Why is there something rather than nothing?

[n2doc]

by
Robert Adler
People have wrestled with the mystery of why the universe exists for thousands of years. Pretty much every ancient culture came up with its own creation story - most of them leaving the matter in the hands of the gods - and philosophers have written reams on the subject. But science has had little to say about this ultimate question.

However, in recent years a few physicists and cosmologists have started to tackle it. They point out that we now have an understanding of the history of the universe, and of the physical laws that describe how it works. That information, they say, should give us a clue about how and why the cosmos exists.

Their admittedly controversial answer is that the entire universe, from the fireball of the Big Bang to the star-studded cosmos we now inhabit, popped into existence from nothing at all. It had to happen, they say, because "nothing" is inherently unstable.

This idea may sound bizarre, or just another fanciful creation story. But the physicists argue that it follows naturally from science's two most powerful and successful theories: quantum mechanics and general relativity.

Here, then, is how everything could have come from nothing.

more

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141106-why-does-anything-exist-at-all

[John1956PA]

1. Here is a fellow DUer's post about the concept of nothingness from back in February 2014.

http://sync.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1228&pid=27232

I've always thought that there was another universe that ours descended from. It's hard to imagine nothingness. Philosophers have written books about the state of nothingness and can't really make any sense of it.

[Louisiana1976]

2. Fascinating article. I think the concept of multiple universes is cool.

[BillZBubb]

3. There isn't anything surprising about this.

It has been known for some time that in a vacuum, matter/anti-matter pairs continually and spontaneously pop into existence. Something from nothing. It is basically an energy balance situation. The energy represented in the matter is matched by the energy deficit of the anti-matter. When they recombine the net energy change in the vacuum is 0.

That should scale up to a whole universe, although such a huge energy split would be much more rare.

[Silent3]

4. While I'm no mystic, and all for trying to understand things scientifically, this misses the point.

When you ask "Why is there something rather than nothing?" you need to really think about what nothing means.

True nothing is more than just empty space, more than an absence matter and energy -- space is a something too.

The laws of QM and GR are something. It's interesting and valuable to explore why, given QM and GR, the less profound "nothing" of empty space might be unstable. Understanding that, however, still won't tell us why QM or GR themselves exist, why whatever "stage" up which laws like QM or GR, or any other possible laws, can play out, exists.

Why isn't there a nothingness so complete and profound that concepts like a physical law can't exist? Why not a nothingness so complete that even the idea of that nothingness is too much to be contained within, because there is no within, no without, no room for any concepts or their antitheses?

[longship]

5. Richard Feynman's response.

When asked why is there something instead of nothing, Feynman quickly responded, "because nothing is unstable."

[Martin Eden]

6. If nothing is unstable ...

... then doesn't it logically follow that everything is stable?

Is empty space nothing if it has dimension?

[DetlefK]

7. Depends on whether conservation of energy works without time.

Energy is the conjugated variable to time. ->
1. You need energy to change a system over time.
2. Energy is conserved in your system as long as that system is independent of when it happens.

But at the Big Bang there is no "before", only "after". So you can't look at your system at ANY point in time, because there was no time before this event. If time-translation isn't valid at the Big Bang, is energy-conservation valid at the Big Bang?

[bananas]

9. Energy isn't conserved in General Relativity

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/02/22/energy-is-not-conserved/

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/GR/energy_gr.html

[Thor_MN]

8. If there was only nothing, who the hell would care?

[damyank913]

10. In addition; why discuss something when you can discuss nothing?...

oops sorry, got that backwards.

[RussBLib]

11. why not? n/t

[FiveGoodMen]

12. Exactly

What leads us to believe that nothingness is more likely than somethingness?

[True Blue Door]

13. The question has no meaning.

"Nothing" is a scientifically undefinable concept, since everything that can possibly be known has to be via correlated observations. In other words, half of the question is nonsense and the other half is tautology.

[rug]

14. This is not "nothing".

Quantum mechanics tells us that there is no such thing as empty space. Even the most perfect vacuum is actually filled by a roiling cloud of particles and antiparticles, which flare into existence and almost instantaneously fade back into nothingness.