Apparently the universe was created by a quantum accident 13.7 billion years ago and empty space is not empty because particles are coming in and out of existence billions of times a second all around us!
My question is
At the time the universe blasted into existence, there was no space. How do the quantum fluctuations needed to created the universe happen without space itself?
IIRC the argument in the book was that the laws of physics could produce a quantum fluctuation absence any space-time. Still leaves the puzzle of where the laws came from.
Think of it this way. You’re trying to imagine how something could come from nothing, and failing. Maybe it’s your assumption that is wrong. If quantum uncertainty is correct, there can’t be any such thing as “nothing.” Therefore, there always was something, even if it wasn’t the conventional something of time and space we see today.
If there is always something, then getting something out of something isn’t a mystery but a problem to be solved, just like any other problem.
No space, right. No length, breadth, or depth. A 0th dimension.
Try to understand what parts of this problem are in your mind. Definitions create each other. Something creates nothing, long creates short, there is a semantic thing going on in your experience. Reality doesn’t have to conform to that.
So. 0th dimension must exist. Universe manifestly exists. The only way to reconcile these two observations is through non-duality. The 0th dimension necessarily existed ‘first’. Being a point, its only possible states are ‘full’ or ‘empty’. Let’s say it ‘starts’ at empty.
Ok, but non-duality is a part of the fabric of the universe. There isn’t a ‘this’ and a ‘that’, there aren’t distinctions. Mathematically, it is expressed A =!A. So in the start-state of empty 0th dimension… call that A.
A= empty 0th dimension.
Non-duality, therefore A =! A
Therefore, universe.
I question if I was right. It could be One of a rainbow of colors, for instance. Only one, but an infinite number of choices. There could be an infinite number of categories for a single point.
Sounds a lot like what I learned in church. This guy from the lecture was so sure of himself. Richard Dawkins was there and it was an atheist orgy.
I was raised on science but I sometimes wonder how scientists get away with their smugness.
I thought the usual way of expressing it was that science is open to being proved wrong, thus enabling the maximisation of near-certainty of truth in those things that are, repeatedly, not proved wrong. Which still leaves quite a lot it doesn’t claim to have the answers to yet.
Whereas religion starts with the certainty of faith, and where its claims are capable being tested scientifically, has to cede ground (historically, with great reluctance), but still insists on the truth of what it cannot prove right or wrong. Some religionists of course accept that this is in the realms of aesthetically satisfying narrative, rather than absolute objective truth, but those who don’t just know.
There can’t be any such thing as “nothing” within the known universe in which the laws of quantum uncertainty apply. We cannot hypothesize any “laws” outside the universe. In fact one might even define “universe” as that realm of space-time that we can describe with the laws of physics.
I would posit that “How do the quantum fluctuations needed to created the universe happen without space itself?” is an ill-formed question because quantum fluctuations are a property of space. It’s like asking how can you have space without having space. The problem being that quantum fluctuations are only an analogy used to suggest how the Big Bang may have come about, not a literal description of it. And it may not even be a valid analogy, as there also quite different hypotheses.
Philosophically (also empirically, if you prefer), what would you consider to be the difference between a hypothetical space that’s utterly empty and a real space that’s utterly empty?
I don’t think it quite works to say that “the real space is the space that you could insert an object into if you had an object handy and a mechanism by which to insert it into the empty space”, if you see what I mean.
Yep; implicit in all these explanations of how nothing becomes something is that it happens once only and after that all the nothing “knows” there’s a universe now; no need to spawn another.
I don’t see what’s so wrong with saying, that when it comes to the fundamental ontological question of how anything exists, we don’t know, yet.
That’s not to invoke religion; I myself am an atheist (and don’t see how throwing in magic entities makes the problem simpler anyway). It’s just to tell it like it is.
If one prefers, the statement “The Universe ‘just is’” can be used instead, but it’s equivalent to saying we don’t know.
Personally I do get a bit tired and annoyed by some of these “creation of the universe” theories. The popular press gives them a huge amount of prominence, and I include the popular science press here. Yet as observed above, there is scant science in most - if not all - the these ideas. But some scientists like to come up with odd ideas, and cynically, I tend to think some of them get a bit hooked on the media coverage they garner. Not just that, but some have become rather wealthy publishing popular books about such ideas. And there is no doubt, you can impress a lot of readers by waving ones hands furiously and talking “quantum”.
No doubt, a lot of these ideas can be quite fun, and they are amusing in the way they slam up against fundamental philosophical questions and the sheer cognitive dissonance of questions about time before time, and space before space. But be clear, they aren’t science. They aren’t testable. But they are neat though paths that take different aspects of real physics and play with them to see if there might be a way of thinking about the genesis of the universe. No doubt, if you could come up with something that was consistent with the laws of our universe as we know them, and accounted for them as part of a wider genesis theory - and the theory was neat, consistent, and simple enough that it wasn’t just an ad-hoc reverse engineering of fiddle factors to make this fit, you might garner some attention. Especially if it predicted some new physics. But nothing anyone is waffling on about comes even slightly near such a lofty goal. (Free ticket to Stockholm for someone who does.)
Then there is the old saw: Not only is the universe stranger than we think - it may be stranger than we can think.
Right. That’s one interpretation of my observation that nothing –> everything implies that the identity axiom (A=A) does not apply. We can’t do any math that I know of without it, so what scientific understanding can we have in that case?
You could interpret the results as ‘non-duality’, but if that is true, what’s proved is that we can’t understand it.
