(March 7, 2014 at 8:41 pm)whateverist Wrote:(March 7, 2014 at 1:45 am)Wyrd of Gawd Wrote: By definition everything had to originate from Nothing. The stumbling block is that it is very difficult to understand what Nothing is and what its properties are.
I guess we are at a semantic divide. Why say "nothing" if by that you actually mean something like strings, foam or God? Perhaps pure nothing has never existed. Hundreds of years ago people would have thought a jar with nothing but air in it was empty. Now we know better. Less than a hundred years ago we would have thought the vacuum of space was nothing but now we understand that space itself has structural properties which apart from anything else can generate uber-tiny phenomena which in vast quantities may do God only knows what.
As I wrote it's extremely difficult to get a grip on what Nothing is. It obviously becomes something once strings form. However, there's no current way to determine when that is. If strings exist where did they come from? The most likely answer is that they came from Nothing. That's because no matter where you start you always have to go deeper into the well.
We don't know what the properties of Nothing are but one of them is that it is extremely cold. So maybe it's the the cold that acts in some way to create the strings.
BTW, our particular zone of space isn't a true vacuum. It's full of stuff. It's just short on breathable air. But there are large zones of apparent Nothing in the visible universe. Those voids could be completely devoid of material.
