If there was a 1st moment in time.

[Edwardo Piet]

[The Grand Nudger]

Books made to popularize science have to connect with a lay audience, and despite your constant protestations to the contrary..we're just not all as smart as you are.  

It's a limitation, sure...but...? The point of the entire book was to explain how the "nothing" people conceive of does what they think it can't..and even....that it's not actually "nothing".

[Angrboda]

Sure, there was always "something" but the something that always was is commonly conceived of as "nothing" by laypersons.

No it isn't lol. Everyone knows that anything at all isn't nothing. Krauss just came up with a misleading title to help him sell a book.

He should have called it "A Universe from Almost Nothing".

Even as a child I knew that something wasn't ever nothing lol.

It's not clear that virtual particles which exist on the edge of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle are indeed something as most ontologies consider the concept of substance. They seem to be neither substance nor nothing, making your lumping them into one or the other category more a rhetorical flourish than anything.

[LadyForCamus]

Not something, but not nothing?! My head hurts...I need a beer. ?

[Whateverist]

New thread direction, finish this line:

If there was a 1st moment in time, then ..


.. then the moment before that was out of line.

[Edwardo Piet]

No it isn't lol. Everyone knows that anything at all isn't nothing. Krauss just came up with a misleading title to help him sell a book.

He should have called it "A Universe from Almost Nothing".

Even as a child I knew that something wasn't ever nothing lol.

It's not clear that virtual particles which exist on the edge of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle are indeed something as most ontologies consider the concept of substance.  They seem to be neither substance nor nothing, making your lumping them into one or the other category more a rhetorical flourish than anything.

And what is "neither something nor nothing" supposed to even mean exactly?

[haig]

So 14 billion years ago somebody named Will ( or was that something with a willy), oh just a minute, something with the will, created the universe. Then about 4.4 billion years ago earth was created. Then about 200,000 years ago homo sapiens started creating havoc all over the earth.

Now the christian fairy tales said this all actually happened about 6000 years ago. Not sure what the quaran says about that. In any event I'm quite confused about the math here.

Now if just for make believe, I say OK, something with a will (such as your god) did create the universe, can you explain why they would do that 14 billion years ago, then bring us into existence 6000 years ago? Did your god take a nap or something?

[Anomalocaris]

No it isn't lol. Everyone knows that anything at all isn't nothing. Krauss just came up with a misleading title to help him sell a book.

He should have called it "A Universe from Almost Nothing".

Even as a child I knew that something wasn't ever nothing lol.

It's not clear that virtual particles which exist on the edge of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle are indeed something as most ontologies consider the concept of substance.  They seem to be neither substance nor nothing, making your lumping them into one or the other category more a rhetorical flourish than anything.

Hawking radiation depends on virtual particles being substance.   Otherwise the substance that is blackhole transmutates through Hawking radiation into neither substance nor nothing, thus violating the general conservation of substanceness.

[paulpablo]

If there is a first moment in time,  it didn't always exist.

Although time wise, and only time wise, nothing precede the first moment in time.  First moment in time is like all other moments, coming to existence and that shifting to another moment in time.

Just like all other moments in time didn't always exist, the same is true of the first moment of time.

The only question remains, what ontologically preceded time. Preceded not as in time wise, but ontological precedence. 

I would say there is 3 options:

Nothing.
Something without will.
Something with will.

As for nothing, I don't think first moment in time just appearing out of nothing makes sense.

Something without will, is problematic, in that it is timeless. As it timeless, time wasn't part of it's reality, and as such it cannot undergo change.  Whatever that reality is, it cannot add to what's there, because ontologically is without time, without motion. Physical things without time cannot cause things to come to exist.

Something with will is the best reasonable conclusion, if there was a first moment in time, that caused the 1st moment in time.

Now when I say something with will, if we imagine will to be separate part of it's essence or part of it's essence, that has it's problems, but it's just semantics, and it means this thing that cause it, is will, because there is no divisions in God.

That is it is  a will that causes the first moment in time to come to be. And God is a will.  The best will at that.

But for the sake of argument, you can say the being has will or is will, doesn't matter.

It seems that there's more problems in your reasoning than the thing you're arguing against.

The problem with the notion you're arguing against is 

1) We don't know of something physical outside of time either moving or creating anything.

The problem with the notion you're arguing is 

1)We don't know of anything that has a will that's separate from anything physical, everything we're aware of that has communicated to us in some way that it has a will is also a living thing with a brain.

2)Physical beings with a will require time in order to move or create things.

3) IF there were such a thing as a being with no physical properties that is just a will then we have never seen anyone exercise their will outside of time either.

It seems to me that it's swapping a problem involving time and space for a problem that not just involves time and space but also biology and psychology.

A disclaimer to this is that I have no expertise in physics, so this is basically an idiot argument vs idiot argument.

[Angrboda]

It's not clear that virtual particles which exist on the edge of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle are indeed something as most ontologies consider the concept of substance.  They seem to be neither substance nor nothing, making your lumping them into one or the other category more a rhetorical flourish than anything.

And what is "neither something nor nothing" supposed to even mean exactly?

It means that traditional ontologies are inadequate for describing Nature as she is, and language and arguments built upon conventional ontological assumptions are therefore likely to be flawed. ("Ex nihilo nihl fit", for example.)

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It's not clear that virtual particles which exist on the edge of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle are indeed something as most ontologies consider the concept of substance.  They seem to be neither substance nor nothing, making your lumping them into one or the other category more a rhetorical flourish than anything.

Hawking radiation depends on virtual particles being substance.   Otherwise the substance that is blackhole transmutates through Hawking radiation into neither substance nor nothing, thus violating the general conservation of substanceness.

The general conservation of substanceness? Did you just pull that out of your ass? Regardless, the traditional ontological conception is that nothing comes from nothing, and that something always comes from something else. However, if, as I suggest, traditional ontology is flawed and incomplete, you can't use the strictures of traditional ontology to argue against something that calls those very assumptions into doubt. That would be invalid. In addition, Hawking radiation is the result of combining gravity and virtual particles, and gravity is not nothing, so the rules of traditional ontology are not violated anyway.