Nothingness

[little_monkey]

Question:
Atheist believes Universe pops out of nothing.

Is there any atheist in the world who can explain what exactly is “NOTHINGNESS or NIHILISM?”

Cheers

I'm a bit late on this thread as I don't post here very often. But I'll try to give you a picture of where physics stands on this issue.

One of the fundamental concept in QM is the vacuum state. Without it, the whole structure of QM falls apart. How is it define? simple, extract everything you can think from a quantum state: all electrons, all quarks, all photons, all gravitons, all Higgs boson, etc. and what you have is the vacuum state.

So now you have nothing. However, this vacuum has a lot of unsuspected properties.

1) When you calculate it, say for free scalar fields, it gives you infinite energy. You can hide it under the rug, which is ok in flat space, but in curved space, you can't ignore it, and now we think it is related to Dark Energy but exactly how, that has to be worked out.

2)You can shift the vacuum to a direction in order to break some symmetry - the Higgs Mechanism that gave us the Higg boson last year is built on that notion.

3)Near a black hole, a pair of particle/antiparticles can pop out of the vacuum, one of them gets trapped by the black hole, the other can travel anywhere to infinity (Hawking radiation).

4)Or you can even measure the force this vacuum will exert between two parallel plates if you squeeze these two together (Casimir effect).

Yet, you're supposed to have nothing!

Now, can we have a universe popping out of this vacuum? In light of what we know about the vacuum, we can't rule it out. It's definitely a working hypothesis.

You might argue that this vacuum is really not nothing. But this could also indicate that nothing can never exist, perhaps it exist in your imagination, but not in reality.