The greatest metaphysical question. I have yet to hear any satisfactory answer.
It makes sense to me anyway that a state of “Nothing” is a state with the fewest contingencies and thus most expected. For ‘Nothing’ to ‘exist’, there is no pre-existing requirement to be met. For ‘something’ to exist, not to be trite, but something must exist. It requires at some point (I’m not sure we can call it a point in time since time may be specific to this universe, but in some way) either an act of creation (whether intelligent or random) or an infinite existence. And I’m not just talking about our particular universe, but rather that which precedes it and perhaps exists outside of it. The pre-quantum soup or however you envision it. Doesn’t it make more sense that rather than an eternal ‘soup’ or a created ‘soup’ there should just be nothing?
Anyway, it’s just an opening to a discussion, so discuss.
Heh, I don’t really expect to, although maybe somewhere on the forums, there’s some guy or gal who is the ‘Fount of all Knowledge.’ I’m more interested in hearing people’s thoughts on the matter or whether they even bother pondering it at all.
There may be no such thing as nothing. I realize that that is just kinda restating your question. But maybe the concept of nothing is just an invalid concept.
Think about it this way. There are two possible states; something or nothing. If you start with nothing then that is what you will always have - nothing. Something cannot be created from nothing. If you have nothing you can never have something. If you have something then you must have always had something - you can never have nothing. Now here we are in this universe, and it is filled with something; lots and lots of something. Since there is something now there must always have been something; there was never nothing. Therefore nothing has never existed - there is no such state as nothing. Just because we think we can conceive of nothing, doesn’t mean it’s actually something.
Was that Font of all Knowledge enough for you?
If you really wanna bend your mind read the comments here!
I’ve heard the argument, but it seems weak to me. I think that nothing is something (if you’ll excuse the humor) that we can conceive of fairly easily. All that it is is the absence of something. I don’t see anything that is illogical or invalid about the concept of nothingness. It might be a bit hard to truly grasp, but no harder to grasp than most metaphysical concepts. All that the argument is really saying is that ‘something existed infinitely,’ but it’s trying to couch it in language that tries to muddle the claim. Again, back to my original post, doesn’t this seem to be less likely than ‘nothing?’ It seems to be a ‘That’s just how it is’ argument and again, seems unsatisfactory.
“Something” and “nothing” are like “hot” and “cold”. There is no such thing as “cold”. It is a word that describes an absence of heat. There is no such thing as “nothing”. It is a word that describes an absence of matter and energy.
According to the Big Bang Theory,when the universe had no matter or energy, it did not exist. So, by definition, a universe cannot exist in that negative state.
I think that we have to expand nothing to be more than just the absence of matter and energy, but rather the absence of anything whether measurable or not measurable. Also, simply saying that the universe can’t exist if there is nothing is the point of the question. Why does the universe (and not just this universe, but rather all universes and anything that may exist outside of those universes) exist as opposed to not exist? Maybe a simpler way to phrase it is ‘Why isn’t there the absence of everything?’ The answer seems to almost invariably be something along the lines of “Because…just because” I’m wondering if someone has anything else to offer.
Is there any particular reason to believe that something can’t come from nothing? I was under the impression that at the subatomic level something came from nothing all the time - that paired positive and negative particles spring into existence and then (usually) promptly annihilate each other and disappear again. (Though I admit I could be completely wrong about this; I’m far from well-read on the subject.)
If that is in fact happening, then perhaps this universe is just the same thing writ large.
The Big Bang is how we got something rather than nothing.
I remember once asking the question here which basically amounted to, “if there was nothing before the Big Bang, and nowhere for that nothing to be, and no ‘when’ during which that nothing existed (since the space-time continuum created by the Big Bang is all the ‘where’ and ‘when’ there is, was, or will be, from our POV), then what caused the Big Bang? How could it have happened?”
What’s irritating me right now is that I can’t find that thread, because I recall that some posters provided an explanation that satisfied me at the time.
I’m going with something like Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe — It can be described with axioms, therefore it exists.
(From the link you can click again and get a 31-page pdf. I think I’ll make a hardcopy, and see if I can make any sense of it.)
You illustrate an important point that was stressed in Michio Kaku’s book, “Hyperspace”, and that is theoretical physics has reached the point where it has evolved beyond our ability to conclusively test many of the theories needed to explain it. We just can’t create the energy level necessary to do so. Instead, we try to prove a theory mathematically, or we try to prove a theory by identifying quantum “side effects” predicted to occur if the original premise is correct. That’s pretty much the best we can do right now.
Similarly, if there was nothing, there wouldn’t be anything around to say there’s nothing. So there has to be something to ask why! You can’t have nothing, because that would be something that you had, so you have to be there to have it!
