(October 24, 2022 at 10:15 pm)LinuxGal Wrote:(October 24, 2022 at 12:10 pm)Jehanne Wrote: Per the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, how could matter not exist, as matter & energy can be converted one to another. Zero matter, zero fields and zero energy is a precisely defined state which would violate the HUP.
Per Emmy Noether's theorem making time and energy conjugate variables, if there's energy now, there must have been the same energy then, just not necessarily in the same form. So there never was nothing.
That is assuming time translation invariance of the physical laws (or at least the Lagrangian). In the context of curved spacetime, that need not be the case.
And, in fact, the conservation of energy is a very delicate thing in general relativity. There is a *local* version, where each interaction at an event conserves energy in all reference frames. But curvature means that it is impossible to even define what the 'total energy of a region' is.
