Universe From Nothing

[Time_Travel]

Is there any possibility or at least any sort of smallest evidence that the universe started from nothing and came into being everything.

It is simply impossible for me to think the existence of something from nothingness.

If there is some sort of proof it may enhance my understanding of nothingness's definition and its truth.

[Moontanman]

No one claims the universe came from nothing, the idea the universe came from nothing is a creationist idea, not science...

[Time_Travel]

No one claims the universe came from nothing, the idea the universe came from nothing is a creationist idea, not science...

 

The idea is from Lawrence Krauss a theoretical physicist. And he is one heck of an atheist and hence doesn't believe in creationist idea.

Also CREATIONIST people need god and i have never heard creationist people say universe came from nothing, but have heard quiet a few from SCIENTIFIC community who say Universe came from nothing. I may not be a physicist or from scientific background but Universe came from nothing is simply tasteless.

I have a Video to a link where in a conference/seminar/discussion(i don't know what exactly it was) where Krauss explains his idea of Universe from nothingness. Not sure whether i should post a video link here.

[Moontanman]

The idea is from Lawrence Krauss a theoretical physicist. And he is one heck of an atheist and hence doesn't believe in creationist idea.

Also CREATIONIST people need god and i have never heard creationist people say universe came from nothing, but have heard quiet a few from SCIENTIFIC community who say Universe came from nothing. I may not be a physicist or from scientific background but Universe came from nothing is simply tasteless.

I have a Video to a link where in a conference/seminar/discussion(i don't know what exactly it was) where Krauss explains his idea of Universe from nothingness. Not sure whether i should post a video link here.

 

 

The universe came from the energy of of an expanding singularity, not nothing, where that energy came from is unknown but there are hypothesis of where it might have come from. To be sure if you want we can do dueling videos until the next big bang but the idea that the universe came from nothing is misleading and yes creationists do say the universe came from nothing, God called it all into existence from nothing of course there is no explanation of where God came from but creationists believe he called it all into existence out of nothing not to mention god called all animals into existence out of nothing in the forms we see today.

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/user/Moontanman?feature=mhee#p/f/5/ANtpsunRYIs

[JMJones0424]

The idea is from Lawrence Krauss a theoretical physicist. And he is one heck of an atheist and hence doesn't believe in creationist idea.

 

Time Travel, at the risk of hi-jacking your thread...

 

On the wikipedia page for Lawrence Krauss, the second external link is to "A Universe from Nothing" - A Lawrence Krauss lecture.

 

In this lecture, he explains around 19:00 what he means by nothing - "a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time scale so short we can't see them." So, like CraigD recently posted here, nothing does not mean no thing.

 

Krauss, in the Universe from Nothing lecture, even deals with the question of the religious view of speaking matter into existence from nothing rather than our reality coming into being as an incredibly rare, yet ultimately inevitable, function of quantum mechanics.

 

I found the lecture to be a very good re-hashing of the current state of cosmological thinking, and recommend viewing it again, as I think his assertion is different from what you understand it to be. Because it is over an hour long, I have posted my notes below with rough time stamps, so that you can jump immediately to pertinent sections. Please note that passages in quotes below may not be verbatim quotations, I was typing while listening, and did not go back to verify that everything in qoutes was exactly accurate.

 

0:00 Intro by Richard Dawkins

2:15 Beginning

"The important part of the Universe is the part you can't see"

6:00 Observation was that universe is static and eternal, Einstein's theories changed that paradigm.

8:30 Hubble showed expansion of the Universe, velocity is porportional to distance.

Pope declares science proves Genesis. Lement says please stop, physics takes us to the big bang, regardless of god.

12:30 Doppler effect shows velocity, luminosity of standard candles shows distance.

Standard candles are hard to find, thus it was hard to nail down rate of expansion. Hubble's original calculations

were off by a factor of ten, making the lifetime of the universe less than the age of Earth.

17:30 Supernovas are great standard candles, one explodes once every 100 years per galaxy.

Because the Universe is so large and old, rare things happen all the time.

18:30 We now know rate of expansion within ten percent, not factor of 10 like Hubble.

19:00 Cosmological constant... the energy of nothing.

Nothing doesn't mean no thing, nothing means "a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time scale so short we can't see them."

*********************

20:50 Empty space is not empty. Most of the mass of the proton is not from quarks, but from the mass of the virtual particles in the "empty space" between quarks

25:00 Geometry of the Universe- open, closed, or flat.

27:30 Gravitational lensing with general relativity allows us to weigh galaxy clusters.

29:00 90% of the mass is from matter that does not shine. Not all of this can be regular baryonic matter.

30:15 Omega is the ratio of all the stuff in the universe divided by the amount of stuff needed to make a flat universe.

There is only 30% of the amount (including dark matter) needed to be flat, therefore

the universe is open.

30:50 Experiments to detect dark matter

32:20 Theorists say the universe must be flat, because total energy is 0.

Only such a universe can begin from nothing (with quantum fluctuations).

33:45 Measuring curvature of the universe geometrically.

37:40 Cosmic triangle using the last scattering surface.

***** Assuming gravity travels at the speed of light?*******

39:00 CMBR "lumps" show that the universe is indeed flat to an accuracy of better than one percent.

 

40:48 "Why is there something rather than nothing? The answer is that there had to be.

If you have nothing in quantum mechanics, you will always get something. It's that simple."

 

41:15 Where is the other 70%... dark energy, cosmological constant, accelerated expansion of space.

42:40 We live in a universe dominated by nothing.

43:00 We (baryonic matter) constitute a 1% pollution in a universe of 30% dark matter and 70% dark energy

45:00 Cosmological constant is constant, energy density decreases over time

Anthopic principle dictates the special circumstances we observe.

48:30 Are the laws of physics fixed so that changing one parameter prevents the formation of the universe?

If anthropic picture is right, then physics is fundamentally just an environmental science.

49:20 If there are an infinite number of universes, then you don't need a theory of everything, you just

need a theory of anything (string theory).

50:25 Cosmic humility.

51:15 In 100 billion years, any observer in our galaxy will only see our galaxy. They will have no evidence of the Big Bang, CMBR, etc.

They can discover everything that we know today, and will derive a picture of the universe that is completely wrong. Falsifiable science

will (in their time) produce the wrong answer.

52:50 "We live in a very special time: the only time when we can observationally verify that we live at a very special time!"

54:00 Closing by Dawkins

55:20 Q&A

55:30 "Are people who are involved in GR more religious than other scientists?"

Basically no. What is true is that GR gives people the wrong idea about science.

Everyone imagines that Einstein came up with this idea independant of reality (like string theory), and the answer

is that that is not true at all. Einstein was guided deeply by experiment. Mercury's perihilion, particularly.

57:30 "If quantum flunctuations produce universes, can we observe a universe being created?"

Lots of evidence suggests we can't, but it is still an open question. If it happened, from the inside, it would appear to be an expanding universe, from the outside,

it would appear to be a collapsing black hole. So it's not so clear we would know.

59:45 "How do you wrestle with infinity?"

Flat universe is infinite in extent. The only way is to deal with it mathematically.

Hilbert's Hotel.

If the universe is infinite and infinity old, quantum flunctuations will produce this reality that we experience now, infinitely... without the need to evolve to our current state.

The universe is big, rare events happen all the time, and that doesn't mean it's special.

[Time_Travel]

Time Travel, at the risk of hi-jacking your thread...

 

 

Not sure what you meant here

[JMJones0424]

Nothing sinister I assure you. Your opening post posed the question (my rewording), "How could all that we observe have arisen from nothing." After clarification from you in post #3, it appears that you fell into a trap common to those who use language to communicate, you assumed that your meaning of the word "nothing" was the same as the meaning intended by Lawrence Krauss. I think I have shown that he intended something else, specifically - given quantum mechanics, nothing is not no thing, instead, it is, on a scale which we are not normally accustomed to dealing with, "a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence."

 

 

Given this, I have changed entirely the direction of this thread. If you wouldn't mind, I would like to explore this line of reasoning further. Some of the possible conclusions that Krauss illuminates and finds distasteful, I likewise do not care for aesthetically. If you allow me to, I will certainly hi-jack this thread and carry it far off from your original question.

 

In my mind, by far the most important passage in this lecture is found around 51:25-

"In 100 billion years, any observers evolving on stars in our galaxy... will see nothing except for our galaxy. Which is exactly the picture they had in 1915. All evidence of the Hubble expansion will disappear. Why? Because, we won't see the other galaxies moving apart from us. So they will have no evidence, in fact, of the big bang. They won't see the Hubble expansion, they won't even know about dark energy... they won't know about the cosmic microwave background; it will disappear too. It will redshift away, and ... it will not be able to propogate throughout our galaxy. All evidence of the big bang will have disappeared. And those scientists will have discovered quantum mechanics, discovered relativity, discovered evolution, discovered all the basic principles of science as we understand it today, used the best observations that they can do, with the best telescopes that they can build, and they will derive a picture of the universe which is COMPLETELY WRONG... falsifiable science will produce the wrong answer".

 

Now......

 

This entire lecture up until this point has been building up to how we know what we know, and isn't it amazing that we can know what we know, given that the time in which we are observing is unique. Why then can we assume that there was not in the past, or will not in the future be, an even better time to be observing, a time in which our observations will lead us to formulate an even more accurate picture of how the universe actually is? If all we have is our observations, and those observations lead us to believe that there will be a time in which observations will lead the enterprise of falsifiable science to give the incorrect conclusions, how is it that we are so sure that our observations now are not misleading us? Fundamentally, how do we know that falsifiable science is an adequate tool in which to discover how the universe actually is?

 

So please, forgive me, for I have certainly now hi-jacked your thread.

[Moontanman]

 

 

Now......

 

This entire lecture up until this point has been building up to how we know what we know, and isn't it amazing that we can know what we know, given that the time in which we are observing is unique. Why then can we assume that there was not in the past, or will not in the future be, an even better time to be observing, a time in which our observations will lead us to formulate an even more accurate picture of how the universe actually is? If all we have is our observations, and those observations lead us to believe that there will be a time in which observations will lead the enterprise of falsifiable science to give the incorrect conclusions, how is it that we are so sure that our observations now are not misleading us? Fundamentally, how do we know that falsifiable science is an adequate tool in which to discover how the universe actually is?

 

So please, forgive me, for I have certainly now hi-jacked your thread.

 

 

This is a good question, if somehow we would have existed with one second of the big bang, lets assume time was different somehow or for what ever reason beings existed under those conditions. While we cannot conceive of them lets assume they existed, could they have inferred us from the information they had? Might they have been privy to information about the universe we cannot be?

[Mintaka]

very helpful answers, thank you for going to so much trouble to answer , I for one appreciate it.

[Cyberia]

Time_Travel. There is an increasing number of people who think the universe may have come from nothing. If you add all the pluses and minuses (gravity, energy, matter) in the universe, it balances out and comes to nothing.

 

While nothing is nil, it is also +1 and -1, +trillion and -trillion. All that matters is that both sides balance out. While nothing occupiers no space, it has infinite potential.

[Cyberia]

The universe came from the energy of of an expanding singularity,

 

Evidence that a singularity can exist?

Evidence of where this singularity came from?

Evidence that a singularity can expand (and inflate)?

 

It's an idea.

[CraigD]

The universe came from the energy of of an expanding singularity, not nothing ...

We need to be careful to consider how the term “singularity” is used in the big bang model, and how it differs from how it’s used in the in a general relativistic description of a black hole.

 

The BB model’s “singularity” isn’t, physically, necessarily a body with zero volume and non-zero mass-energy, but rather a small volume with the mass-energy of the universe. GR’s description of a stellar mass BH’s singularity is a body with zero volume and the mass-energy of a star.

 

With these distinctions in mind, Sexton’s challenge questions become more tractable.

 

Evidence that a singularity can exist?

That The BB singularity – the universe with a much smaller volume than it currently has – is possible can easily be demonstrated via any small-scale experiment that compresses anything, and is equivalent to noting that volumes containing mass-energy can be comperessed.

 

That the BB singularity is plausible is evidenced primarily by the large-scale homogeneity of the present day universe’s baryonic matter – visible stars and interstellar dust and gas – and the homogeneity (usually called isotropy) of its photons, in particular those with frequencies corresponding to radiation of a black body of 2.725 K (the CMBR).

 

Evidence of where this singularity came from?

Sticking with my classification of “what came before the BB” theories into 2 kinds –

• “nothing cosmologies” is which the BB is explained as, for example, a large scale fluctuation of virtual particles in a “classical vacuum” such that the particles become real (The “classical vacuum” term I’ve used here is synonymous with the shorter “nothing” of this thread’s “did the universe come from nothing?” question.) and
• “extra-dimensional bulk” theories, such as brane cosmology

- the evidence sorts into 2 kinds.

 

I think the best known support of a nothing cosmology’s large-scale vacuum fluctuation are observations of such fluctuations on a small scale, such as the of the Casimir effect.

 

To the best of my knowledge, there’s no experimental support for brane theory or other “extra-dimensional bulk” theories. Rather, these theories are supported only by their formal theoretical soundness and beauty.

 

Evidence that a singularity can expand (and inflate)?

That cosmic inflation must have occurred is a critical requirement of present day BB cosmology, and is supported by a lot of astronomical observation of various kinds.

 

How inflation occurs, and how it’s possible, is a question to which I’ve not yet found an answer I could understand. Other than suggestions that a very high energy experiment (involving a large particle accelerator/collider, etc.), might “recreate the conditions of the big bang”, I’m unaware of any confirming experimental data, or plans to produce any, for the hypothesis.

 

Cosmic expansion is, by consensus of cosmologists, the best explanation for the observed universe, because it fits the observed data, and as with brane and other extra-dimensional bulk theories, have sound and beautiful theoretical formulations.

 

It's an idea.

The big bang model is an idea, yes, but because of the breath and depth of what it explains, and its experimental validation, it’s elevated above the status of a common idea to that of a scientific theory.

 

In science, there’s no higher status for ideas than that of theories. Among theories, status is gained and lost by the widening and contraction of their explanations, and the success and failure of their experimental confirmation.

 

PS: The “universe from nothing?” question has been discussed in many threads here at hypography. Hopefully, we can knit them together some day – such “hypographys” were, in hypo’s early days, one of its main goals.

[Cyberia]

CraigD. The fact that you can compress mass energy in no way opens the path for a BB singularity. That is like saying because cars can travel at 130 mph, that is evidence that they can travel at light speed.

 

Compressed mass energy is called a black hole. If you accept that gravity can bend spacetime, then it can fall into a black hole and stay there, as it also keeps in matter and energy. The only difference between a black hole and a singularity is that a black hole obeys the laws of gravity (which is an internal matter and nothing to do with what is outside, if anything) and a singularity which obeys the laws of convenience like it did not even need gravity to stay together originally.

 

The problem with a BB singularity is A: how did it happen, and B: how did it inflate and expand? B suggests that it was not in it's natural form so what could compress a whole universe into "a small ball"?

 

As far back as 1896, Charles Edouard Guillaume predicted a temperature of 5.6K from heating by starlight. Arthur Eddington refined the calculations in 1926 and predicted a temperature of 3K. Regener predicted 2.8 in 1933.

 

The temperature near in space away from a star's heat is 2.7K. The temperature at the edge of the observable universe is 2.7K. Surely if we could see far enough, it should be ever higher, to 3,000.K when matter first appeared? If we look at a galaxy at the edge of the universe, no one says it is 10.K allowing for redshift, etc.

 

I would like to believe that the Casimir effect is really something from nothing, as it would make a universe from nothing easier to believe, but maybe we are just crowding together something too small to see so they combine and form something we can see, which then promptly splits up into it's constituents again, so "vanishes".

 

My problem with the BB is the singularity. If you could get something from nothing so that we get fundamental particles which forms hydrogen, helium and lithium, and so early stars forming over maybe millions of light years, I can accept that.

 

But when it comes to the singularity all we have is ridiculous ideas like branes colliding "elsewhere". But why come here? Surely if a singularity was somehow made by forces beyond our comprehension, it would then inflate and expand as soon as those forces were released, where it was created?

 

Inflation was supposed to insure a smooth universe, but that never happened. We have the Eridanus void, some 3.5 billion light years across some 6-10 billion light years away, so very old. We have a two billion solar mass black hole (ULAS J1120+0641) from a time when the universe is claimed to be just 770 million years old.

 

I don't see earthly particle accelerators recreating the BB. Even the LHC produces just one forty millionth the energy of some protons we have had come in from space.

 

There are niggly little things that go against expansion. Dark energy was brought in to explain one point but then it is claimed that 72% of the universe we don't know about (dark energy) and not forgetting another 24% (dark matter) leaving us with just 4% of the universe that we can detect. The BB also failed the afterglow test. Time dilation, someone finally admitted does not work at distances of six billion light years and more. It is a "local" phenomena. And the idea of stretching space does not explain how it can be infinitely stretched from quantum size to present size without changing as would be expected (ie: the concept of spacetime suggests that space is more than the distance between two objects). It still has too many things to be worked out before I can call it a theory.

[Rade]

not to mention god called all animals into existence out of nothing in the forms we see today.

Not exactly what is given in Genesis. Humans, a type of animal (well lets say they are not a plant), were created by God from "dust of earth", into which was added the "breath of God". This is the Creationist two stage mechanism that explains how the first human, Adam was created, with all functional cells, tissues, organs, etc. ready to go. Of course this process cannot be applied to the scientific method until God presents a demo, perhaps on Fox News, just think of the ratings they would receive.

[Moontanman]

Not exactly what is given in Genesis. Humans, a type of animal (well lets say they are not a plant), were created by God from "dust of earth", into which was added the "breath of God". This is the Creationist two stage mechanism that explains how the first human, Adam was created, with all functional cells, tissues, organs, etc. ready to go. Of course this process cannot be applied to the scientific method until God presents a demo, perhaps on Fox News, just think of the ratings they would receive.

 

 

Actually only man was supposedly created in that way, animals as I pointed out were simply called into being exactly like they are seen today, it can be easily demonstrated to be totally false....

[spellbound]

Hi, I'm new here and a bit nervous about posting. There was an article in Scientific American a while ago about the big bounce instead of the big bang, that is, a previous universe (or many) collapsed and created the singularity we know of. As I recall, the author identified some way that the traces of the previous universe could be seen. Could this be a solution? Does anyone know if any more work has been done? Regards, John.

[Rade]

Welcome to the Forum, Spellbound. Nothing to be nervous about here, mostly friendly and very helpful people. Concerning the 'big bounce' hypothesis for the universe, see this Wiki link for additional information:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bounce