A Universe From Nothing? The Ultimate Free Lunch

Theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author Stephen Hawking explained that the universe could have arisen from nothing. Theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss also explains why there is something rather than nothing. According to Hawking - “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist".

"A Universe From Nothing" is an accessible and engaging exploration of some of the latest ideas and discoveries being offered as explanations for how the universe came to be. This is perhaps one of the greatest questions of all, because it’s essentially asking not only where did everything come from, but how did all of it arise in the first place.

Krauss postulates that all signs suggest a universe that could and plausibly did arise from a deeper nothing—involving the absence of space itself and—which may one day return to nothing via processes that may not only be comprehensible but also processes that do not require any external control or direction.

But, what came before the big bang? Scientists have yet to determine what prevailed before Planck time. Stephen Hawking, gave a proposal concerning the state of the Universe prior to the Planck epoch. But for him, the question of what came before the Big Bang was meaningless because , to all intents and purposes, time itself — as well as the universe and everything in it — began at the Big Bang.

#universe #space #science

"Professor Stephen Hawking" by kBandara is marked with CC BY 2.0.

[jamesquigley]

A singularity isn't a "point", it means the equations we have don't work.
In the big bang theory it was not a point, it was all the space there was, there was no space outside it, it had no boundary or surface. In a sense it was infinite from the beginning.

[josephgdangelo]

simple answer. There are no absolutes except for there are no absolutes. If you makes absolutely something you'll find it's entropy so high it wants to degrade at faster and faster rates. Likewise if you try to make absolutely nothing the more likely you are to create something. It's that the scale is not ‐3—3+ in a linear line but a circular one. Destructive and constructive interference.

Destructive(nothing) and constructive(something) interference will create each other when pushed past their threshold. That's not just plausible but already well understood.

The more technical part is which came first. Nothing(slow build/destructive) or something(big bang/constructive)?

Which is the principle and which is the attribute?

Which is the cause and which is the effect?

[mreckes]

Maybe the "big bang" was the recreation of the universe. Why can't the universe have always been, expanding and contracting forever.

[Kneedragon]

Let's try that again, without the power failure when I'd typed almost all of it...
1. I am a layman, an old taxi driver. I do have some training in engineering and computers, not grand unified theory physics.
2. I am speculating. This is not a ‘Theory’ – this is idle whimsy. Sabine would tell you I am counting angels on the head of a pin.
3. I think we live in a multiverse. It may be one of many. The number of universes which exist in this multiverse, is a large but finite number. Like the number of hydrogen atoms in the Milky Way.
4. Perhaps there is an upper limit to the number it could contain, perhaps not. No way of knowing.
5. Where it came from or how or why, I have no idea.
6. How long it has existed, I have no idea.
7. I think there is a misconception about the nature of black holes. If you compress time and dimensions enough, you get a singularity, but that doesn’t happen the moment you get an event horizon where escape velocity exceeds light-speed. I think you need to gather quite a bit more mass than that.
8. At some point, the mass in that black hole gets heavy enough to bend not only time but space and dimensions, and you get a singularity and a wormhole.
9. The singularity, and the wormhole, are like a divide by zero error in maths. You’re doing something that shouldn’t happen. As your dimensions approach zero, your density approaches infinite.
10. At around this point, ‘things’ (objects, particles) stop being able to exist. Atoms, proton, neutrons, quarks and leptons and bosons, photons… What happens is like the dual-slit experiment. Light is both a wave and a particle, until you dictate that it become one or the other. So at the singularity, it becomes impossible to remain both, so everything becomes wave. It converts into pure energy, and energy has no minimum width, so energy goes down the wormhole. Anything wider than planc length cannot, but energy can, and at infinite density, everything gets converted to energy.
11. Due to time dilation, this process seems to take a very long time for an observer at the source. The black hole ‘evaporates’ as Hawking would have it.
12. How long it spends in the wormhole, I hesitate to think time has any meaning in there.
13. So the ‘overflow error’ from the black hole, the super-massive neutron star thing which has converted into pure energy, drifts and falls between dimensions until it comes to a place which is a confluence of dimension. It may once again be three spatial and one temporal, it may not.
14. When it finds a place it can emerge, it does.
15. That place did not exist until something landed in it.
16. Time dilation now works in the opposite direction. What took a long time to fall in, takes planc-time to fall out. It’s a white-hole and a huge bang.
17. In this place, time has not switched on yet. The Higgs field has not switched on yet, so there is no mass, and no momentum. There is no speed of light. There is only energy, in a density that borders on infinite.
18. In short order, these ‘mistakes’ begin to correct themselves. I don’t know what order they do it in, but time switches on, length and breadth and height switch on, the Higgs Field starts to work, density becomes less than infinite because the cubic area becomes greater than zero.
19. Without mass or time or speed limit, the lump of energy expands – violently.
20. Time starts to work, and we discover that the ‘universe’ is one millionth of a second old, but it is already a million light-years across, and the stuff in it is still pure energy. Temperature is infinite.
21. As soon as time starts to work, you have a speed of light limit. At more or less the same instant, the Higgs Field switches on, and things have mass. As density decreases, energy starts to dissipate and we can once again have a wave particle duality. The first subatomic particles begin to condense. That is also a symmetry breaking.
22. There is no reason these early arrivals should be matter or antimatter, so they arrive as both, and then contact / touch each other because of close proximity, and we’re back to pure energy again. There may be something here where you get more energy back than went in.
23. Matter and antimatter both condense and then annihilate. There is a flash and a bang and we’re back to pure energy. Pure energy doesn’t disappear, it expands and cools and condenses, and we go through steps 1, 2 & 3 all over again. This is not an ‘event’ ~ this is a process. “Why did we end up with matter and not antimatter? Because after you toss the coin a million times, one side or the other is going to be slightly higher, so it’s going to win. Is there a reason matter won and not antimatter? I don’t know, but I’m not sure there needs to be.
24. When time and mass and momentum switch on, you now have a gazillion tons of stuff moving apart in all directions at a thousand times the speed of light. That has to stop. So everything that was breaking the rules, goes back to being pure energy again. Like 22, there may well be something here where you get more back than you put in.
25. At some point, perhaps a few seconds after it arrived, time has settled down. Maybe for the first second or so it waved back and forward increased and decreased, like a splash, but it damps down and becomes a relatively flat sheet. The 3 spatial are expanding, but the rate of that expansion drops to well under infinite. We call this ‘inflation.’
26. By random chance, some parts of this expanding thing have slightly higher or lower density. We can see the remnants of that in the cosmic microwave background. It was almost uniform, but not quite. Random does not mean exactly uniform.
27. Theory proves to us that virtual particles appear and disappear all the time, in the vacuum. I think universes appear and disappear too. I think what enforces reality, is the comprehension of a conscious entity, not necessarily aware of every facet of the thing but roughly cognisant of what she is seeing. In brief, I think that universes that stick around, do so because a soul went down the hole to watch the fireworks display. The soul in the hole must be post physical. No physical entity could get down the wormhole and live.
28. Whether that entity has gained ascension to god status because of technical mastery, or whether we really do have souls and what went exploring was ghost, I don’t know. I would suggest the two are equivalent. I am talking about a disembodied soul – I am not talking about how we got to that point.
29. Once life emerges and sentience and intelligence, the goddess can take a break, but while she is the only thinking entity in that place, she is bound to stay or her work may vanish.
30. On some level, this story makes her God. On most others it does not. Things are unlikely to emerge or materialise or happen if they are completely outside her ability to comprehend. If she is incapable of imagining pink elephants then I don’t think there will be many pink elephants. But that doesn’t mean she can wave her imperious hand at the Red Sea and let the waters part so the Israelites can walk across the sea floor. For one thing, if you have power like that, then you can teleport the Israelites where you want them to go. That means you don’t have to commit genocide on Egyptian children…
Point I’m trying to make, in some respects this creature is a god, but that doesn’t mean she made the heavens and the earth or stole a rib from Adam, or tempted a woman with something that looks like a snake with an apple in its’ mouth, that a reasonable straight woman might be interested in, whether it grew on her husband or someone else…
I am not a Christian, and I’m not an Atheist either. I am a cynical agnostic. I can think of reasons we would not be here unless somebody was watching. But that doesn’t mean ‘somebody’ like the one in the King James…. Nor does it mean the observer is also the creator, or has any sort of supreme power, above and beyond the power of ignorance and non-comprehension.
Can I back any of this up with evidence?
No.
Technically, what I’ve described is the same as any religion. I would hope that it stays within the constraints of science and theory as we know them at this point. That is my intention. I would not like to make another damn religion that’s impossible, we have at least a dozen too many of those now.
LOL 30 points – 30 pieces of Silver ~
Pleased to meet you ~ hope you guess my name.
But what’s troubling you, is the nature of my game.
No, I don’t think Mick Jagger is God either. But you got to admit ~ it’d be interesting ….

[rosieokelly]

Space cant come into and out of existence because to do so presupposes a canvas upon which this birth can be seen. Plus, in a finite amount of tiny space, yes there come into and out of existence tiny particles, but these particles do not take up the entire space. If they did, they would not be capable of moving. Thus even in the smallest measurable space of a box of particles, there still exists some space between them. Either the particles created space out of nothing or the particles were created by space. The space between particles, as tiny as it is, is space that exists independently of the particles and their birth. Thus the particles do not come out of nothing.

[NA-eemt]

I'm a theist, the basis for my theism is the fact that nature cannot BOTH create itself, AND abide by the law of conservation of energy, as that would be a contradiction. This fact tells me that something supernatural exists.

I came to this video to see if I find a legitimate argument against my take, but this only seems to reinforce it, as this guy in the video even mentions that all natural law as we know it breaks down at that very particular point in the past. This only reinforces the idea of a supernatural event being responsible for creation.

[jamesruscheinski]

Can nothing be seen as zero and zero dimension? If zero, there is numbers and mathematics; and if zero dimension, there are dimensions and space?

[Hawkers]

No, my ma.. my mama said the universe was created by a massive donkey fart.

[alejandroarreguin]

wouldnt the universe need time to begin expanding even if it was a "free lunch"? Like another dimension which the universe itself is in, which has time.

[smlankau]

The universe continues from a small nothingness to a large nothingness relatively. So probably, the universe would not reverse again. The dimensional relationships between each point of nothingness would make them look like something. And gravity and pressure would continue the contraction and expansion of the universe. Thank you so much.

[dunnbrandon]

Maybe we, our known universe is existing inside a black hole. The Big Bang was all matters condensed into a single atom, singularity and exploded into the others side of that black hole

[replica]

infinite acceleration as opening sequence of an infinite universe where planets are fed with solar wind and stars and galxies are fed with cosmic radiation
(life as center of the universe)

[jasonkinzie]

The laws of quantum mechanics shows that something can pop into existence out of nothing? But these laws are themselves something. How do I know this? Because I can't describe these laws without reference to their properties. True nothingness has no properties. Krauss claims we should change our definition of nothingness in the same way that we changed our definition of atoms. Atoms use to be indivisible pieces of extension and solidity but the word 'atom now refers to something completely different. But this just means that the atoms of philosophy are not being referred to when physicists use that word. The meaning of the word changed. Unlike an object of empirical study, Nothingness is purely conceptual. It comes from the perplexity of wondering how something exists. The ultimate answer to why their should be something rather than nothing should leave us with no more questions. But Krauss's answer still leaves us with one. Why the laws of quantum physics and not some other laws, (or no laws at all)? I don't believe this question can be solved, even in principle. At least not in the ultimate way I require to fully satisfy my curiosity. It is an eternal mystery in my opinion. And no, I'm not religious.

[jacovawernett]

There is no nothing. It comes from someplace else. There are multiple strings of time. Several times I've experienced the same event twice. Once was the death of the same person twice on different days, months apart. She also had a funeral twice.

[joewise]

Before something there has to be a cause. That cause could be something or someone. And like this scientist usually say remains to be a mystery.

[dunnbrandon]

Why is that when gravity is shown visually, it always has earth sinking/sitting, on an imaginary fabric of space? But arent all things gravitating to center of earth instead? Since earth is round so the ppl that happens to be on the side of the earth sinking on the side of the fabric of space be crushed?

[benjamindover]

The religious fundamentalists are so stuck on this "something from nothing". They keep bringing it up to the point of nausea,
"You can't get something from nothing", they say over and over again.
They refuse to understand that it's their bible that claims "something from nothing".
It's on page 1, "God said" and poof! it all pops into existence.
And when I ask how their god did it, , they NEVER have an answer. Just a quick side step and change the subject.

[henkkoppelaar]

Note: In the Greek language the word TÍPOTA means nothing as well as something.

[jefferee]

What is +1added to -1? Zero, right? What if we live in a plus universe and there is a negative universe? What if there is a plus atom to every negative atom? The sum of all of this would be zero. There's your something out of nothing.

[mattwood]

Economists everywhere are nervously sweating