The following is not a question: Can something come from nothing?

[Mudhammam]

I've been engaged with a Christian the last couple days who thinks WLC's Kalam argument is a knock down for God. It's frustrating trying to convey to him that the argument is flawed, based only on everyday intuition and not actual observation. Thanks for posting this Alex.

[John V]

Oh crap - written - I'll have to hunt but are you looking for science papers, news-stories or books. There's always "A universe from nothing" from Krauss himself which is a great place to start. That does cover his definitions of nothing but not in great details. Its the furore since that has brought it up. There are some letters I saw somewhere (emails in reality) between Krauss and various other physicists but I can't remember where they were and they were only extracts.

There's a report on one of the debates at http://www.livescience.com/28132-what-is...ebate.html

And an explanation of how difficult it is to get to nothing at http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/...g-the-phi/

Any good?

Good for me. From the first one"

The first, most basic idea of nothing — empty space with nothing in it — was quickly agreed not to benothing. In our universe, even a dark, empty void of space, absent of all particles, is still something.

Which is something I've been saying. Also:

But there is a deeper kind of nothing, argued theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University, which consists of no space at all, and no time, no particles, no fields, no laws of nature. "That to me is as close to nothing as you can get," Krauss said.

Which is of course something we can't study.

The second one says the same:

And so we try to answer it scientifically. In order to do that, we want to start with a scientific definition of nothing. In our nearby Universe, nothing is hard to come by. We are surrounded by matter, radiation, and energy everywhere we look. Even if we blocked it all out — creating a perfect, cold, isolated vacuum — we still wouldn’t have nothing.

We would still exist in curved spacetime. The very presence of nearby objects with mass or energy distorts the very fabric of the Universe, meaning that if we want to truly achieve a state of physical nothingness, we cannot have anything in our Universe at all.

[max-greece]

AM (JV2?),

OK - glad we have an understanding of the problems of defining nothing- and how hard it would be to demonstrate anything on the back of it - but where are we now?

I've rather lost the thread.

I'm not even sure at this point that "true" nothing can be expected to exist - even in the spaces outside of any universe. If it can exist I am not even sure there is a reason as to why it should.

[John V]

AM (JV2?),

OK - glad we have an understanding of the problems of defining nothing- and how hard it would be to demonstrate anything on the back of it - but where are we now?

I've rather lost the thread.

I'm not even sure at this point that "true" nothing can be expected to exist - even in the spaces outside of any universe. If it can exist I am not even sure there is a reason as to why it should.

My point on this line is that it's incorrect at best or sometimes disingenuous to claim that science has shown that something can come from nothing.

[Chas]

That really has little to do with it. We are not talking about wave/particle duality, but about mass. Photons have zero rest mass.

---

Christ Chas.

Lets just take a step back.

I cited the emission of a photon from a light bulb as creation of something from nothing.

And I refuted that. The energy lost by the electron is the photon.

You say the photon is merely the form of energy resulting from the change in energy state of the electron.

Correct.

I'm saying the photon isn't just energy.

And you are wrong. The photon is electromagnetic energy.

Your saying if it doesn't have rest mass then it isn't matter (which doesn't mean its just energy).

It does mean it is just energy. Are you saying there is matter, energy, and magic photons?

That's just to get us up to speed. I never claimed (obviously) that a photon has mass. I don't think its relevant.

It is quite relevant. It is either matter or energy, and you agree it is not matter.

Actually - of course - we can't even talk about a photon being at rest - its a photon - it travels at the speed of light - it kinda has to - it can't accelerate or deccelerate.

And if it had mass, that mass would be infinite. The mass of a particle of matter increases with velocity inversely proportional to √(1 - (v² - c²)).

Now I don't think we can simply ignore the duality issue as you are saying. Part of that duality, for example, is the simple fact that light has momentum. Energy doesn't.

Wrong. Electromagnetic waves have momentum.

I'd argue, therefore, that the energy released from the electron as it changes state is carried off by the photon but that the photon has indeed just been created out of nothing.

And you would be quite wrong. Look at what you just wrote. If the photon is created out of nothing, where did the energy released by the electron go? If the photon is the energy that the electron lost, then that is what it was created from.

That its massless merely tells us that it doesn't interact with the Higgs field. I don't think THAT's relevant. Actually, if it ever did the universe would be really fucked.

Right, it doesn't.

[Rampant.A.I.]

AM (JV2?),

OK - glad we have an understanding of the problems of defining nothing- and how hard it would be to demonstrate anything on the back of it - but where are we now?

I've rather lost the thread.

I'm not even sure at this point that "true" nothing can be expected to exist - even in the spaces outside of any universe. If it can exist I am not even sure there is a reason as to why it should.

My point on this line is that it's incorrect at best or sometimes disingenuous to claim that science has shown that something can come from nothing.

"If I keep repeating the same stupid shit, maybe people will start believing the stupid shit I keep repeating has value, even though it's just more repetition of the same stupid shit I've been saying since I started saying stupid shit"

[archangle]

Take it one step further. "ignore" the "smart shit". Let the smart shiters talk and just don't debate them. They do that a lot.

Hopefully someday the shit will be too much and we will clean it up or go extinct. Evolution is growing up, not death.

[LostLocke]

My point on this line is that it's incorrect at best or sometimes disingenuous to claim that science has shown that something can come from nothing.

So what your saying is that the universe, even if it was created by a god, must have come from something?
Where did that something come from and how long was that something around?

[Whateverist]

The question is meaningless, or at least a semantic one, because it all hinges on what we mean by "nothing". First air turned out not to be nothing, then empty space itself turns out not to be nothing and even if there was a time when there was a god but neither space nor matter .. that too would not be nothing. If we're to worry about the transition from nothing to something, god doesn't get a pass. Then again, why do we think there would ever have been a true nothing? What leads anyone to suppose that?

Personally I don't accept that there was ever a true nothing. Before the earliest phenomenon we could ever come to theorize, there would always have been the preconditions necessary to give rise to it. Looks like pre-existing conditions all the way down to me.

[Senshi]

Well for me, one problem I have here is that, from what I know, it's the theists who are making the claim that we, atheists, are saying the universe came from nothing.
As far as I can tell, many atheists are saying the universe came from a singularity, a something, which in turn didn't come 'from' anything since ideas like from, before, or after don't work at that stage.

Yeah, correct. But the thing with the singularity is also wrong... But they really usually say, ok then before that was a singularity, but why does that exists rather than not exist.

Is it really wrong? Please teach me why!

You have to keep in mind that in physics, time is a constituent element of the universe, it was created with the universe therefore "Asking what happened before the big bang is an irrelevant question, because there was no time before the big bang, it is like asking what is south of the south pole and there is nothing south of the south pole.- Stephen Hawking"

To answer your question I will refer you to the quantum foam. Particles of matter and anti-matter pop in and out of existence all them time and in every cubic inch of space. To understand it take this mathematical analogy 1 + -1 = 0, so we start with 0 then we add a particle and it's antiparticle and we still have 0. So did we get something from nothing or do we just have a different kind of nothing where something and its opposite exist?
That was a rhetorical question of course!