Nothingness

[little_monkey]

Benny, not the metaphysical thing again...

Joe

I agree with Benny, although how I word it is a tad different:

I think "nothingness", trying to attribute it to reality, is unintelligible. I also think that it fails as a meta-physical concept, because we can't describe it with any positive attributes; in that I differ from Benny, I think.

Unlike something that could be described intelligibly, yet not be possible to exist because of (positive) incompatible properties, e.g. the proverbial "married bachelor" or "square-circle" and thus cancel themselves out. You don't have that with "nothingness". It's even weirder than dividing by zero, it seems to me.

I was just teasing Benny.

On the question of nothingness, a good part of it is about semantics. It mainly depends how you view the vacuum:

(1) The universe (something) came out of the vacuum (nothing).

(2) The universe (something) came out of the vacuum (something).

If you take position (2), then to the question, how did something came out of nothing, the right answer is, it never happened. And granted Benny would have a point. Nothing never existed in that case. But what if one takes (1) as a starting point? Would the theists/deists accept that? Would it settle that question once and for all? Probably not.

Personally, I don't believe in the Hawking/Krauss take on this. And until we overcome some major hurdles in physics - the hierarchy problem, quantization of gravity , to name a few - we are not in the position to settle this yet. And this is not taking into account the various proposals such as Reinhartd's cyclic theory, Sussking's multiverse, Smolin's fecund universe or Penrose' Cosmological conformal cyclic theory. We need more data to filter some of these. The jury is still out there.