Ya got me there. I think. But I think the thread is about things existing, not being identified as existing, right?
Somewhat reminds me of “a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it” crap.
Whatever the thread may be about, what you quoted was a specific post — from JMS@CCT. I thought you misinterpreted that post, and so I posted to you. You then quoted me and responded with what I thought was a non sequitur, and I told you so. Now, you’re talking about trees in the woods or something. That’s pretty much the history of our correspondence in here.
“There are more things in heaven and earth that are thought of in your philosophy…” Quantum mechanics posit that virtual particles arise in the vacuum of space, and this is one of the theories behind the Big Bang: The possibility of virtual particles becoming real particles. I understand that a vacuum is not exactly nothing, but it is nothing in a specific location. So, in a sense it is nothing.
How can it not?
Is ‘nothing’ an actual concept? Everytime I think about the subject I keep thinking that, ultimately, nothing can not exist.
Nothing is nonsensical to me.
In order to have ‘nothing’ you would have to have nothing in something, right? Or nothing would have to possess something-both of which contradict the concept of nothing.
I’ve seen some posts stating “you can’t get something from nothing”. But it would seem we can not only hypothesize, but observe something coming from nothing all the time. If there wasn’t something popping up out of nothing every fraction of a femtosecond in every measureable volume of space, the world we live in would look radically different; in fact, it probably couldn’t exist at all. To me, it seems just as mysterious to ask “how can there be anything” as to ask “how could there be nothing?” It may very well be that “nothing” just isn’t a possible stable state. I’m not even sure if there can be any meaningful definition of “nothing”, beyond “zero”, which we know from experiment is a point about which there must be fluctuation, fluctuation that can literally be of any size, so long as the negative and positive values of such fluctuation all equal zero. How can there be zero? The world seems to tell us there can’t be forever, or even very long. Why? Who yet can say? “Why not?” is an equally valid objection, and just as confounding, given what’s been observed.
Since everything is ultimately a form of energy and since the net energy of the universe is zero it could be said that the Big Bang actually created “nothing” from nothing.
Isn’t starting a thread like this the equivalent of shouting “Dance, monkeys, dance!”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but we can’t really observe someting coming from nothing. We can only observe some phenomena whose current scientific explanation implies that something pops up out of nothing.
Observing a particle materialize out of nothing is quite different than saying that particles must be able to materialize out of nothing in order for us to explain (using current theories) the properties of black holes, for example.
A quantum field is not “nothing”.
There has never been “nothing”.
There is no such thing as “nothing”.
Except, of course, in the non-existent region of the universe.
From your link: “What we refer to as a ‘field’ is an entity existing at every point in space, which regulates the creation and annihilation of the particles.”
What on earth is this “entity”?
Your cite also says “quantum electrodynamics, is one of the most well-tested and successful theories in physics”, so there is no disputing this theory, but what *is * this “field”?
A field is a volume of space in a particular configuration (or the potential to take on a particular configuration). A perfect vacuum still comprises spacetime, which can be bent or shaped any which way by waves (or equivalent particles): the surface of a pond still exists even if no stones are thrown in.
In this case, time itself might well exist only as a particular configuration of space, such that it has no meaning when the universe is infinitessimally small.
I didn’t word this well, and you are correct in alluding to the fact that the observations of vacuum fluctuations are indirect, so far as I know. However, when one observes two closely juxtaposed mirrors being pushed together by the so-called Casimir force, it’s a bit, I think, like saying Brownian motion provides observable evidence of atoms and molecules. When you observe the Casimir effect, you are observing one of the things that “nothing” can do, which is predicted very well by quantum field theory, which requires these vacuum fluctuations to accurately describe pretty much everthing we can observe in the world, besides gravity (as the theory currently stands). People haven’t just picked this idea of something-from-nothing out of the obscure blue to explain far-off notions like black hole entropy; I’m told it’s intrinsic to modern relativistic quantum field theory, which is about as sucessful a theoretical framework for making almost absurdly accurate predictions humanity has ever produced. For instance, the hypothesis that electrons polarize the vacuum (how can “nothing” be polarized, unless there’s always something in it) predicts to better than parts-per-billion what we observe to be the deviation of the magnetic moment of the electron from earlier predictions that did not take virtual particles into account. Nothing is important!