How can something arise from nothing

These virtual particles often appear in pairs that near-instantaneously cancel themselves out. Still, before they vanish, they can have very real effects on their surroundings. For instance, photons—packets of light—can pop in and out of a vacuum. When two mirrors are placed facing each other in a vacuum, more virtual photons can exist around the outside of the mirrors than between them, generating a seemingly mysterious force that pushes the mirrors together. This phenomenon, predicted in by the Dutch physicist Hendrick Casimir and known as the Casimir effect , was first seen with mirrors held still.

Researchers also predicted a dynamical Casimir effect that can result when mirrors are moved, or objects otherwise undergo change. The speed of light in a vacuum is constant, according to Einstein's theory of relativity, but its speed passing through any given material depends on a property of that substance known as its index of refraction. By varying a material's index of refraction, researchers can influence the speed at which both real and virtual photons travel within it.

The researchers began with an array of superconducting quantum-interference devices, or SQUIDs—circuits that are extraordinarily sensitive to magnetic fields. They inserted the array inside a refrigerator. By carefully exerting magnetic fields on this array, they could vary the speed at which microwave photons traveled through it by a few percent. The researchers then cooled this array to 50 thousandths of a degree Celsius above absolute zero.

Because this environment is supercold, it should not emit any radiation, essentially behaving as a vacuum. What happens if the vacuum is the signal? The researchers detected photons that matched predictions from the dynamical Casimir effect. For some 'thing' to come out of no 'thing' is not logical.

Swami Vishwananda Swami Vishwananda 3, 2 2 gold badges 17 17 silver badges 25 25 bronze badges. Add a comment. See the Principle of Sufficient Reason SEP : The Principle of Sufficient Reason is a powerful and controversial philosophical principle stipulating that everything must have a reason or cause. You essentially have two options: Anything can come from nothing. Only certain things can come from nothing. Everything with a beginning or just everything?

Stating things that eternal have causes seems foolish to me. How can a thing that has never not existed have a cause? NeilMeyer I specifically avoided that quagmire. So, barring some extremely mind-bending breakthroughs in physics and cosmology, the 'Big Bang' event is probably as far back as we can possibly go, putting a hard upper limit on how well we can know that anything has existed. Physics does not postulate that every event has a cause. All it postulates is that every event is caused by all events in its past Cauchy Horizon.

This does not exclude the possibility of events that have nothing in their past Cauchy Horizon. For example, the Friedmann Robertson Walker metric the metric of the Big Bang is a valid solution to General Relativity GR has the Cauchy Horizon constraint , and yet it has an event - the singularity, i.

Bridgeburners: And yet, we have people like Lawrence Krauss working on explanations of how our universe is a fluctuation of something, a something which can be conflated with nothing when in its ground state. It is not clear that science will ever truly rest on uncaused phenomena. Or if this happens increasingly, it may start looking like 'religion'.

Show 3 more comments. As I already pointed out, the main goal of this question was not to speculate anything but to investigate the apparent contradiction between "something cannot come from nothing" and "everything must have a beginning".

The thing is, either something can in fact come from nothing or otherwise something must have always existed. It is one or the other, but not both. The question was, which way is it. That's all. To that question, Mozibur Ullah has provided both an excellent answer and an excellent commentary also. I recommend reading it, it is very accessible.

Where is my answer speculating about anything? It takes your question, re-phrases it in a meaningful way, analyses it, and tells what we can and what we cannot say about an answer. Thank you for the clarification. I simply referred to your choice of arguments and the concluding remark of your answer.

One of the reasons I asked my question in terms of metaphysics and ontology and not physics or mathematics was precisely that gaining knowledge through direct observation or mathematical models is sometimes not possible. However, that doesn't mean truth in such matters can't be discovered.

It can, through logic and metaphysical proofs by contradiction. That is why I am objecting here. A question of ontology is not a question of physics. The path it treads is a bit different. I think you're collating existential experience with a purely logical deduction. You can observe something. That's a fact. The question, however, wasn't about existential experience which is already a given. The question is about what can be deduced from it.

The term "assume" functions simply as a placeholder for the fact of observation, it's not there in any speculative capacity. I recommend reading the accepted answer Mozibur provided.

It's quite excellent. I see. So you think it is a good approach to using your reason to deduce the truth about existence to start by taking existence as a given rather than examining it?

Descartes must be turning in his grave. I wonder what you mean by 'existence'. It is not difficult to deduce that nothing really exists for if it did the paradox you're trying to solve would arise, as you are discovering.

I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be a good approach. Cognition requires both a subject and an object, hence at least something indeed exists Q. So yes, I think the approach is quite solid. By existence I mean the object of "cogito", whichever it may be.

As you argue, one could simply declare that nothing really exists and find the question meaningless but that particular view doesn't explain any of the observations I've highlighted in the question.

In contrast, the limits to reason as described by Kant explain them quite succinctly. Kant was a good philosopher and did not make the mistake of taking anything for granted. The fact that cognition requires a subject and object tells us nothing about what exists.

Kant concluded that existence outruns cognition. Where assumptions give rise to a intractable problem it's a good idea to investigate whether dropping the assumption solves the problem.

I must say, you're strangely insistent about a question that according to your view doesn't really exist. Existence might indeed outrun cognition and probably does but that doesn't make cognition invalid within its limits. Nor would I say that undecidability is a sign of a problem.

Undecidability is a sign of a limit. I understand that you want to reframe the question here but as far as I can see, there's no reason for it. If you want to answer a different question, you can just create it and continue your thought over there.

The question on this page is already written, and answered. Yes because a all powerful transcendent cause willed it to be. Neil Meyer Neil Meyer 2, 17 17 silver badges 29 29 bronze badges. In this context, a transcendent causal agent is also something and not separate from it. The above question in essence inquired whether it is logically and also empirically reasonable to say there is something eternal or not.

As Mozibur Ullah pointed out in the commentary to his answer, Immanuel Kant investigated this question also and concluded it constituted an antinomy - according to Kant, it is reasonable to say both that there is something eternal and that there is not.

Yes, this would be Nagarjuna's answer as well. Nondualism is a dual-aspect theory for which, as Lao Tsu says, 'true words seem paradoxical'. It's a bit like saying that an electron is a wave and a particle or neither, where these are aspects.

For Kant's view to make sense we need Nagarjuna's 'Two Worlds' doctrine, the idea that there are two levels of analysis. Kant almost got there but we have to take up where he left off.

Can something come from nothing? Who is that famous atheist you're mentioning? Your answer could use some sources or references. Then you attribute to that concept positive judgements in the form of negations non-temporal, non-spacial, etc.

Isn't this a mistake? Because what you are describing is not simply "a non-existent stone", but non-existence itself. You can replace the stone with apple, orange, man, vehicle, etc but don't need to change the logic. What would the answer be if I ask if your non-existing stone is rough or smooth? What colour is it? Thank you for the answer. The word "assume" in the question is meant in a different sense -- in the sense of taking existence for granted and justifiably so. The goal was to investigate the apparent contradiction between "nothing can come from nothing" and "everything must have a beginning".

In conclusion - no , something can not come out of nothing! Guill Guill 1, 8 8 silver badges 5 5 bronze badges. Thank you. The thing is, my question addresses Creation and its Creator as a single unified whole. So, I am not sure if conclusions that pre-suppose a fundamental separation between the two can answer such an inquiry. Nevertheless, you are welcome to continue and improve on your initial thought, in case you feel like it.

Saul: From my perspective, I am addressing the Creation and its Creator as a "unified whole. This is a direct consequence of the Creator being eternal. Yes, but that does not really answer the question. You're simply postulating that something the Creator is eternal.

That, however, gives us very little information as to why such a postulate is correct or useful to adopt in the first place. If you happen to be interested in expanding your current thoughts even more, you might want to re-visit the question -- it has been clarified and hopefully improved since the time you posted your original answer.

Saul, I reviewed your clarified statements and I come essentially to the same conclusions. It is precisely because "something" can not come from "nothing," that one thing a Creator that exists eternally, is required! Your statement, "The only way for our present reality to have an ultimate beginning is when something can in fact come from nothing," is in fact not true.

Scientist use the term "vacuum" when referring to "nothing," philosophers use the term "nothing" when referring to the absence of every thing including a Creator!

Show 2 more comments. The problem of your question is the idea of "nothing". It is neither nothing nor any particular thing. What is nothing? Is it some blankness? Where does that come from and from whence does this order come from? The only answer to your question is to posit a Quantum Sea of Unknowability. Consider it like heat or Hiesenberg's Uncertainty. So, in the end, you can't actually quantify it.

Get it? Frank Hubeny In their paper, Turok, Feldbrugge and Lehners took a path through the garden of possible expansion histories that led to the second dominant solution. Lacking a causal element, lapse is not quite our usual notion of time. Yet Turok and colleagues argue partly on the grounds of causality that only real values of lapse make physical sense. And summing over universes with real values of lapse leads to the wildly fluctuating, physically nonsensical solution.

He and Hartle analyzed the issue of the contour of integration in He and his colleagues argue that, in the minisuperspace case, only contours that pick up the good expansion history make sense. Imaginary numbers pervade quantum mechanics. To team Hartle-Hawking, the critics are invoking a false notion of causality in demanding that lapse be real. According to Hertog, Hawking seldom mentioned the path integral formulation of the no-boundary wave function in his later years, partly because of the ambiguity around the choice of contour.

He regarded the normalizable expansion history, which the path integral had merely helped uncover, as the solution to a more fundamental equation about the universe posed in the s by the physicists John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt. Wheeler and DeWitt — after mulling over the issue during a layover at Raleigh-Durham International — argued that the wave function of the universe, whatever it is, cannot depend on time, since there is no external clock by which to measure it.

And thus the amount of energy in the universe, when you add up the positive and negative contributions of matter and gravity, must stay at zero forever. The no-boundary wave function satisfies the Wheeler-DeWitt equation for minisuperspace. In the final years of his life, to better understand the wave function more generally, Hawking and his collaborators started applying holography — a blockbuster new approach that treats space-time as a hologram.

Hawking sought a holographic description of a shuttlecock-shaped universe, in which the geometry of the entire past would project off of the present. But Turok sees this shift in emphasis as changing the rules. In backing away from the path integral formulation, he says, proponents of the no-boundary idea have made it ill-defined. For the past year, Turok and his Perimeter Institute colleagues Latham Boyle and Kieran Finn have been developing a new cosmological model that has much in common with the no-boundary proposal.

But instead of one shuttlecock, it envisions two, arranged cork to cork in a sort of hourglass figure with time flowing in both directions. While the model is not yet developed enough to make predictions, its charm lies in the way its lobes realize CPT symmetry, a seemingly fundamental mirror in nature that simultaneously reflects matter and antimatter, left and right, and forward and backward in time.

Boyle, Finn and Turok take a stab at the singularity, but such an attempt is inherently speculative. Questions abound about how the various proposals intersect with anthropic reasoning and the infamous multiverse idea.

The no-boundary wave function, for instance, favors empty universes, whereas significant matter and energy are needed to power hugeness and complexity. Hawking argued that the vast spread of possible universes permitted by the wave function must all be realized in some larger multiverse, within which only complex universes like ours will have inhabitants capable of making observations. The recent debate concerns whether these complex, habitable universes will be smooth or wildly fluctuating.