Stephen Hawking Says Universe Created from Nothing

mr_3ntropy writes "Speaking to a sold out crowd at the Berkeley Physics Oppenheimer Lecture, Hawking said yesterday that he now believes the universe spontaneously popped into existence from nothing. He said more work is needed to prove this but we have time because 'Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end.' There is also a Webcast available (Realplayer or Real Alternative required)."

Comments

hmmm, sorta like God, eh?

[swschrad]

the interesting thing about theories is that they all attempt to explain something. why there are bumfights between bible thumpers and scientists three times a day over these things has always mystified me.

Re:hmmm, sorta like God, eh?

[CRCulver]

And how I wish some of the anti-religion slashdot types would take some time to actually understand some theology and philosophy, and the history of both. Augustine set the stage for many disciples- in the 4th century no less.

The East disagrees. Augustine really set the stage for the Great Schism with his views on the atonement and his proto-scholasticism, while the Orthodox Church--and arguably the undivided Church East and West before Augustine--have always preferred semi-Pelagianism and apophatic theology. Still, Augustine is venerated as a saint by the East as well, but because of his fine apologetics and moral example, not because of his problematic theology.

Re:hmmm, sorta like God, eh?

[meringuoid]

Richard Swinburne, the foremost living philosopher of religion and an orthodox Christian, is one of a number of theist philosophers who hold that God is everlasting, that is, existing yesterday, today, and tomorrow, as opposed to timeless, that is, existing outside of time and being knowing for sure the future deeds of agents with free will.

That seems... tricky. If God exists in time like the rest of us, and cannot for instance accurately see the future, then we have a God subject to physics, subject to general relativity and the lightspeed limit. A God who sits within the universe in an inertial reference frame and who is just one more observer within the relativistic framework.

I'm far more comfortable with the idea of God as an entity wholly outside spacetime, subject to totally different laws if indeed subject to any at all, and free to inspect and perhaps to amend the whole four (or more) dimensional extent of the Universe at will. Put him in time and either you elevate time beyond the Universe of relativistic spacetime into God's domain, or you confine God within the Universe with the rest of us.

so

[mastershake_phd]

universe spontaneously popped into existence from nothing.
 
So how long till it pops out of existence?

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Out of Nothing Nothing Comes

[lawpoop]

There is nothing now. It is everywhere, it is nowhere. It permeates the whole universe. The thing is, nothing is *nothing*. It doesn't look like anything, it doesn't have any gravitational pull, it doesn't radiate, it doesn't reflect light, it doesn't affect the universe in any way. It doesn't interfere with us *at all*. It has no effects or consequences whatsoever. It has no physical existence, no thing can come from it, therefore it cannot produce anything. It's just nothing -- timeless, spaceless, pure nothingness. The universe and nothing are not opposites; they do not cancel each other out or annihilate each other. They have no effect on each other. There is no difference between nothing 'being' here or not 'being' here. It's exactly the same.

It's confusing to say that the universe 'came from' nothing. The universe wasn't produced by nothing. Currently, the universe exists, and also there is nothing. At some point in the past, the past didn't exist. When the universe didn't exist, there was only nothing.

Re:In the beginning....

[oGMo]

Did you ever notice that the Creation story in Genesis gets the order wrong? God creates light and dark, day and night, and then waits until the next day to create the sun, moon, and stars. Oops.

Eh only if you're looking at it from a literalist's perspective. Which is silly. Think of it as a story for those who aren't astrophysicists; it's not a textbook, but it's not meant to be. From this perspective, it's actually suprisingly what you'd expect: we get basic physics (space, time, light) in the first eon of the universe ("day-night" sequence). Plus, I believe that physicists currently theorize that there was quite a bit of light (and radiation) and quite a lack of stars and planetary bodies for quite awhile after "the beginning".

I think the story would actually be more suspect if God first created the sun, moon, stars, and earth. Compare this to other mythologies where that is what happened.

Outcast by friends and family

[kayakun]

Also, keep in mind that a lot of them don't like to rock the boat of their personal lives. Saying you don't believe in god is a good way to distance yourself from your family and or spouse -- so many either lie, or, more likely, just avoid thinking down that path a lot because it has no positive benefit.

I strongly agree with your statement. Many of my classmates don't like to speak with me, or even "look down" on me for my un-Christian views. In addition, I've had multiple girls refuse to date me simply because I'm not Christian. Although one could argue that the girls are using that as an excuse to just not date me, I'm talking about the cases when I've become very close to the girl, and the next logical step would be to date.

Whatever the case may be, I certainly have heard people at least claim that they don't want to spend time/go out/talk with me because I'm not Christian. People think it's wrong to discriminate based on race, but when discrimination occurs based on religion (on a small scale, I'm not talking about the holocaust), it's suddenly justified because that's part of the religious doctrine?

I used to be Christian, and at my church, we were told as kids to only have close friends with people within the church. Having friends with anyone else would supposedly cause us to turn away from the "truth" and fall into temptation.

That's not what he meant...

[7Prime]

Many are assuming that Hawking is proposing that the universe came into existance from complete nothingness. This isn't what he was saying at all:

From the article:

According to Hawking, the origin of the universe can be depicted as bubbles in a steam in boiling water. Small bubbles that appear and then collapse represent mini universes that expand only to disintegrate.

All this is is a simple analogy to represent the way in which the universe came into existance, it says nothing about what caused it to do so. In fact, even in his analogy, the bubbles are caused by extreme heat through a medium in a transitional state. This most definitely is "something".

In a discussion with one of the more thoughtful news anchors at my work, I was caught making the following statement, "everything must have an origin", but in actuality, we have no proof of that. Traditionally, when we talk of creation, we are really refering to a transformation of something into something else. We've never actually seen creation, in the purist sense of the word, so we have no way of proving that anything ever was created.

I have come to believe that there never has been nothing. Some form of SOMETHING (be it matter, energy, time, or what-have-you, since we're talking multi-dimensional proporties outside of our existing concept of reality) has always existed. Time could very well simply be a property unique to our universe, so "eternity" may have no real meaning whatsoever. But in any case, something has always existed in some form or another. It is impossible to come to any conclusion otherwise. Even if you take into account that physics, reality, space, and time, as we know it, may very-well only exist inside our universe, there must be some form of physical properties, be they very different, outside our universe, and changes in those properties were the cause of our universe.

Simply because one is busy concentrating on the creation of a bubble in boiling water doesn't mean that you can completely disregard the existance of the boiling water, or the energy coming off the stove, as part of what went into creating the bubble.