X-Message-Number: 17889 From: "Pat Clancy" <> Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 12:49:15 -0800 Subject: Re: Do you like philosophy? > > 1. The idea that something can come from nothing doesn't make sense to me. > For instance: I find that some theories of the Big Bang don't make sense. > What I don't understand is how someone can hold that specific theory that > says the universe was created (formed, arose, came from) from nothing. To > me, "nothing" means nothing! That would mean not even the propensity to > become something. This is often justified based on the idea of a sort of gigantic quantum fluctuation. Since the energy content of the universe (mass + radiation) is almost exactly balanced by the negative potential energy (I hope I said that right) of the gravitational attraction pulling everything back together, the net result is almost zero, or maybe exactly zero. On a metaphysical level (which is usually ignored by the writers talking about this), this is not really satisfactory - I don't think you can have a fluctuation of _nothing_. Nothing means _nothing_ - I can't even conceive of Nothing, the closest I can get is a void, which is definitely not Nothing. (Some famous physicist, I forget who, said it's a mystery why the universe goes to all the trouble of existing.) In fact many writers on this subject say that Time itself wouldn't exist pre-Bang, which seems to me an obvious absurdity since nothing can "happen" (fluctuation, Bang, whatever) except within Time. So I don't think you will find any theory of the Big Bang that truly carries things back to Nothing. I think a common idea is that there's a level of "vacuum energy" present pre-Bang. A newer alternative to the quantum fluctuation idea is a theory (described in a recent Scientific American) involving "collisions" of separate (empty) universes leading to the Big Bang - again, though, not creation from Nothing. And then there's the possibility of cyclic Big Bangs and Big Crunches, repeating infinitely back and forward in Time. I think a real creation from Nothing, though, is a metaphysical problem that is beyond science. Pat Clancy Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=17889