From the Vault: Horror Vacui, Part 4

an incoherent concept. So in the previous episode of this one we talked about how this view in physics persisted through the Middle Ages and part of the early Modern period in Europe until important experiments by figures like Evangelista Torricelli, the man with the batman symbol for a mustache, or rob I think, as you pointed out, the sort of the crucifix goatee.

atmospheric pressure. But something we alluded to in the previous episode is also the fact that while the laws of nature don't exactly rule out a vacuum in the way that Aristotle and the Scholastics thought, there is also some nuance to the issue, because you can create an approximate vacuum, but it's really hard or perhaps impossible to create a

perfect vacuum, depending on how you define your goals. When we talk about a vacuum in like real world examples instead of you know, ideal thought experiments, we are never talking about completely empty spaces with no particles whatsoever. Instead, we're usually talking about an area where the density of gas particles is very or the inside of a container where the density of gas particles is much lower than

the density of particles on the outside. And the latter type of vacuum where a container that has a lower density of gas particles than the world outside, is common throughout the world of technology and electrical appliances and scientific equipment, especially of years past, but still somewhat today. A couple of classic examples incandescent light bulbs. They make light by running current through a filament that gets so hot that

it starts to emit photons it starts to glow. But these bulbs are not full of air at regular atmospheric pressure, and if they were that would be a problem. The filament would tend to fail very quickly. That's not good for incandescent bulbs, so instead they are typically either filled with an inert gas like argon or nitrogen, or they are pumped out to contain a vacuum. The earliest light

bulbs were vacuum based rather than inert gas based. Another component used in electronics, one that will be very familiar to electric guitar players, is vacuum tubes, which were once commonly used to manipulate current to amplify and rectify electrical signals. They've been replaced with silicon transistors in most modern devices,

but they still have their uses. And by the way, if you want to see something really weird and awesome, look up pictures of vacuum tube based computers before transistors took over to become the logic circuitry inside computers. I guess that happened roughly around the sixties or so. But before that, the information processing in computers was done on

large arrays of vacuum tubes. And I'm very tempted to say like that, I wish to see a certain kind of computer snobbery arise, where there are like gamers who are like, oh, you play on transistors, I've got a vacuum tube rig.

state amps. Rob, I don't know if you've ever come across this debate, you know, sometimes I think people look on the tube preference as a kind of snobbery. Personally, I can see both sides, Like, I think solid state amps sound great, but tubes are. They're cool? Yeah.

about tubes. They might kind of feel differently when you're playing a guitar through one, especially if you're in the room with it as opposed to listening to a recording. I'm not sure.

area outside. And there are actually designations for the different levels of vacuum that are achieved through technological means. You know, you can have like a medium vacuum, a high vacuum, an ultra high vacuum, and so that's what's possible on Earth. But then you might be wondering in response to that, Wait a minute, though, isn't outer space at least a vacuum. Isn't the space between the planets or the space between

the stars at least a vacuum. Again, the answer here is yes and no. It depends on what you mean. Space is a vacuum when compared to earth atmosphere, and it is even lower density than most partial vacuums created

by humans. I was trying to find a good estimate for the density of outer space, and I came across a couple things in that book I was talking about In the last episode called the Void by the physicists, Frank Close, he writes about while he's writing about the reasoning that led people to assume that outer space was a vacuum when scientists such as Blaize Pascal started to notice that the atmospheric pressure was different at different altitude.

So you go up on a mountain, the atmospheric pressure is lower. That does tend to suggest that if you go higher and higher, the density of particles just keeps getting lower and lower, and you would eventually reach an altitude at which there was effectively nowhere to breathe anymore. There was no atmosphere anymore, which some people found maybe kind of like threatening in principle or maybe threatening to their theological ideas of how the universe was put together. Nevertheless,

you could show it was true. As you go higher and higher the density gets lower. So close, writes quote, at a height of one hundred kilometers, the pressure is less than a billionth of that on the ground, at four hundred kilometers a million millionth, and en route to the moon in space it is down by ten to the nineteen, an amount that is less than the size

of a proton compared to a kilometer. We can thus say that essentially all of the atmosphere is a thin shell whose thickness is less than one thousandth of the Earth's radius. Wow, I don't doubt that's true. But that's the kind of thing that I don't even I don't usually picture it that way. I you know, I picture the atmosphere is extending much higher up off the surface of the Earth.

following are approximate. But what gun says is that roughly within the Solar System space between the planets contains an average of about five atoms per cubic centimeter, so that's very low density, but there's still is gas out there. It's just extremely dispersed. In interstellar space the space between solar systems in our galaxy, so like where you know where the voyager probes are eventually headed to, or where Omuamua came from. That interstellar space has about one atom

per cubic centimeter according to gun here. And then in intergalactic space, the space between galaxies, the density is about one hundred times less than that. It gets pretty lonely out there, right, but still there are not no particles. They just get farther and farther apart on average. So the reason space is so empty is of course gravity.

Objects with mass attract one another, so mass tends to clump together over time, creating this varied terrain of cosmic density, with very high density say in the middle of a star, and still lower density around that star and around the planets around that star, and then lower density in between the stars, and then lower density in between the galaxies

and so forth. But it wasn't always this way. In the early history of the universe, matter was dispersed far more evenly, and you could think of the early universe in a way as a kind of well, in a strange way, almost kind of like an ocean. I guess it wasn't liquid, but like an ocean or a cloud or something where there were more uniform distributions. But then as space expanded that more varied terrain that we know today influenced by gravity emerged.

average density of the universe overall? And so I was looking around at that I did find a NASA page on this This is according to research I think carried out by w MAP by the Wilkinson Microwave an isotropy probe that was looking at fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, and in a write up on that research by NASA that they say, quote w MAP determined that the universe is flat, from which it follows that the mean energy density in the universe is equal to the critical density

within a zero point five percent margin of error. This is equivalent to a mass density of because as an aside, ultimately mass and energy can be exchanged for one another, they are equivalently. You know, mass is just a huge amount of energy. Coming back to the quote, this is equivalent to a mass density of nine point nine times ten to the negative thirty grams per cubic centimeter. But the density of normal matter is not even that high because most of the energy density in the universe is

not normal matter. It's dark matter or dark energy. So maybe normal is not even the right word, because the kind of matter we're talking about that we're familiar with is the minority of stuff. Less than five percent of the stuff in the universe is actually made of atoms. So the quote actual energy density of atoms is equivalent

to roughly one proton per four cubic meters. So you can imagine kind of a like a large palette box and that's like one proton in there, and that's the average density of the universe.

to the experience that is boundary breaking. You know, floating in this salt bath that is the same temperature as your body serves to sort of break down the division between where you stop and the rest of the world begins. So, yeah, there are plenty of cases like you don't have to have an isolation tank to engage in that kind of boundary dispute, you know.

birds and all sorts of little shells to look at. Likewise, of course, a walk through the woods is just I mean, we've talked about this before on the podcast, Like your your senses are able to fully engage age in the environment for which they have evolved, taking in all these details and changing details in the world around you.

created by humans, if not the lowest pressure. And it's actually the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, which is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN. I believe it is still the largest vacuum system in operation in the world. It was certainly at the time it was put together, and I can't think of what would be larger than it. But it has more than one hundred kilometers of piping held in a

state of vacuum for various purposes. There has to be ultra high vacuum piping for the actual particle beams to travel through so that like the accelerated particles don't collide with gas molecule and ruin the experiments. I'm not sure what would happen if they did collide. Maybe it could be worse than ruining experiments. Certainly wouldn't be good. You don't want it. But there are also advanced vacuum systems used to like insulate other elements of the collider, such

as the magnets or the helium distribution line. So a lot of evacuated space going on at the LHC facility, and it's at extremely low density. They compare various vacua that they create to the density of interstellar space, so that is horror vacuity in physics. But one thing I've been wanting to come back to is the fear of emptiness or the fear of empty spaces as an actual literal fear that humans feel the kind of uneasiness that one experiences in a depopulated space.

this horror associated with depopulated spaces. Like you're saying, and if you've seen Suspiria the original, though I really like the remake as well, and I don't think they recreated this scene in the remake, but I could be wrong. This scene involves a blind man walking through an open, unoccupied city plaza at night. There are no other human beings in sight, the environment is pretty well illuminated, though

there are still some deep pockets of shadow. There's a growing sense of threat and terror and eventually, and I think we get some very wide shots here too to really take in all that space, and then as the tension builds, the dog begins to bark, and in a nasty twist, because again this is a Gilat film and they're often nasty, the dog turns on the blind man

and kills him. But the way the scene builds up to that moment takes just full advantage of this very open space, this feeling that there's just something wrong in the openness of all of this, that there's just this one individual and his dog out here and something terrible is about to happen.

and richness and stuff. You know, they're full of patterns, and so I think the scene of you know, the man who is unfortunately cursed by the witches and then this attack happens on him. It gets especially scary because it's so unlike the rest of the movie, having all this emptiness and blank space in the night. But I was thinking about this and about how the horror genre in particular tends to favor blank, vacant, empty locations in

multiple ways. So one way is that they tend to favor settings that are like literally emptied in the narrative sense. They are literally emptied of human activity or neglected by humans in some way. So think of how much horror

loves like abandoned or empty buildings and settlements. Maybe the first idea that comes to my mind is Dracula's Castle, which is interesting because it is a castle that has no servants bustling about, no courtiers, just empty halls and chambers, and then the solitary figure of Dracula himself as the host. It's kind of like a like a Where's Waldo, except there's just one guy there on the page and he's really staring at your neck.

it assumes, and it's kind of a great premise. And there's a moment where they ask the character, who is in this telling a real vampire, if he read the novel Dracula. He says yes. He says the novel made him sad, and they said why and he says, because Dracula had no servants.

many people, but he's the only one there. I mean, I guess later we find out there's some other you know, ghoul type creatures, but at first it's just empty except for him. But think of other movies with just abandoned locations, ghost towns, abandoned settlements, you know, empty empty streets and

other places at night and so forth. Rob, I'm not sure if you've noticed the same thing, but it strikes me that horror movies especially favor locations that are not just empty as a matter of course, like you'd expect them to be empty, but locations that are empty in contrast to how we usually see them.

presence of it was there previously is just gone. But one example that does come to mind, and this is a zombie film, but twenty eight days Later, of course, that's all those wonderful shots of what depopulated London and our character walking around there and sort of experiencing just the overwhelming emptiness of the city.

wouldn't usually expect to encounter there. Instead, locations that I think of as most common to horror movies are like empty versions of places you would usually expect to be full. So not just cities like at the beginning of twenty eight Days Later, but think of empty hospitals at the night shift, empty churches and cathedrals, where's the congregation empty school buildings after hours, empty empty castles. Like I said at the beginning, you know what happened to the crew

of the event Horizon? Why is this spaceship empty? So I think empty locations like this lend themselves well to horror for multiple reasons. One is a kind of just like literal understanding of danger in the world. Like, you know, there's an uneasiness that comes from a location being empty, because it sort of me like you're on your own

against whatever might threaten you. But if for the locations full of people, you might be able to get help from the werewolf if it's going to come at you, Like people usually feel safer in numbers for totally good and logical reasons.

They both take place in shopping malls, and of course thinking about Donna the Dead from George Romero and Shopping Mall, both films in which our characters find themselves in a depopulated mall shopping mall environment, and eventually they're gonna have to deal with of course zombies in one film, and well and also like evil bikers in one film, but then in the other film theyre can have to deal

with killer robots. And in both of these there's kind of like this I don't know, this kind of I guess capitalist rebellion in energy to them, where it's like this place that contained me through commerce and also just the social environment of the mall. Now those constraints are not there, and I can just go into any store

in the mall and steal things. But then on the other hand, yes, it's like all the things that made this a normal place, that made this a cathedral of American culture during the nineteen eighties or what have you, that's gone as well. There's something unholy about the environment.

So there was the thing I already said about empty locations, or in a very literal sense, they're scarier just because like there's safety in numbers, but empty locations and abandoned the locations I think are also good fodder for horror on a conceptual level because in some cases they invite you to wonder why the place is empty, like what

happened here? Where did the people go? Or as you just said, they invite you to sort of look upon the purpose of the place with a newly critical eye, like when people are not doing the things they're normally doing in this place, what is this place actually form?

be used for unholy rites. But finally, I think there are also conceptual suggestions, like a place that is empty in contrast to the expectation that it should be full, like all of these depopulated places we've been talking about that has long been associated with death, right like you would think under normal old ideas like humans have left this formerly inhabited place, like a soul leaving a body.

But in addition to all these more literal concerns, I think horror films in particular, but other genres as well, often use blank space also known as negative space, in the frame of the film as a visual marker to create uneasiness. So this is less literal about like what is threatening the characters, and more just kind of the

feelings that we get from how a movie looks. I don't know how much of this is a natural secological expectation that humans have and how much is just sort of a like a learned convention emergent convention of filmmaking that we have all learned implicitly from watching movies. But I think the baseline fact is that when we see negative space in a movie, we somewhat expect it to

become filled. There's empty space on the screen. We expect something to come to occupy that space, and of course, once you have expectation, you have the ability to create tension, and by denying the fulfillment of that expectation, like you know, like a character peers out into the darkness and it's uniform darkness, not filled in with detail, there's no detail, or they look into an empty room with nothing in it,

or some other negative space. We expect something to happen, something to fill that space or to come into view, and if it doesn't, that is unresolved tension and uneasiness and the sort of the prime example, like one of the core feelings that is evoked by weird fiction and cinema.

But still it does this fabulous job of establishing a cloudy or even open sky as being possibly a threat. And I found that when I watched it in the theater. When I left the theater, when I left the dark theater and went out into the day, because it was a matinee that I attended, instantly I kind of felt in danger. I kind of felt some of the danger from the film still, like residually coursing through my body to where I was like, let's go ahead and get

to the car. I don't want to. I don't feel great walking across this this wide open parking lot beneath this the scary sky.

of essentially falling up into the sky. Now. I couldn't find any academic discussion of this alleged phobia, and I'm not doubting anyone's experiences around it, because for starters, there's plenty of room for anxiety and paranoia to creep up

in one's experience of reality. It may simply just be newly defined and understudied, but to whatever extent it's an actual phobia, it would seem to be kind of a subset of this idea of chinophobia pronounce fear of the open you a feeling that this open sky might either swallow you up or somehow gravity is going to fail and you'll float up into it.

this effect where you think about what would happen if I, like, what if I just fell up into it? And it doesn't make any sense. Nobody's like, this is not going to happen. You have you have a number of other concerns if gravity stops working, besides you know where you're going to float to. But but yeah, I can I can sort of look back on times in my life where I've been looking up at like a big, clear blue sky or some sort of a starscape and feeling this,

especially with the Blue Sky. I think there are times where I looked up at the starscape and I was maybe a little afraid of aliens more than I was afraid of just falling up into the blue.

in Egyptian Mythology. And I wasn't able to find a satisfying answer on this, but I mean, this definitely seems to be the case with the ancient Egyptians. But the ancient Egyptians were not the only people to find the sky very interesting. They weren't the only ones to have an advanced astronomy. I mean, you look at various examples from the ancient world, the Babylonians, the Greeks, India, China, Persia,

the Mayans. They all had robust astronomical systems. And there are disciplines that look into this sort of question, like how did the perception of the sky and the understanding of the cosmos and the movements of the stars. More specifically, like how did this affect a given civilization and their beliefs and their views. You have the disciplines of archaeo

astronomy and ethno astrology. And there's a lot of interesting work out there concerning, say, for example, certain architectural traditions and to what extent they were created with astronomy astronomical data in mind.

cultures or anything not that I could tell. If it's out there and I missed it, and you know about it, listeners,

write in and let me know. But more often you seem to see this mix related to astronomical traditions that where a culture, a civilization realizes that okay, you know, the trackable movement of the sun and the stars is linked to various cycles of life, the passage of time, I am, the seasons, navigation, and then you also have purely supernatural concepts such as omens and portents and looking to the stars to try and divine the future, and

looking for yeah, individual data, data about the individual experience in the heavens, alongside broader information about how life works

in the long term on Earth. So within a given astronomical culture, there might be a number of important but kind of mundane considerations about the sky, alongside lofty religious, cosmological ideas and negative superstitions concerning certain anomalies such as say, eclipses, which we've discussed in the show before, as well as things that these certain lunar phases and other things that might in some cases might be out of the ordinary or somehow novel, but.

of monster threatening reality and so forth. But then on the other side, you have, even though they may seem like strange anomalies out of nowhere to some observers, and perhaps at sometimes you're still going to have astronomy get on top of that, as we discussed in those episodes we did on Eclipse Myths, and people begin to realize, Okay, these things are trackable, and we can tell when they

will occur, or we can predict them. Now. Within the context of horror, this idea of fearing the sky, fearing big open places, it does line up not only thematically but specifically with the twentieth century writings of HP love Draft.

I was looking around, and you know, I don't think I don't remember reading this story, but there's a nineteen twenty one story titled The Other Gods, and there's this bit in it where the character who's I'm sure clearly going mad thinking about, you know, some sort of monstrous reality all around him, exclaims the other gods, the other gods, the gods of the auber hells that guard the feeble

gods of Earth. Look away, go back, do not see, do not see the vengeance of the infinite abysses, that cursed, that damnable pit, merciful gods of Earth. I am falling into the sky.

or greater meaninglessness in the cosmos as a whole. And one way you could really imagine that that sort of absurdity or meaninglessness being highlighted is just like, I don't know, capricious violations of the laws of physics. Suddenly you fall up instead of down.

in a vast and alien universe. And I think this is often you know, you often see this emerging in a context of our increasing scientific understanding of who we are and what the planet is, and you know, getting away from these older ideas about and also religious ideas about the importance of Earth, the importance of humanity, and then what are you left with, or at least what are you left with maybe in your darker moments or in your moments of doubt.

an average place within the universe. And of course that goes along with our discovery of you know, the Earth and not being the center of the Solar system and so forth. I think that's just a fact of life, and that is a good way to look at the universe. One need not feel despairing about it, but if one chooses to feel despairing about that realization, you kind of end up in the cosmic horror area.

of falling into the sky. And maybe they're not like, you know, a literal fear like oh I better hold onto the grass, but just this sort of overwhelming sense of the vast. I think a lot of it does come back to what we discussed earlier, this connection between the infinite and the finite, between how this do is

of great expanse can affect us. So to one line of thinking, clear of the blue sky might be relaxing and a brilliant starscape inspiring, but to others this could certainly be overpower, perhaps bringing out feelings of vulnerability and insignificance.

their sacred or RESTful or contemplative spaces decorated in a minimalist way that has more blankness, more uniformity of color, and things like that, whereas people who live in more pastoral environments might be more attracted to sacred, RESTful or contemplative spaces that are full of rich detail. And the example was Tibetan art.

this search for freedom or empowerment can be frightening. Whenever one is searching for what we used to call a horizontality and puts oneself in situations in which one may perceive larger volumes of space, one runs the risk of losing sight of the limits of such a volume, in which case one will likely feel chinophobic. One may have this fearful experience since one has no anchors of reference, and therefore one is unable to become aware of any

volume of space. For example, when out at sea, departing from the coastline and heading farther and farther into the ocean, one comes to be in the midst of a vast extension of limitless water. Kinophobia is, in fact the opposite of being placed the being at home that comes with topophilia. So that's interesting. I like that explanation a lot, this

feeling of that you could be hit with that. Again, this is highly subjective, but you encounter this vast expanse of ocean or sky or desert, and you lose sight of the limits, and you might think, well, you know, I have no place here, I have no belonging here. This is the overwhelming scope of the world kind of unhinges me from that that spatial sense of belonging. All right, looks like we've gone the limit here, were late for the sky, So we're gonna go ahead and close it out.

But we'd love to hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts and reflections on all this. I'd especially love to hear from anyone out there who's had a similar or conflicting reaction to say, a very open blue sky or a very open starvest at night. Be interesting to continue to discuss this on our listener Mail episodes. Our listener Mail episodes of course published on Mondays in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. Our Core

Science episodes are on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Short Form Monster Fact on Wednesdays, and then on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film on Weird House Cinema.