated with waves of energy, etc. etc., but again such a medium has to have the qualities of non-resistance to the free motion of atoms and molecules within it (i.e. is a zero-inertia medium) and so could not generate any resistance.

But, in terms of the kinetic atomic theory of gases, where the only force allowed is a positive one generated by the collisions of atoms, the generation of such a resistive or negative force is inexplicable, and if the matter of our experience is almost entirely composed of a non-material ’empty space’ (of any speculative description) then, technically speaking, it should be very easy to remove all atoms from within it.

It is an undeniable fact that current physics theory has no answer to this question and, as these numerous empirical results are a direct falsification of current, kinetic-atomic atomic theory of gases, it would be accordingly necessary to conclude that this, the base theory of the science of physics, is invalid.