Nothingness

[little_monkey]

That's a cute one. Consider this:

(1) Scientists are proposing that the universe popped out of the vacuum, with evidence that this not only possible but very probable based on what has been observed so far with what the vacuum can do ( Hawking radiation, Casimir force, Higgs boson).

(2) Deists/theists have to invoke a God, (whose nature is problematic) who has created this something out of nothing by using pure magic.

Which is more credible?

Joe

With all due respect, in neither case is something coming out of nothing. A vacuum is still something, as at the least it has some relationship to time and to the existence of the particles that come from it. I don't accept the word "nothing" as a substitute for "particle-spawning space."

As for credibility: I think either view equally abuses the meaning of the word "nothing." I'm fully willing to believe that matter can spontaneously arise out of empty space. But I'm not willing to call this process getting something from nothing.

You do realize that I have posted why this "nothing" is nothing from a physics POV, in another forum (atheistforum.com), I believe I also did it here in this forum. In case you've forgotten, here's a repost:

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.

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.

(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) 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.

Joe