Some of you may have been following a tiny brouhaha (“kerfuffle” is so overused, don’t you think?) that has sprung up around the question of why the universe exists. You can’t say we think small around here.
First Lawrence Krauss came out with a new book, A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (based in part on a popular YouTube lecture), which addresses this question from the point of view of a modern cosmologist. Then David Albert, speaking as a modern philosopher of science, came out with quite a negative review of the book in the New York Times. And discussion has gone back and forth since then: here’s Jerry Coyne (mostly siding with Albert), the Rutgers Philosophy of Cosmology blog (with interesting voices in the comments), a long interview with Krauss in the Atlantic, comments by Massimo Pigliucci, and another response by Krauss on the Scientific American site.
I’ve been meaning to chime in, for personal as well as scientific reasons. I do work on the origin of the universe, after all, and both Lawrence and David are friends of the blog (and of me): Lawrence was our first guest-blogger, and David and I did Bloggingheads dialogues here and here.
Executive summary
This is going to be kind of long, so here’s the upshot. Very roughly, there are two different kinds of questions lurking around the issue of “Why is there something rather than nothing?” One question is, within some framework of physical laws that is flexible enough to allow for the possible existence of either “stuff” or “no stuff” (where “stuff” might include space and time itself), why does the actual manifestation of reality seem to feature all this stuff? The other is, why do we have this particular framework of physical law, or even something called “physical law” at all? Lawrence (again, roughly) addresses the first question, and David cares about the second, and both sides expend a lot of energy insisting that their question is the “right” one rather than just admitting they are different questions. Nothing about modern physics explains why we have these laws rather than some totally different laws, although physicists sometimes talk that way — a mistake they might be able to avoid if they took philosophers more seriously. Then the discussion quickly degrades into name-calling and point-missing, which is unfortunate because these are smart people who agree about 95% of the interesting issues, and the chance for productive engagement diminishes considerably with each installment.
How the universe works
Let’s talk about the actual way physics works, as we understand it. Ever since Newton, the paradigm for fundamental physics has been the same, and includes three pieces. First, there is the “space of states”: basically, a list of all the possible configurations the universe could conceivably be in. Second, there is some particular state representing the universe at some time, typically taken to be the present. Third, there is some rule for saying how the universe evolves with time. You give me the universe now, the laws of physics say what it will become in the future. This way of thinking is just as true for quantum mechanics or general relativity or quantum field theory as it was for Newtonian mechanics or Maxwell’s electrodynamics.
Quantum mechanics, in particular, is a specific yet very versatile implementation of this scheme. (And quantum field theory is just a particular example of quantum mechanics, not an entirely new way of thinking.) The states are “wave functions,” and the collection of every possible wave function for some given system is “Hilbert space.” The nice thing about Hilbert space is that it’s a very restrictive set of possibilities (because it’s a vector space, for you experts); once you tell me how big it is (how many dimensions), you’ve specified your Hilbert space completely. This is in stark contrast with classical mechanics, where the space of states can get extraordinarily complicated. And then there is a little machine — “the Hamiltonian” — that tells you how to evolve from one state to another as time passes. Again, there aren’t really that many kinds of Hamiltonians you can have; once you write down a certain list of numbers (the energy eigenvalues, for you pesky experts) you are completely done.
We should be open-minded about what form the ultimate laws of physics will take, but almost all modern attempts to get at them take quantum mechanics for granted. That’s true for string theory and other approaches to quantum gravity — they might take very different views of what constitutes “spacetime” or “matter,” but very rarely do they muck about with the essentials of quantum mechanics. It’s certainly the case for all of the scenarios Lawrence considers in his book. Within this framework, specifying “the laws of physics” is just a matter of picking a Hilbert space (which is just a matter of specifying how big it is) and picking a Hamiltonian. One of the great things about quantum mechanics is how extremely restrictive it is; we don’t have a lot of room for creativity in choosing what kinds of laws of physics might exist. It seems like there’s a lot of creativity, because Hilbert space can be extremely big and the underlying simplicity of the Hamiltonian can be obscured by our (as subsets of the universe) complicated interactions with the rest of the world, but it’s always the same basic recipe.
So within that framework, what does it mean to talk about “a universe from nothing”? We still have to distinguish between two possibilities, but at least this two-element list exhausts all of them.
Possibility one: time is fundamental
The first possibility is that the quantum state of the universe really does evolve in time — i.e. that the Hamiltonian is not zero, it truly does push the state forward in time. This seems like the generic case (there are more ways to be not-zero than to be zero), and it’s certainly the one that we spend time considering in introductory courses when we foist quantum mechanics on fearful undergraduates for the first time. A wonderful and under-appreciated consequence of quantum mechanics is that, if this possibility is right (the universe truly evolves), time cannot truly begin or end — it goes on forever. Very unlike classical mechanics, where the universe’s trajectory through the space of states can bring it smack up against a singularity, at which point time presumably ceases. In QM, every state is just as good as every other state, and the evolution will go happily marching along.
So what does this have to do with something vs. nothing? Well, as the quantum state of the universe evolves, it can pass through phases where it looks an awful lot like “nothing,” conventionally understood — i.e. it could look like completely empty space, or like some peculiar non-geometric phase where we wouldn’t recognize it as “space” at all. And later, through the relentless influence of the Hamiltonian, it could evolve into something that looks very much like “something,” even very much like the universe we see around us today. So if your definition of “nothing” is “emptiness” or “lack of space itself,” the laws of quantum mechanics provide a nice way to understand how that nothing can evolve into the marvelous something we find ourselves inside. This is interesting, and important, and worth writing a book about, and it’s one of the possibilities Lawrence discusses.
Possibility two: time is emergent/approximate
The other possibility is that the universe doesn’t evolve at all — the Hamiltonian is zero, and there is some space of possible states, but we just sit there, without a fundamental “passage of time.” Now, you might suspect that this is a logical possibility but not a plausible one; after all, don’t we see things change around us all the time? But in fact this possibility is the one you immediately bump into if you simply take classical general relativity and try to “quantize” it (i.e., invent the quantum theory that would reduce to GR in the classical limit). We don’t know that this is the right thing to do — Tom Banks, for example, would argue that it’s not — but it’s a possibility that is on the table, so we should think about what it would mean if it turns out to be true.
We certainly think that we perceive time passing, but maybe time is just emergent rather than fundamental. (I don’t like using “illusory” in this context, but others are not so circumspect.) That is, perhaps there is an alternative description of that single, unmoving point in Hilbert space — a description that looks approximately like “a universe evolving through time,” at least for some period of duration. Think of a block of metal sitting on a hot surface, not evolving with time but with a temperature gradient from top to bottom. It might be possible to conceptually divide the block into slices of equal temperature, and then write down an equation for how the state of the block changes from slice to slice, and find that the resulting mathematical formalism looks just like “evolution through time.” In this case, unlike the previous one, time could end (or begin), because time was only a useful approximation to begin with, valid in a certain regime.
This kind of scenario is exactly what quantum cosmologists like James Hartle, Stephen Hawking, Alex Vilenkin, Andrei Linde and others have in mind when they are talking about the “creation of the universe from nothing.” In this kind of picture, there is literally a moment in the history of the universe prior to which there weren’t any other moments. There is a boundary of time (presumably at the Big Bang), prior to which there was … nothing. No stuff, not even a quantum wave function; there was no prior thing, because there is no sensible notion of “prior.” This is also interesting, and important, and worth writing a book about, and it’s another one of the possibilities Lawrence discusses.
Why is there a universe at all?
So modern physics has given us these two ideas, both of which are interesting, and both of which resonate with our informal notion of “coming into existence out of nothing” — one of which is time evolution from empty space (or not-even-space) into a universe bursting with stuff, and the other of which posits time as an approximate notion that comes to an end at some boundary in an abstract space of possibilities.
What, then, do we have to complain about? Well, a bit of contemplation should reveal that this kind of reasoning might, if we grant you a certain definition of “nothing,” explain how the universe could arise from nothing. But it doesn’t, and doesn’t even really try to, explain why there is something rather than nothing — why this particular evolution of the wave function, or why even the apparatus of “wave functions” and “Hamiltonians” is the right way to think about the universe at all. And maybe you don’t care about those questions, and nobody would question your right not to care; but if the subtitle of your book is “Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing,” you pretty much forfeit the right to claim you don’t care.
Do advances in modern physics and cosmology help us address these underlying questions, of why there is something called the universe at all, and why there are things called “the laws of physics,” and why those laws seem to take the form of quantum mechanics, and why some particular wave function and Hamiltonian? In a word: no. I don’t see how they could.
Sometimes physicists pretend that they are addressing these questions, which is too bad, because they are just being lazy and not thinking carefully about the problem. You might hear, for example, claims to the effect that our laws of physics could turn out to be the only conceivable laws, or the simplest possible laws. But that seems manifestly false. Just within the framework of quantum mechanics, there are an infinite number of possible Hilbert spaces, and an infinite number of possibile Hamiltonians, each of which defines a perfectly legitimate set of physical laws. And only one of them can be right, so it’s absurd to claim that our laws might be the only possible ones.
Invocations of “simplicity” are likewise of no help here. The universe could be just a single point, not evolving in time. Or it could be a single oscillator, rocking back and forth in perpetuity. Those would be very simple. There might turn out to be some definition of “simplicity” under which our laws are the simplest, but there will always be others in which they are not. And in any case, we would then have the question of why the laws are supposed to be simple? Likewise, appeals of the form “maybe all possible laws are real somewhere” fail to address the question. Why are all possible laws real?
And sometimes, on the other hand, modern cosmologists talk about different laws of physics in the context of a multiverse, and suggest that we see one set of laws rather than some other set for fundamentally anthropic reasons. But again, that’s just being sloppy. We’re talking here about the low-energy manifestation of the underlying laws, but those underlying laws are exactly the same everywhere throughout the multiverse. We are still left with the question of there are those deep-down laws that create a multiverse in the first place.
The end of explanations
All of these are interesting questions to ask, and none of them is addressed by modern physics or cosmology. Or at least, they are interesting questions to “raise,” but my own view is that the best answer is to promptly un-ask them. (Note that by now we’ve reached a purely philosophical issue, not a scientific one.)
“Why” questions don’t exist in a vacuum; they only make sense within some explanatory context. If we ask “why did the chicken cross the road?”, we understand that there are things called roads with certain properties, and things called chickens with various goals and motivations, and things that might be on the other side of the road, or other beneficial aspects of crossing it. It’s only within that context that a sensible answer to a “why” question can be offered. But the universe, and the laws of physics, aren’t embedded in some bigger context. They are the biggest context that there is, as far as we know. It’s okay to admit that a chain of explanations might end somewhere, and that somewhere might be with the universe and the laws it obeys, and the only further explanation might be “that’s just the way it is.”
Or not, of course. We should be good empiricists and be open to the possibility that what we think of as the universe really does exist within some larger context. But then we could presumably re-define that as the universe, and be stuck with the same questions. As long as you admit that there is more than one conceivable way for the universe to be (and I don’t see how one could not), there will always be some end of the line for explanations. I could be wrong about that, but an insistence that “the universe must explain itself” or some such thing seems like a completely unsupportable a priori assumption. (Not that anyone in this particular brouhaha seems to be taking such a stance.)
Sounds and furies
That’s all I have to say about the (fun, interesting) substantive questions, but I am not strong enough to resist a couple of remarks on the (tedious but strangely irresistible) procedural questions.
First, I think that Lawrence’s book makes a lot more sense when viewed as part of the ongoing atheism vs. theism popular debate, rather than as a careful philosophical investigation into a longstanding problem. Note that the afterword was written by Richard Dawkins, and Lawrence had originally asked Christopher Hitchens, before he became too ill — both of whom, while very smart people, are neither cosmologists nor philosophers. If your real goal is to refute claims that a Creator is a necessary (or even useful) part of a complete cosmological scheme, then the above points about “creation from nothing” are really quite on point. And that point is that the physical universe can perfectly well be self-contained; it doesn’t need anything or anyone from outside to get it started, even if it had a “beginning.” That doesn’t come close to addressing Leibniz’s classic question, but there’s little doubt that it’s a remarkable feature of modern physics with interesting implications for fundamental cosmology.
Second, after David’s review came out, Lawrence took the regrettable tack of lashing out at “moronic philosophers” and the discipline as a whole, rather than taking the high road and sticking to a substantive discussion of the issues. In the Atlantic interview especially, he takes numerous potshots that are just kind of silly. Like most scientists, Lawrence doesn’t get a lot out of the philosophy of science. That’s okay; the point of philosophy is not to be “useful” to science, any more than the point of mycology is to be “useful” to fungi. Philosophers of science aren’t trying to do science, they are trying to understand how science works, and how it should work, and to tease out the logic and standards underlying scientific argumentation, and to situate scientific knowledge within a broader epistemological context, and a bunch of other things that can be perfectly interesting without pretending to be science itself. And if you’re not interested, that’s fine. But trying to undermine the legitimacy of the field through a series of wisecracks is kind of lame, and ultimately anti-intellectual — it represents exactly the kind of unwillingness to engage respectfully with careful scholarship in another discipline that we so rightly deplore when people feel that way about science. It’s a shame when smart people who agree about most important things can’t disagree about some other things without throwing around insults. We should strive to be better than that.
I do wonder this sometimes, then I remember that there are extraterrestrials that already understand this way beyond our capable comprehension (their proof being their interstellar travel) and I wonder when it is that they will actually teach it to us. Instead of top-secret projects reverse-engineering UFOs and not telling us. Because I’d love to know. They know everything. They’re like God.
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@ Cosmonut 51
A finite needs a cause because it can’t exist except as limited. Hence, a finite being can’t limit itself. Some other being must have limited it. Likewise, a being that begins to exist at some point in time needs a cause. Also, a being that is a composition of metaphysical principles or incomplete beings needs a cause.
A finite being is a composition of two incomplete beings or principles: essence and existence. The existence is the principle that gives a being its existence. The essence is the principle that limits a being’s existence so that it is the particular finite being that it is. An infinite being is a pure act of existence without a limiting essence and can be the reason for its own existence.
There can be an endless chain of finite beings, but an infinite being must exist outside of the chain and give the entire chain its existence.
The interval from 0 to 1 is a mental being. It only exists when someone is considering it. It is not a real being. As for defining what is meant by being and causality, there is no definition.
#50, David Roemer: What is a “finite being”? Why does it need a cause? How does any of this apply to the universe, i.e. existence itself? Talking about beings and causes is outmoded thinking that stems straight from human cognitive biases (artificial categories, assumptions of ontological basic entities and agency). The language of physics has left such terms behind for good reason. Check out Sean’s essay, Does the Universe Need God?.
#70, scribbler: Where the universe came from and how it started seem like basic questions, but they are actually assumptions. The assumptions are that such questions must be appropriate and must have answers. Why must the universe have come from something or somewhere, and why must it have started? When you say “there is always something else that came before the beginning of a thing,” that is true about objects in events within the universe. It is not necessarily applicable to the universe itself.
Great article. Unfortunately, after reading the comments I realized that a lot of the posters either did not read the last section, or simply chose to disregard it. Do people really believe that by insults and nit-picking spelling?! they will better be able to get their point across? Admittedly, I have but a rudimentary understanding of cosmology/quantum theory, but I can see that some questions simply cannot be answered with 100% surety. So I’m an anthropic sort of guy, the universe is the way it is because it must be, or we wouldn’t be here to ask the question. But I’m not comfortable with the idea of infinite multiverses. Or infinite anything. The honest human mind just can’t grasp the concept. So I suppose I’ll be insulted now by “smarter” people. HAGD 🙂
Science applies to everything except that which prove me wrong, huh? I said that which created the Universe and set it in motion was outside of the laws that govern the Universe. The Universe, however, being in motion was set so by a force within that construct. That force was not only preexistent of the Universe, it had to be larger than the Universe. The fact that we cannot see it does not negate its necessary existence…
That’s the logic. That’s the science.
For your argument, I stand behind a person and toss a pencil past their ear. I then say that the pencil created itself and set itself in motion. I then say that any question about how it did so is a philosophical argument and that all that happened before hand is scientifically irrelevant and outside of the laws of nature.
When the obvious retort of “Nonsense!” is snorted, I, like Kepler reply, “You see the farce of such a sentence when one observes a pencil and yet are blind to it when you observe the rest of the Universe?” The size of the object in no way changes the nature of it…
The same laws that govern the pencil govern the Universe…
66. Lawrence Krauss Says:
April 30th, 2012 at 3:08 pm
Sean: I know you alerted me to this, but I skimmed it at the time because I was tired of all the discussion of what I see as peripheral points.. but you certainly did miss something, and several of your readers have pointed it out. I was careful to make it quite clear in the book I am discussing a “how” question, and not a ‘why” question, and that I believe most people (certainly people who do not presume purpose) when they ask such “why” question, really mean a ‘how’ question.. So I think you misrepresented me.
I don’t see how changing your subtitle to a “how question” helps.
So, suppose you change “Why there is Something rather than Nothing” to “How you can get Something from Nothing”.
Now your explanation starts with “Let Nothing be a quantum field behaving according to such and such law…”.
Right there you have a contradiction and this is what David Albert, Jerry Coyne and even Sean is pointing out.
And as far as I can tell, this is not at all a peripheral issue as far as your book is concerned, but the grand conclusion you claim to have.
What you seem to be trying to do is change the definition of “nothing” so that the “explanation” still holds.
But this is rather like people who claim they have proved the existence of God, provided by God you mean “laws of physics”.
I have to agree with Dr. Krauss on this. The “nothing” that David Albert and Sean Carroll are trying to describe is self-contradictory and incoherent. (For greater detail, see http://adnausi.ca/post/22097450303)
You can’t possibly define a “nothing” that both has no laws of physics (“…or even something called “physical law” at all”) and has the property that we shouldn’t expect something to spontaneously emerge from it. That restriction alone is a law of physics. I challenge Drs. Albert and Carroll (or anybody who agrees with them) to try.
Albert and Carroll aren’t describing what nothing is, just what it isn’t. Any answer for “something from nothing” inherently must have properties of this nothingness, and Albert and Carroll simply add on “but why this property?”. The question then becomes unanswerable by definition. If you get rid of the “words” to describe things you aren’t left with “nothing”, you are simply left without a language to describe the nothingness.
Combined, these problems makes their definition of “nothing” incoherent, self-contradictory, and useless. On what basis should anyone accept that this is a form of “nothing” that we should accept as a default from which we need to explain why something happened? Where is the evidence that such a “nothing” is even possible?
A more thoughtful approach is to define what are the barest self-consistent properties a “nothing” could possibly have. It seems to me that such properties will have to be some form of uncertainty and probability, and this is exactly the basis of the vacuum state whether you look at it from energy-time uncertainty or probability distribution of vacuum energy.
If we can go simpler, then so be it. That’s scientific progress. But at least make the goal defining what “nothing” is, not what it isn’t.
Uncertainty and probability are something… 😉
@82. Cosmonut Says:
What you seem to be trying to do is change the definition of “nothing” so that the “explanation” still holds.
Krauss’s point is not that science has answered the ages-old question, but rather rendered it obsolete pretty much for the same reason as we no longer talk about prime movers and first causes. Questions like “why the laws are the way they are and not the other way around?” and “why there are any laws in the first place?” is NOT a substitution for the question “why there is something rather than nothing?”. It’s a question “why there is this something and not some other something?” Krauss does touch these issues if only briefly, and he honestly admits he does not know the answer.
I fail to see where in the book he claims to give any definite answers rather than merely plausible ones. The book leaves a door for subsequent discussions wide open, and if you happen to disagree with him, all you have to do is to say something like “Krauss, you’re dead wrong on this one, the ages-old question is still relevant, and here is why.” This would be totally cool.
If, on the other hand, you say something like “regardless of your physics, your book has nothing to offer but the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation of religion”, it simply means you are not interested in any discussions short of religious apologies. Then why Krauss or anybody else should bother with you?
@83 Chad, perhaps the required properties are shared between more than one “nothing”, in such a way that each nothing is prevented by the other from collapsing to a triviality, analogous to a Borromean ring, and their interplay somehow breaths perpetual life into them both.
For example, I’ve long thought there may be something physical about the variety defined by the following simulataneous equations $x_1 + x_2 + .. + x_n = 0$ and $x_1 x_2 .. x_n = 1$. This is a Calabi-Yau variety for a start, and thus of possible relevance to string theorists.
Each expresses the combination of its unknowns as the identity (a sort of “nothing”) for the relevant operator. Also, it obviously has the rather nice property that smaller versions of the same form can “bud off” from or recombine with their parent.
For n = 4, and considering the terms as real/complex numbers, just its birational transforms over Q result in a vast menagerie of simple and suggestive forms, and symmetries which I am currently exploring. So Heaven knows what more a string theorist could find, with Mirror symmetry and suchlike at their disposal.
Also (again for n = 4), there is a birational transform between x + y = z + t and X + Y + Z = T, (with each satisfying the product equation). Although the second doesn’t quite satisfy the sum equation, this seems slightly reminiscent of the AdS-CfT duality between 2D and 3D, and in some forms automorphisms between x, y and 1/x and 1/y, a symmetry shared by Maxwell’s equations!
I could go on and on about this fascinating system, but here is not the right place. (Some might argue it isn’t the right place to mention it at all, although it is relevant to the “nothing” everyone has been discussing!) Of course for physicists, even if it is relevant, the main question is what do the values represent and how do they influence each other to evolve?
Incidently, each rational solution to the above pair implies a rational solution to the Weierstrass equation $x^3 + y^2 = 76$. This has an infinite number of rational solutions, but only one integer solution: $x, y = 3, 7$. Is it coincidence that we see 3 space dimensions, and there are (supposedly) 7 curled up dimensions? Almost certainly, but who knows? .. 😉
P.S. Did I mention the n = 4 case is birationally equivalent over Q to a system of equations that defines Jacobean elliptic functions? $k^2 + K^2 = 1$, $c^2 + s^2 = 1$, $d^2 + k^2 s^2 = 1$. So it represents an infinite set of tori parametrized by a circle.
Hi Sean, one serious comment on philosophers;
“Philosophers of science aren’t trying to do science, they are trying to understand how science works, and how it should work, and to tease out the logic and standards underlying scientific argumentation, and to situate scientific knowledge within a broader epistemological context, and a bunch of other things that can be perfectly interesting without pretending to be science itself”.
Agreed, but with a caveat: is it a given that those philosphers who do not have a high degree of training in science can understand how it works, can tease out the logic and standards underlying scientific argumentation? I’m not sure something like this can be understood in the abstract, without reference to the particular. And to fully understand particular examples is really difficult for non-scientists (just as some science historians seem to have read everything except the actual papers). Is it not a little bit like an untrained musician trying to evaluate how well an orchestra played Shostakovitch, and why they might play it?
@75, John Merryman:
You wrote: “1=0? What if we were to say 0=0. Would that mean that nothing is a void, rather than a singularity.”
Well, I mentioned Errol Harris as a champion of this rather counter-intuitive–and often misunderstood and written off as mystical–idea: 0=1.
From The Restitution of Metaphysics:
“Again, the captious critic may object: not all continual consist of overlapping elements. For instance the number series is made up of discrete quanta, and the numbers do not overlap. But indeed they do: 1+1=2, 2+1=3; each successive number includes it’s predecessors. The only digit of which this is not true is 0, but with 0, the continuum has not yet begun. Yet 0 and 1 do overlap, for 0 is defined as the null class, which has only one member. Discrete magnitudes have to be dissected out of continuous magnitude, for if they are discrete, there must be some intervening magnitude that can again be divided into discrete magnitudes, and the continuum is inescapable” (109).
But what I intended the equation 0=1 to represent is simply: Nothing=Being.
This idea is not new. One can trace its origin back to ancient Eastern traditions, but surely the comprehension of this fundamental truth has always been, and always will be, available to everyone.
This idea can be found in contemporary philosophy, too. It’s literally everywhere.
In What is Metaphysics, Heidegger invokes Hegel:
“”Pure Being and Pure Nothing are therefore the same.” This proposition of Hegel’s (Science of Logic, vol. I, Werke III, 74) is correct. Being and Nothing do belong together, not because both–from the point of view of the Hegelian concept of thought–agree in their indeterminateness and immediacy, but rather because Being itself is essentially finite and reveals itself only in the transcendence of Dasein which is held out into the nothing” (110).
However many thinkers, generally operating under the inherited Western paradigm of thought, reject this line of reasoning. For example, William James in The Problem of Being, wrote, “Philosophy stares, but brings no reasoned solution, for from nothing to being there is no logical bridge” (1003).
He pokes fun at what he refers to as the ‘queer rationalist temper.’ He wrote, “Mathematically you can deduce 1 from 0 by the following process: 0/0=1-1/1-1=1. Or physically if all being has (as it seems to have) a ‘polar’ construction, so that every positive part of it has a negative, we get the simple equation: +1-1=0, plus and minus being the signs of polarity in physics” (1005).
So the debate, the mystery of Being and the holistic question, it seems, has not been settled.
But back to your original question, John. It’s interesting that you should mention a singularity. I believe that the correlation between the mass of a black hole and the mass of the galaxy that contains it provides at least provisional empirical evidence for claims such as: 0=1; Nothing=Being. The reasoning behind this is rather convoluted, but a more detailed explanation is linked above.
Scott
Sean, I don’t understand how quantum field theory is supposed to be of service to the public debate over theism and atheism. My thoughts are here: Carroll on creatio ex nihilo. I don’t expect a response, but I would be grateful for one. Mine is not a loud voice, but it is an earnest one. -Jason
@Andrei:
You bring up some interesting points. So here goes…
> Krauss’s point is not that science has answered the ages-old question, but rather rendered it obsolete pretty much for the same reason as we no longer talk about prime movers and first causes.
I wouldn’t say so.
Its just that there is no way to answer this question within the framework of science. Because science will always start with some model and equations to set up that explanation, and then the next question will be “Why is there anything that can be described my that model and equations ?”
OTOH, religion has no answer to the question either. Their answer is “God did it”. But then the question is “Why is there God ?”
> It’s a question “why there is this something and not some other something?”
The problem is, this question can’t be anwered by science either.
Because science will say, “This something exists, rather than that because of these laws and equations”. But then you again have the question, “Why those laws ?” like above.
I guess this is what Sean means by “ending the chain”. At some point, ome nust necessarily say “This is as far as I can explain and not more”.
But of course, not everyone will agree where that point is….
>I fail to see where in the book he claims to give any definite answers rather than merely plausible ones.
I guess that’s what annoyed me about the book.
The title and subtitle made an enormous claim. The afterword by Dawkins supported that. But when you read the book, its just a run-of-the-mill set of hypotheses which have been around for quite a while.
As I said, for me it was equivalent to read a book titled “God Exists: A Definite Proof” and then you find the author is just defining God as “love” or “laws of physics” or something and claiming that this is the correct definition.
> If, on the other hand, you say something like “regardless of your physics, your book has nothing to offer but the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation of religion”, it simply means you are not interested in any discussions short of religious apologies. Then why Krauss or anybody else should bother with you?
Yeah, its a pity that a potentially interesting discussion on science and philosophy became nasty because of all the name-calling both ways. But hopefully, the many other blog discussions are sorting this out.
@68. Juan Ramón González Álvarez
Please read the book about what Lawrence M. Krauss says about the basic principles of quantum mechanics.
Also in an NPR interview, Krauss explains: “… literally whole universes can pop out of nothing by the laws of quantum mechanics.”
@90. Cosmonut Says:
> I wouldn’t say so.
> Its just that there is no way to answer this question within the framework of science.
Well, I would, and here is why.
Let’s start with something as close to nothing as science can tell, like the ‘void’ (to borrow the term from Victor Stenger) plus some (hypothetical at this point) basic laws of quantum gravity. It does not have space-time but can produce one due to quantum fluctuations. But it is clearly not nothing.
Now let’s take away quantum gravity from it, in fact, any physical laws. What would we get? Shroedinger’s equation is on some basic level is just the law of energy conservation — you take that away, and the energy is no longer conserved. In fact, nothing is conserved anymore, anything can just pop in and out of existence. What you get is a sort of lawless universe that Krauss briefly mentions. But that is not nothing, it’s anything.
Even if you define ‘nothing’ in a rather circular way as ‘out of which nothing can come’, it is still something — it can be described with a zero wave function in 1-d Hilbert space and a unit operator as a Hamiltonian. It is also not really nothing, but a rather weird kind of something perpetuating itself.
So, my point is: wherever you go in search for that elusive ‘nothing’, you end up with still something. ‘Nothing’ looks like a logical impossibility, and The Question is reduced to ‘why there is possible rather than impossible?”. What you are left with is a word that has no meaning.
As for the “there is no way to answer this question within the framework of science” — yes, sure. I would even add “and in any other framework either.” Unless, of course, nothing is impossible. Then the answer is trivial.
> The problem is, this question can’t be answered by science either.
At this point I have to agree, but I would not exclude such a possibility in the future. If science comes up with a sort of fundamental law without which nothing can exist, that would pretty much settle the question. Certainly, there may not be such a law at all, but I think it is better to keep both possibilities open.
> The title and subtitle made an enormous claim. The afterword by Dawkins supported that.
I can buy that. I don’t really share your sentiment that it is such a big deal, but I won’t argue against it either. The tittle/subtitle is definitely too provocative, and the afterword by Dawkins certainly calls for trouble. I guess it would be much better to turn it into something humorous and tongue-in-cheek. Bad news is that the book is already out, and there is nothing we can do about it.
@Andrei:
>As for the “there is no way to answer this question within the framework of science” — yes, sure. I would even add “and in any other framework either.”
Quite so. As I said, religious people often say, “God did it” and think that answers the Question, but not really.
> Unless, of course, nothing is impossible….
> If science comes up with a sort of fundamental law without which nothing can exist, that would pretty much settle the question.
See, all these comes very close to the philosophical idea of a “Necessary Being”.
In fact, a Necessary Being is the only potentially satisfactory answer I can imagine for the Question.
In short, “You can’t get an Universe from nothing. You can only get an Universe from a Something which HAS TO exist.”
However, I have no idea how one can show that anything MUST exist or whether it will ever be possible to prove anything like that.
All scientific (and other) explanations start with assuming a model, but there is an implicit assumption that whatever is described by the model does exist already.
Instead, we might just have to take the existence of some kind of basic stuff – like the ‘void’ or ‘spacetime foam’ for granted without any logical reason why it has to be so.
Just an aside re energy conservation:
Krauss makes a big deal about the total energy of the universe being zero and how this is evidence that the universe came from nothing. But that’s mostly nonsense.
It seems energy conservation is an extremely tricky issue in General Relativity and it is not even clear how one can define energy properly.
In fact, Sean had an article on this blog that its simply the case that energy is simply not conserved in most spacetimes described by GR – for eg, in an expanding universe.
So, contrary to Krauss, the issue of whether the total energy is in fact zero or not is really not relevant to the argument.
(But yes, it opens up the possibility that energy can simply be generated from empty space. Which is pretty much what happens in cosmic inflation)
Or as I put it: Nothing get so tired of being nothing, it becomes everything! Still not content, it begins to spins and explodes. When it get really, really cool, it’s us!!!
Nonsense, guys… 😉
Stop denying the science that says in the OBSERVABLE UNIVERSE, something HAD to have come first based on what looks to me, an ignorant prejudice…
Or admit that your idle speculation about that which you cannot prove is just that: Idle speculation…
Quantum mechanics require a quantum field for anything to arise out of it. Right back to square one: Where did the quantum field come from?
@ 95
Bingo!
…and end of discussion.
Love this line: “That’s okay; the point of philosophy is not to be “useful” to science, any more than the point of mycology is to be “useful” to fungi.”
@88, Scott,
“Discrete magnitudes have to be dissected out of continuous magnitude, for if they are discrete, there must be some intervening magnitude that can again be divided into discrete magnitudes, and the continuum is inescapable” (109).’
Yet, wouldn’t this be the “void,” ie, the continuum. As opposed to zero simply being the initial point of measure for the first unit?
I have a problem with treating space as only measurement. With time, we are measuring action and change, but with space, we are measuring space. Distance, area and volume, ie, the three dimensions, are aspects of space, not the basis for it. I think the spacetime construct obscures deeper factors under the patina of “measurement.” When we measure time, we measure from one event to the next, past to future, but the underlaying process is change, resulting from action, turning future into past; Tomorrow becomes yesterday within the circumstances of what is present, not external to it.
The problem for me, is that science does have a very profound philosophy of reductionism that is very intellectually conservative and any attempt to tease back out the more wholistic elements gets derided as “mere philosophizing.” So reducing nothing from the potential of empty space, non-fluctuating vacuum, if you will, to a singular point of reference, doesn’t just distill the basic logic down to its essence, but totally changes the logical foundation.
So instead of space as an infinite equilibrium state, we have it as a measure of action from an initial event. If space expands from a point, why do we still use a stable speed of light to judge this expansion? For example, if two galaxies expand from x lightyears apart to 2x lightyears apart, that’s not expanding space, but increasing distance. Where does that otherwise stable speed of light come from, if the very fabric of space expands?
Now we have inflation, dark energy, multiverses, etc. to support this notion that space expands from a point, because it is just a measure of points and they are redshifted, because we can only measure light as a point, but what if light expands when we are not measuring it and only contracts when we do measure it and doesn’t travel billions of years as a discrete particle?Wouldn’t the photon we detect be a holographic sampling of this light and therefore be redshifted?
An interesting paper on this last idea(not mine):
http://www.fqxi.org/data/forum-attachments/2008CChristov_WaveMotion_45_154_EvolutionWavePackets.pdf
From NPR today, a review of the book noted:
“Philosopher of science David Albert wrote a scathing review of Krauss’ book for The New York Times questioning his understanding of the meaning of “nothing.” Briefly, Albert claims that physics presumes the existence of fundamental fields in order to define nothing. Hence, it’s not really nothing, but something.”
I would agree with that particular statement. (Think of vaccum energy.) But we all know David. Grizzled and confused generally until the very end. I’ve seen the man trip over a chair, I’m proud to say. While teaching statistical mechanics/quantum mechanics, too. Long story short: I was the only one laughing in the room. Lesson: quantum mechanics is really just about the probability of David Albert tripping over a chair teaching statistical mechanics. Woah… 😀
From NPR “Blackboard Rumble: Why Are Physicists Hating On Philosophy (and Philosophers)?” by Adam Frank:
“David Albert was having none of it. As he correctly points out: Where do the fields come from? Better yet: Where do the laws of quantum mechanics come from? These are clearly meaningful questions even if, perhaps, they fall outside the domains of physics. The bulk of Albert’s review is spent articulating how deeply Krauss had missed this point.“