Short answer. Do YOU remember anything prior to being born?
Saying it like that, to me, makes it sound more substantive than it really is. I think a better way to describe it is that the Uncertainty Principle tells us that you can never be sure of exactly zero energy in any non-zero sized space. Since there is uncertainty, that means that sometimes you’ll have particles appear.
This seems to be just the way things are - the laws of physics. You can’t ever be sure there is exactly zero energy.
I guess you could then ask why the laws of physics are what they are, or why there is space instead of no space. We don’t know why, but it’s what we have, and there’s no reason to suppose that it’s due to a god (which is often where the OP question is leading).
There’s one thing that I hope we can all agree on: There is something.
Or, as I like to call it, the “shit happens” observation. It’s equivalent to Decartes’ cogito.
Which leads us to ponder the contrary: that nothing exists. A lot of physicists want physics to eventually explain that the current world is the only possible (logically consistent) one. But that doesn’t answer the question of why it is, even if it’s the only possiblility.
I don’t buy the probability argument, because if there was nothing, there would be no probabilities. I could be wrong about that, though. It begs the question of whether, if nothing exists, do math and logic still exist as abstracts? That is, does the lack of physicals imply the lack of abstracts? They could never be ideated, but does that mean they don’t exist? That question is over my pay grade, though. I think Sartre adresses it in “Being and Nothingness”, but I can’t understand him well enough.
IMHO, the fact that anything exists is absurd, but there it is, and we just go from there. Trying to explain the existence of existence is doomed to failure. Of course, we can always learn something on the path to nowhere, so I don’t call it a waste of time. You just cant prove anything else from it (as religious apologists are often trying to use it as evidence for God).
Considering the alternative is a nice way to get a headache!
And a good talk by the same guy: A Universe From Nothing.
Nothing is unstable. You can’t have nothing.
How do you know there is anything at all outside of your brain? Your brain tells you so, but your brain could be wrong.
Or maybe your brain is a product of MY brain’s imagination. You think you are you because I wish you to think you are you.
Or maybe my brain and your’s are both contained entirely within someone ELSE’S brain.
I could go on…
Or maybe somebody else could go on but makes “me” think that it’s “me” going on.
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered more *non sequiturs *than in this thread’s OP. Every “therefore” or “it stands to reason” is an invalid leap of faith . . . or, at most, a metaphor.
But it got me thinking: Could the Big Bang have occurred without matter? Could it have just created an empty expansion of space and time?
Probably not. Inflation was a key part of the Big Bang. But inflation necessarily ended with huge amounts of leftover energy, which ended up as all the matter in the universe.
Maybe it’s possible to have a Big Bang without inflation. But it doesn’t seem possible to have an empty universe with inflation.
I agree wholeheartedly about the god issue—after all, postulating god just creates a further explanandum, namely, god. But as you note, the same is true when positing that ‘the laws of physics are just the way they are’: it’s perfectly possible to ask why they are that way, or equivalently to imagine that they might have turned out differently.
Perhaps it’s less conceptually muddled if we leave the notion of ‘nothing’ out of the question, and just ask: why is there anything? That way, it becomes obvious that positing the quantum vacuum as an answer does no good: even if everybody agreed that it’s a good formalization of the notion of ‘nothing’, still the question of why there is anything at all isn’t answered.
(This presupposes somewhat that the questions ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ and ‘why is there anything at all’ have the same extension, which might not be true in all cases; but I think one captures the spirit of the other well enough for present purposes.)
For a bit more balanced view, the 2013 Isaac Asimov memorial debate (featuring Krauss and Jim Holt, the author of the above mentioned ‘Why does the World Exist?’) had ‘The Existence of Nothing’ as its theme (unfortunately, the philosopher David Albert, who formulated perhaps the sharpest criticism of Krauss’ view, was apparently disinvited shortly before the debate).
Well, the de Sitter universe is a consistent solution of the Einstein equations, and describes exactly the situation of a matterless expanding universe; so if it’s enough to be consistent with general relativity in order to be possible, then yes, such a possibility exists.
As Dr. Strangelove notes, this wouldn’t really be what we consider the ‘standard’ big bang picture, in which an early inflationary phase (describable, however, as a de Sitter universe) was driven by a special kind of ‘inflaton’ field whose potential energy, during the ‘reheating’ stage, gives rise to the particle content of the universe; but that’s not the only way to get an expanding universe.
In the most literal sense, no, nothing is not unstable: nothing has no dimensions at all, meaning there is no time, hence nothing itself is eternal in its non-existence. Linguistically, the true concept of nothing is not explorable because nothing simply cannot exist, at least in a way that we can describe, because existence, as we know it, has a temporal component that is absent with nothing. You cannot say “there is nothing here” because “is” is temporal and “here” is spatial, which are properties that cannot ascribe to the purest meaning of nothing.
Existence is the failure of nothing to not exist. The universe simply must exist because it does. If you use “nothing” as shorthand for “nothingness”, then your statement makes sense: nothingness is in fact unstable and will naturally become something, because it has space and time and naught else to do with it.
For You: it goes back to the old “tree in the forest” conundrum. If there is a cosmos of absolutely “nothing,” how can it be said to “exist,” given that it can never be observed in any fashion whatever.
“Nothing” is painfully uninteresting! Take Modesto, and, using the limitless power of the human imagination, extrapolate to the logical extreme. You get: Modesto!
But none of this is an explanation for anything, so I don’t see the value.
Not that I’m expecting an explanation; this does seem to me to be the ultimate intractable problem.
I’m just saying, even if nothingness is self-contradictory or nonsensical or whatever, that in itself doesn’t explain “somethingness”, and certainly doesn’t explain why a particular something should exist.
There needs to be two different understandings of nothing:
Nothing1: A place where there is no matter or energy
Nothing2: Absolutely nothing.
Before I read “Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story”, I didn’t really think of the Nothing2. Nothing2 is not a vacuum. It is not a quantum vacuum with any sort of properties. There are no virtual properties which come into existence. It is the absence of everything real, virtual, and imaginary.
I can understand how Nothing1 can spawn a whole universe. I don’t understand why there is something instead of Nothing2.
There could have been Nothing2. It is an entirely plausible arrangement of the cosmos. It just didn’t happen that way; we got lucky and there’s something.
Our sun might have been a K-5 instead of a G-2. But that isn’t what happened. Your parents might have had a big fight when they were first dating, and split up. As it turns out, that didn’t happen.
If there are “alternate timelines” on the grand scale, there might be trillions of cosmoses (cosmoi?) that are, within their confines, Nothing2, for every cosmos that just happens, by chance, to have something. Or Nothing2 cosmoses might be relatively rare. No way to say.
there are 2 ways i understand nothing 1st is just a place before big bang that is not a empty area.
2nd way is before bigbang but is empty area.
i am not including quantum vacuum in this atall this idea is without that.
if you say you can have a empty area then you are saying the empty area is something in it self.
a empty area is either something or it is not .if it is not then it is nothing .
there is still the temptation to have nothing that also does not have the empty area in it though.
Nothing1 is best described as “nothingness”, and I think you would be very hard pressed to find any anywhere in this universe.
As Senegoid intimated in post #5, nothing (your nothing2) could be an abstract potentiality on an infinite-ish continuum of potential realities in the same way that zero is a number in the continuum of numbers. If there are a very large number of potential realities, as far as we can tell, the probability of any one them being instantiated may be infinitesimal (one chance out of as many potentialities as there are), so the probability of nothing is no greater or less than the probability of what we think that we know (unless we eventually discover the Infinite Improbability Drive and can use it to explore these issues).
In the end, reality as we know it exists because it does. Any attempt to discover some kind of cause or reason for its/our existence is just hand-waving or woo-weaving. That it does exist should be sufficient.
Nothing1: A place where there is no matter or energy
Nothing2: Absolutely nothing.
nothing2 does it have a area in that.
if you say no then area/space must be made of something
we will then have to say a empty area is not possible with no logical reason to this .
why can we not just have a empty area
So if the Big Bang was a point source that exploded and the universe has been expanding ever since, what is outside the expanding bubble of the universe? Nothing? Can “nothing” be big enough to encompass the entire universe?
Man, that’s deep…
It may be the case that finding an explanation for existence itself is impossible. That doesn’t make it woo to point out that such an explanation does not exist.
“The universe just is” is equivalent to shrugging one’s shoulders. If Jane thinks we cannot explain why there is something rather than nothing, and John thinks the universe “just is”, there is nothing they disagree about. There’s no contradiction there.
Note that an explanation does not necessarily mean talking about prior causes. An explanation is something that helps us form a model, and we know we have a good model when we can use it to make useful predictions.
For “something rather than nothing” we have no explanation, no model and no predictions.