There is something about the “gravity is a wave” and postulating “gravitons” that puzzles me.
Light can be considered as either an electromagnetic wave or a stream of photons depending on what effect you are trying to explain.
Now, when the moon totally eclipses the sun, the light, either as a wave or a particle, is blocked off from the earth. But the sun’s gravity “waves” or “particles” exerting gravitation on the earth seem to pass right through the moon and on to the earth which continues undisturbed in its orbit.
This would indicate to me that there must be some gravity waves that “resonate” with the moon and hold it in orbit and others that “resonate” with the earth and with there being no coupling between them and the moon.
Or something like that.
To say that something comes from nothing and to say that a relative veiw of something equals zero seem to me; two seperate questions. I’m under the impression that solving the universal singularity would as a necessity create a falsifiability for solipsism, in order to stand on the type of ground it ultimately seeks.
-Justhink
Da
Just in case your still not happy with the +1, -1, 0 thing. You have to remember that nothing is being divided or split, there’s just the creation of two opposite particles/energies. The reason it happens (if it does) is, AFAIK, because it does (or maybe it’s all the small gods practising for universes of their own).
If you don’t like the universe having net zero energy, you can always assume that the universe has always been there and just goes through cycles of expansion and contraction down to a super black hole, before exploding out again.
The other thing to remember is that what we see may be only a part of the ultimate reality (or whatever you want to call it). So something that doesn’t make sense to us might do if you considered what was going on in the other dimensions. The classic way that you usually see this explained is by pretending that the universe is 2D and then using the old “the visible universe is like the surface of a balloon” metaphor.
Once you understand this, it becomes fairly apparent that it’s going to be difficult to get an understanding of what’s going on without a hell of a lot of complex maths 
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Having said that, if anyone has a decent, gentle introduction into superstrings, I’d appreciate it. Last time I got interested and tried, it all proved too much for me .
First, a disclaimer: all of these type discussions occur in the context of quantum gravity or string theory, theories which are as yet unporven. So this is all pretty much WAGging.
To continue Bromley’s analogy: in our spacetime, a virtual particle-anitparticle pair can appear from the vacuum, i.e. empty spacetime. In string theory, spacetime itself is treated quantum mechanically, so a spacetime can be created from the string vacuum - the positive energy/negative energy is analogous to the particle/antiparticle pair.
The string vacuum is not just empty spacetime. It’s really Nothing with a capital N. Space ane time are characteristics of our universe, our little bubble of Something. So this is not really telling us about “before the Big Bang” - there is no “before” since there is only time “after” the BB.
On the business of the total energy of the thusly created universe being zero, this has always seemed fishy to me. First of all, the point where energy = zero is always arbitrary in classical physics, so saying “gravitational energy is negative” is really meaningless. Secondly, you can’t define “total energy of the universe” as a meaningful quantity in general relativity - it will always depend on the reference frame chosen.
So, until we have a consistent theory of quantum gravity that we really understand, it doesn’t make any sense to talk about the total energy of the Universe.