Here’s a previous Dope thread, beginning with the wonderful statement by a world-class expert physicist that
The Universe is Just One of Those Things That Happens From Time to Time.
Yes, the argument, though very popular among physicists of late, that nothing somehow ‘decayed’ or ‘tunnelled’ into something is unfortunately nonsense: it doesn’t talk about ‘nothing’ at all. Rather, one talks about ‘spacetime manifolds of zero radius’, or various kinds of instantons, etc. But these are not nothing: they have very definite properties, and nothing just isn’t something you can associate properties with.
True nothing is something that’s very hard to talk about—this sentence being a good example of why it’s so hard: one almost invariably talks about ‘something that’s nothing’ or ‘something that isn’t anything’ instead. It’s ultimately this confusion of language in which most answers to what William James called the ‘darkest question of all philosophy’—why is there something and not nothing—originate.
Thus, you simply can’t talk positively about nothing: whenever you say something like ‘nothing is such-and-such’ you’re already on the wrong track. Most answers to the darkest question then don’t even get of the ground. Rather, to talk about nothing, you have to pursue the via negativa: talking about what nothing is not (this way of speaking has its origins in apophatic theology, talking about God by talking about what God is not, since God transcends the category of being, and what God is is therefore inexpressible).
Speaking this way, maybe one can at least approach an answer to the nothingness puzzle. Because then it becomes clear that nothing is ultimately not anything. It is not the absence of anything, but everything not being there. For example, you can reformulate ‘nothing is missing’ as ‘everything is there’. Contrariwise, ‘nothing exists’ or ‘there is nothing’ becomes ‘everything exists not’ or ‘everything is not there’.
An interesting thought has been proposed by Russell Standish in his book ‘Theory of Nothing’: as we’ve seen, nothing can be talked about via negatively talking about everything. Let’s consider this from the point of view of information theory: everything—the set of all things—can be used to talk about nothing; but the everything-set is a set that contains, actually, no information at all. (One must, however, be careful here: in naive set theory, the set of all things is not a consistent construction, thanks to Russell’s paradox.)
To understand this, consider Borges’ library of Babel, a vast complex containing every possible book of a certain length. Although this contains trivially every book that will ever be written, from Shakespeare’s complete works to The Little Prince, as a whole, the library contains no information at all. Because think about how you’d retrieve any information from it: say, the books are ordered, alphabetically, such that from the first room, there are 26 doors, one labelled ‘a’, one ‘b’, and so on. Going through any door again leaves you in a similar room, with as many doors again. Now, in order to find any book, the catalogue entry denoting the book’s position is essentially a copy of its whole text—that is, to retrieve any information, you must already possess that exact information. (Alternatively, simply note that the empty set contains no information, but that the everything-set can be constructed from it by simple complementation; but then, both sets must contain exactly the same information.)
But in this sense—regarding their information content—then everything and nothing are not different: they both contain no information. Strange as it sounds, then, nothing and everything are indistinguishable, since every distinction between them—every difference that makes a difference—would then be a difference in information content. But then, if everything exists, there’s no question about it coming it into being, or everything existing rather than nothing—they’re effectively the same thing. We happen to only observe a limited part of everything—or nothing—which is why to us the universe seems to contain information: if you block off access to a part of the library, suddenly the remaining part contains useful information; say if only Shakespeare’s complete works were accessible, you could list them using only their titles, thus creating a useful index for the library. Then, that’s how you get a universe from nothing.
Many hypotheses posit that time was started at the beginning of the universe and that there was no time before the universe began. This is something people have an extremely hard time wrapping their heads around.
Here’s something I’ve found that helps: Every line has a length, it could be 2 inches or 8 kilometers or 3 light years. Length is unbounded in the positive direction, for any line, I can come up with a line bigger than it. But the smallest length possible is 0 meters. It’s meaningless to say “But what’s smaller than 0 meters long?” You could ask why 0 was chosen as the natural endpoint, why isn’t the smallest length 5 inches or -3 inches, but it’s kind of a meaningless question. That 0 is the smallest length is baked into the structure of the universe.
Similarly, you could ask why the universe started 15 billion years ago but it has the same degree of meaningless. It’s not like the universe went from not existing to existing, the existence of the universe is baked into the nature of time starting.
I’ve tried to make that point before … it doesn’t play well with the armchair pedants. There’s a certain brand of intellectual, (this place is rife with them) who are so proud of themselves for their Physics degree, or learning Esperanto, that they are quite confident of being able to analyze and quantify anything. Don’t have a discussion about Alien technology, Faster Than Light Travel, Paranormal Events or a possible Superior Being with them.
Uh-oh, here they come now, gotta go.
Well for one thing, if the laws of our universe weren’t congenial to the existence of intelligent life, we wouldn’t be here to ask the question. If one takes the position that there many universes with many sets of laws, which seems like the most reasonable position to me, then only those universes that can support sapient life will have anyone in them asking why things are like they are.
Thing is, we can’t - we are already well beyond what a human mind can comprehend when it comes to our understanding of the universe. No one human truly grasps modern science. We’ve just been able so far to divide up the problem of understanding the universe into small chunks that one human can tackle.
So the question isn’t really if the universe is too complex for a human mind to understand; it is. The real question is if there are aspects of it that can’t be broken up into parts simple enough for an individual human mind to handle them.
When most people think of nothing, they think of something like the vacuum of space. In that version of nothing, quantum fluctuations cause virtual particles to pop into existence. The version of nothing that exists in our universe is pretty active. Science can say why nothing gave birth to the universe. But that isn’t Nothing.
Nothing should be Nothing. No quantum fluctuations, no field lines, no time, absolutely nothing. It’s less clear why we have a universe instead of Nothing. If there were Nothing, there would be no quantum fluctuations to give birth to the universe. So why was there nothing instead of Nothing?
As said, one argument is that it’s because “nothing” is inherently unstable. If there’s truly nothing, including no physical laws, then there’s also nothing to stop something from just appearing.
I’m going to disagree with some of what you’re saying. I agree that it’s possible, I’d even say likely, that there are some truths that we are physically incapable of grasping. However, that does not mean that we aren’t qualitatively different from other animals.
Your post demonstrates what is qualitatively different about us. Your post reasons about reason. It speculates about speculation. It cogitates about cogitation.
What makes us qualitatively different is our ability to do a sort of meta- reasoning. We can speculate about the very nature of thought. We can think about our ability to think. We can wonder about what we can grasp and if there are things that we cannot grasp with our mind any more than we can grasp a planet with our hands.
I think this may be a qualitative leap beyond other animals. I doubt that a dog, for example, wonders about how it thinks or whether or not there are things it can’t think about. I doubt that it even has the concept of “thought”.
This makes the most sense to me.
Then you’ll enjoy listening to Lawrence Krauss lecturing about this subject.
I’m really enjoying the lecture, thanks.
Surely there’s more to the argument than that, because if that’s all there is, it feels sloppy to me. Why couldn’t a Christian argue that God (or a god) is possible for that same reason? Or a Mythos lover for a RL Cthulhu?
Then again, I’m not sure I get how all of this relates to conservation of matter and energy, so maybe I’m misreading.
If I’m understanding it correctly it’s just argueing that there doesn’t need to be a god for a universe to form. That because there is nothing there that means there is no restrictions, since to have a restriction you need something to restrict. Therefore anything is possible(like spontaneous creation of matter leading to the big bang) until something does exist. At least that’s what I got from it, and it makes sense to me.
We don’t know. Ultimately, that’s what we have right now, IMO.
The OP is right that prior causes in themselves don’t explain anything, but I also think that saying the universe “just is”, doesn’t help either: it leaves open all the associated philosophical questions, and gives us no predictive power.
So…at this time…dunno.
But Krauss, of course, isn’t talking about nothing at all; he’s talking about a very specific state that is an object of a very specific theory of nature—quantum mechanics. So the question doesn’t get answered: for instance, quantum mechanics needn’t be true. In explanations like his—which IMO miss the core of the question—, you start with a very specific state vector (wave function) for the universe, one from a certain space of possibilities (the so-called Hilbert space) which ultimately is arbitrarily chosen, and which is then evolved unitarily to yield a universe.
Now, Krauss’ proposal is a pretty ingenious idea of how, given such a state and given such an evolution, a universe like ours might develop; but ultimately, these are the easy problems. There is no a priori reason that the universe should be describable by a vector in Hilbert space subject to unitary evolution at all; and even if there were, that there could just not be such a thing is still a possibility. Even if you argued that quantum mechanics is necessarily true, what you start with will still be some wave function, and it is then always possible to imagine something ontologically lesser than that, namely the absence of that wave function. Thus, it can’t be nothing (or, by subtracting it, we’ve arrived at something ‘less than nothing’, which makes sense only for Slavoj Žižek).
Things have causes. Effects cannot come before causes. Things have a beginning and an end. These are the sorts of things that happen in our universe, and we’re used to the way our universe works.
But questions about the origin of the universe don’t neccesarily have to follow the physical laws of the universe itself. The whatever-it-was that eventually ended up as the universe needn’t follow the laws of logic or physics that our universe displays.
Or to put it another way, when we go back to the big bang, all information about what happened prior to some quadrillionth of a second after the big bang has been destroyed, so it seems we’ll never know what the universe was like before then, because all the evidence we could ever discover about it has been melted. You can’t get there from here.