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

[ManMachine]

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Since this crops up every week in arguments, I thought I'd make a thread.

The notion of things coming from other things is not applicable to the universe as a whole.

Before and after

When we use the words "coming from", "causing" etc., we allude to principles we have learned from experiences which we have made within our universe. With the help of physics, we can have a pretty decent understanding what lies behind these intuitions, what it means for something to cause something, for something to come from something.

It boils down to statistics: imagine you walk through the forest along a small creek, the trees are swaying gently in the wind. Imagine you have your camera with you and you film this scenery while you walk past the creek.



When you come home, you just for fun let the film roll backwards, and you notice that you can barely make out the difference: the trees are still swaying, and the water runs its shallow course. Since the slope of the river is not noticeable, there is no striking paradox. Until you reach a small waterfall.



Suddenly, it becomes all too clear that something is very wrong with this picture - the cascade runs backwards, waves from the shore coalescing on the creek to form droplets which emerge from the surface to travel upwards, losing their momentum until they integrate with a newly formed, almost unperturbed stream.

Why did the cascade so obviously violate your sense of time, while the other parts of the creek did not? The reason is entropy: the cascade is, from the physics point of view, a very irreversible process which produces lots of entropy. The creek running its course quietly produces entropy as well because of the friction the water experiences, but much less so than the cascade.

The surprising thing is this: nothing in the backwards-running movie violates the laws of physics. The only thing that is striking is how utterly unlikely the events are which we witness in it. In the same way, the laws of physics do not really dictate our everyday arrow of time, which events we interpret as future, which as past. It is merely a matter of probabilities, because increase in Entropy is exactly this: the transition from a less likely state to a more likely one.

No Time

The moral of this story is this: causation is a statistical phenomenon in a world of increasing entropy. Do not think that your intuition about what past and future mean, what causation means, can be applied to realms which are radically different.

Some want to go even further and discuss the origin of the universe, or let us say, of being itself, from nothingness.

Note what has happened: we use the words which have meanings in our everyday lives as well as in science, and try to apply them in a scenario so different that none of them retain any meaning. Two things spoil the question: if there is no universe full of particles doing their statistical dance, there is no notion of an arrow of time, even if we assume that time as a continuous parameter exists. However, if we let even go of this, if we feel compelled to talk about the creation of time itself, all meaning is lost, and the questions we utter merely resemble questions, but in reality only mimic them.

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Ho, hum.

The question for me is how to unpick all the conflated ideas in this post. That's not a criticism, it's an observation.

The topic has wondered here and there, in and out of the Standard Model, which we know is not complete. There are varying schools of thought on this and it's fair to point out, or at least fair for Lee Smolin to point out in his frustrated rant against the individuals - who he claims prop up their pet theories by ensuring the establishments they hold authority over rally against competing theories - in his book 'The Trouble With Physics'. Well that's Theoretical Physics for ya, and it ensures the inertia of academia holds the impetuous whippersnappers of youth in their place and allows the consensual mind science to move at the speed of fog. But this is not new and it serves a purpose.

Next, how do you define 'nothing'? Are we talking a Quantum Vacuum, the popping candy-soup of fleeting quanta, or the absence of anything at all? The latter is effectively the broth of our popping candy-soup anyway.

How about time and space. We can't mention time without meaning space as well, they are one and the same thing, at least that's what Einstein tells us, and who are we to question. It is very possible (and some might even argue probable) that spacetime is an emergent property of quantum systems. There are now many theories that the spacetime geometry emerges from quantum systems, there are certainly those who claim the higher the energy of a quantum system the fewer special dimensions it has (which is why we experience light speed as a sort of Universal speed limit even though some observed phenomena defy this, spooky action at a distance springs to mind).

These theories certainly prop up some of the newer QLG Theory.

Because the complexity of the issues philosophers have left them pretty much alone. Most older philosophy use space and time as fundamental structures, it underlies many of our logical structures.

Without a doubt there is a philosophical debate to be had here, it's a fantastic idea to being to the forum, sadly it seems people have run to the structures they know best and not embraced the question.

For me the questions are, what are the implications for philosophy if;

1. The Universe and everything in it came from nothing (and will ultimately return to nothing)
2. Space and Time (and all attendant concepts such as causality) are not Universal constants but emergent properties

For me these are the questions that are imperative for philosophy, for centuries classical philosophy ran ahead of scientific philosophy, in this century scientific philosophy is leading classical philosophy by the nose. I personally think Deleuze is a great starting point for a decent philosophical debate on the matter (pun intended).

Anyone?

MM