Mathematical Proof That the Universe Could Come From Nothing

TaleSlinger writes: One of the great theories of modern cosmology is that the universe began in a "Big Bang", but the mathematical mechanism by which this occurred has been lacking. Cosmologists at the Wuhan Institute have published a proof that the Big Bang could indeed have occurred spontaneously because of quantum fluctuations. "The new proof is based on a special set of solutions to a mathematical entity known as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. In the first half of the 20th century, cosmologists struggled to combine the two pillars of modern physics— quantum mechanics and general relativity—in a way that reasonably described the universe. As far as they could tell, these theories were entirely at odds with each other.

At the heart of their thinking is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. This allows a small empty space to come into existence probabilistically due to fluctuations in what physicists call the metastable false vacuum. When this happens, there are two possibilities. If this bubble of space does not expand rapidly, it disappears again almost instantly. But if the bubble can expand to a large enough size, then a universe is created in a way that is irreversible. The question is: does the Wheeler-DeWitt equation allow this? "We prove that once a small true vacuum bubble is created, it has the chance to expand exponentially," say the researchers.

Comments

Nothing?

[Anonymous Coward]

So quantum fluctuations are "nothing" then?

Re:Nothing?

[penguinoid]

So quantum fluctuations are "nothing" then?

You have to be an expert in quantum mechanics to really know nothing.

Re:Nothing?

[halivar]

And that's the paradox. There is ALWAYS the question "but what caused THAT?" with no ultimate answer more satisfactory than a meta-physicist can come up with.

Re:Nothing?

[Loki_1929]

John Snow is an expert in quantum mechanics? Who knew?!

Re:Nothing?

[evil crash]

So quantum fluctuations are "nothing" then?

Everyone knows they are caused by turning the electric can opener on and off.

Re:Nothing?

[Anonymous Coward]

there is always the question 'but what caused that'? really? there is "always" this question only if you continue to think about the world in the same mindset.

you don't have to search for an answer in the world through Newtonian glasses. "caused" implies causation. causation implies a before, and an after. first there is the cause, then there is its effects. abstract ideas like before and after are looking at the world from a point of view of LINEAR time.

if you truly study relativity, and i mean read Einstein's essays and not just the summary on wikipedia...you realize the linear view of time is just the way our electro-chemical computers (brains) process information. but in relativity, an atomic clock up in an airplane experiences time an a slightly different rate than you on the ground. since it is further from the earth. just think about that! imagine how warped and non-linerar time must really be, in a universe with supernovae and black holes! we can already measure two different RATES of TIME ITSELF just by using an airplane and an atomic clock. how crazy must the REAL story be? it will blow our minds in a thousand years when we understand it even better.

so anyway, my point is time is not linear. in fact, most science on cosmology shows that near the big bang...all rules about time and physics break down and make no sense. so why would you expect that, at that critical moment, time is linear and simple and easily understood? why do you insist that at that moment, anything caused anything else? i don't think it really worked that way. it's just that the true way it worked is so complex, we are only now beginning to try to wrap our minds around impossible ideas like how anything would work in a universe without "before" and "after".

i hope, instead of deciding that there is an un-solvable paradox, that you will continue to think about this stuff. don't give up. :)

"There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in our philosophy." --Shakespeare's Hamlet

Re:Nothing?

[itzly]

Our brains were made for the 4 F's: fighting, fleeing, foraging and reproducing. Understanding of quantum mechanics was not a driving factor, so we just have to accept that we don't understand.

Re:Nothing?

[Guy Harris]

there is always the question 'but what caused that'? really? there is "always" this question only if you continue to think about the world in the same mindset.

you don't have to search for an answer in the world through Newtonian glasses. "caused" implies causation. causation implies a before, and an after. first there is the cause, then there is its effects. abstract ideas like before and after are looking at the world from a point of view of LINEAR time.

if you truly study relativity

If you truly study relativity, you'll see the words "causality" and "causal" used. It's not a strictly Newtonian idea. As long as there's no faster-than-light travel, "X happens before Y" is an invariant - it's true in all reference frames.

At least mathematically speaking, there are solutions to the equation of general relativity that have "closed timelike curves", so you could get causality violations, although those solutions might not be realistic (e.g., infinite rotating cylinders). See, for example, the Wikipedia page on Tipler cylinders, and the references to which it links.

Re:Nothing?

[shadowrat]

In our experience, there's always a next question. I wouldn't call that a paradox. That's like saying driving down the road is a paradox because once you finish a mile, there's another mile.

If we can say for certainty that our universe was created in this quantum fluctuation we answered a question. It raised another question about what is fluctuating, but that question doesn't invalidate the first. We moved ahead.

Re:Nothing?

[infinitelink]

This reminds me back when one insightful person referred to the stretches being done for string theories as "masturbated math." In the mechanico/natural-scientific realm, ex nihilo is mathematically and qualitatively not possible...by definition. That "Science" is being stretched to try and explain origins like this bespeaks much. That we are ignoring that probabilities are a tool to overcome our own limitations of dealing with complexity and at the same time cause-effect is grammatically the same thing as the last statement.

Re:Nothing?

[infinitelink]

there is always the question 'but what caused that'? really? there is "always" this question only if you continue to think about the world in the same mindset. you don't have to search for an answer in the world through Newtonian glasses. "caused" implies causation. causation implies a before, and an after. first there is the cause, then there is its effects. abstract ideas like before and after are looking at the world from a point of view of LINEAR time. if you truly study relativity, and i mean read Einstein's essays and not just the summary on wikipedia...you realize the linear view of time is just the way our electro-chemical computers (brains) process information. but in relativity, an atomic clock up in an airplane experiences time an a slightly different rate than you on the ground. since it is further from the earth. just think about that! imagine how warped and non-linerar time must really be, in a universe with supernovae and black holes! we can already measure two different RATES of TIME ITSELF just by using an airplane and an atomic clock. how crazy must the REAL story be? it will blow our minds in a thousand years when we understand it even better. so anyway, my point is time is not linear. in fact, most science on cosmology shows that near the big bang...all rules about time and physics break down and make no sense. so why would you expect that, at that critical moment, time is linear and simple and easily understood? why do you insist that at that moment, anything caused anything else? i don't think it really worked that way. it's just that the true way it worked is so complex, we are only now beginning to try to wrap our minds around impossible ideas like how anything would work in a universe without "before" and "after". i hope, instead of deciding that there is an un-solvable paradox, that you will continue to think about this stuff. don't give up. :) "There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in our philosophy." --Shakespeare's Hamlet

The proper response is Einstein's: he became deeply troubled by the consequences of his theories because they implied a beginning when, in his own words, his god was "Spinoza's", i.e. Deus et Natura--God and Nature being one and eternal. Einstein's position was this way because the ancient idea of an omnipotent Sovereign creating ex nihilo was not reconcilable with world cruelty (like Spinoza--also a heretical Jew). But the science (as he understood it) implied just this--a universe with a finite beginning--even if we speak of multiverses and shift the frame...or try to use probabilities to cover-up the glaring fact that a natural universe does not, really, make natural sense--nor is it sensible to fuzz it up with "well our brains just work that way." Among the great advances is that there turns out to be a series of primes and that various mathematical formula seem to indicate that math (or number) is not, in another of Einstein's favorite books (what is math) "[merely] a creation of the human mind." Einstein by the way, ended-up rejecting (as total) his belief to follow the science, and the way things have played-out since, under testing his theories are largely correct (of course, with refinement-revisions). I find it funny how probabilities keep being used to mask and cover-up failures to find causes and that this procedure is being substituted for real science even at the most fundamental levels of inquiry--this is the very thing Einstein condemned with "God does not play dice." And for those who are hyper-precise...I know all of the above is way too impreicse but then, doing better would require a longer crazier rant subject to much more deconstruction.

Re:Nothing?

[drerwk]

As long as there's no faster-than-light travel, "X happens before Y" is an invariant - it's true in all reference frames.

No. http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/... and for the longer version http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.... In these examples, the doors either close at the same time for the observer stationary with respect to the barn, or at different times for the observer running with the pole.

Re:Nothing?

[Guy Harris]

As long as there's no faster-than-light travel, "X happens before Y" is an invariant - it's true in all reference frames.

No. http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/... and for the longer version http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.... In these examples, the doors either close at the same time for the observer stationary with respect to the barn, or at different times for the observer running with the pole.

OK, sorry, should have said ""X doesn't happen after Y" is an invariant" (there don't exist reference frames such that X happens before Y in one frame and X happens after Y in another frame).

Re:Nothing?

[Zecheus]

No. Not turtles all the way down. That is a blunder. One turtle on top of another on top of another .... is a broken model. God is the single source of being, the single source of existence. This statement is irrational: The existence of the single source of existence depends on another source of existence.

Re:Nothing?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Reproducing doesn't start with F. Whatever could the fourth F be? :) It's ok, we're all adults here, you can say it.

...fermions? ;)

Re:Nothing?

[david_thornley]

Nope. In relativity, each event* divides spacetime into three regions: the future that can be affected, the past that can affect the event, and anything that could be seen as simultaneous from some reference frame. Causality cannot travel faster than light, just like anything else, and whether X can cause Y, or Y can cause X, or neither, are the three sections of spacetime defined by an event. In the event that neither can cause the other, they've got spacewise separation, and some reference frames will see X happening first and some will see Y happening first. (That leads to the fact that FTL travel and time travel are the same thing if Special Relativity holds.)

If you're looking to relativity to mess with causality, you're looking in the wrong place. Try quantum mechanics.

*An event is a point in spacetime, usually when and where something happens.

Re:Nothing?

[Charliemopps]

And that's the paradox. There is ALWAYS the question "but what caused THAT?" with no ultimate answer more satisfactory than a meta-physicist can come up with.

See, you're thinking classically. Causality must be maintained. But causality is an artifact of the existence of time. The big bang created time as well.

It would be like a stick figure on a piece of paper saying "Ok, so I was drawn by a giant pencil. But where IS the pencil?!? I can look to the top and bottom of the paper... to the right and left... there is no giant pencil! Therefor it cannot exist."

Re:Nothing?

[bluefoxlucid]

Seriously? There are theories about this?

A long time ago, when I was reading scifi, I asked a friend who is a theoretical quantum physicist about special relativity. I had two problems: first, that my internal simulation (I run complex systems like physics, economics, wars, and sociology in my head non-mathematically) indicated that time dilation would cause every object in the universe to exist in every position simultaneously; and second, that spinning the universe would be identical to standing in the center of the universe and spinning, except it would take more energy. Both of these are problems.

The first is simple: velocity is something like (v1+v2)/(1+ (v1)*(v2)/c), which is okay for two objects; but any third object would have a different velocity relative to either. This means two objects approaching each other both traveling at near the speed of light (0.99c and -0.99c) would not approach each other at nearly 2c, but rather at nearly c; meanwhile, they would pass other objects relatively stationary at nearly c. In other words: object A sees object B approaching it at the speed of light, and object P (planet behind) being left behind at the speed of light; object B is approaching object A and P at the same speed--the speed of light. But object P is getting further away from object A, but cannot be getting further away from object B! Object Q, behind object B, experiences a similar relationship. All objects in this system must be simultaneously stationary and moving away from or toward each other at the speed of light. Carrying this out to completion, all objects must be in an infinite number of positions, and in none of them.

The second has simple implications: spinning the universe and spinning a small object both amount to the same thing; thus it takes less energy to move more than half the mass in the universe, and almost no energy to move 100% of the mass.

My friend cited Mach's Theorem for the second, but declined to give a satisfactory answer about it. The whole thing is insanely complex, and beyond my existing mathematical knowledge. In short: if you spin the whole universe, the thing in the center feels the centrifugal forces pulling itself apart, as if it were spinning rather than the universe.

As for the first, he said quantum physics makes a lot of conjectures about multiple existences and everything being in every state--and thus every place--at once. It's even conceivable that every point in time exists at once, and thus that everything is simultaneously also in the same physical location--the proto-universe of the big bang was a single point, and, time being nothing, we are all both here, there, and everywhere we have and will be.

It was at this point I decided the universe is more broken than computer technology.

Re:Nothing?

[oh_my_080980980]

Crazy rant is correct because that's all it is. You're understanding of Einstein is severely lacking. Einstein believed in a deterministic universe and not the non-deterministic one espoused by Bohr and the Copenhagen interpretation of the quantum wave function. Einstein spent years developing paradoxes to demonstrate quantum physics could not be a complete theory. Unfortunately for Einstein, experimental physics kept validating quantum physics.

Re:Nothing?

[HiThere]

There actually *is* a real problem here. At least if you consider space and time as parts of the universe. If there is no space and no time, then you can't have quantum fluctuations.

My guess is that the actual universe is eternal, and that space and time exist without (most?) of the other features of the universe. But that they can be distorted by mass and energy. This essentially solves the problem as I understand it. There is the question of size in the absence of matter and a few other problems.

If my guess is correct, any "universe" that's created by this process is temporary. (What are a few billion years to eternity?) What's not clear is what the constraints are. Can a new universe be caused (or happen) to erupt within an existing universe? The probability of each eruption at any one point would necessarily be extremely small (or it wouldn't match observations)...but this doesn't mean it couldn't happen, or that it couldn't be caused. What the effects would be are difficult to contemplate. Does the eruption cause new space and time to be created, pushing pre-existing stuff out of the way, or does it occur within the same space-time? Etc.

P.S.: Whenever you get a singularity you get the laws of physics breaking down because division by zero is an invalid operation. But if Heisenberg's uncertainty rules, then you will never actually get exactly onto the singularity, so the laws don't break down. (You can divide by arbitrarily small numbers, as long as they aren't actually zero.) Sometimes other tricks are used to avoid this problem (see renormalization), but that's the simple way to say it.

P.P.S.: If you actually read and understand Einstein's work you don't realize that ordinary linear time is an illusion, you realize instead that it's a pretty precise statement of the way things work at low energy levels. It just doesn't work as you approach certain boundaries (like the speed of light, Schwartzhild boundary strength gravity, etc.). This is predictable because we never experience those boundaries. If you want an actual illusion, think about the way electromagnetic waves are translated into color sensations.

P.P.S.: To reiterate, the laws of physics do not break down near the Big Bang, only *AT* it. And Heisenberg uncertainty offers a way to finesse that problem.

Re:Nothing?

[LateArthurDent]

Again no. A running coming from the other direction would see the doors close in the other order. I think the AC parallel to this post explains it pretty well.

This is a highly misunderstood topic, I'm going to try to clarify it.

You're correct about the concept of simultaneity in relativity. In the barn door example, depending on your frame of reference, the bars could open simultaneously or one after the other.

He's correct about causality in relativity. Causal events are invariant. There is no frame of reference in existence, regardless of your velocity or distance, in which an object shot by a bullet fired from a gun gets hit before the gun is fired. It can't happen. It doesn't happen because with such a causal event, at some point the bullet and the gun were at the same location and the distance between them was 0. Time dilation depends on speed and distance, because time dilation requires an accompanying lorentz contraction. After the bullet is fired, depending on your frame of reference, people can disagree how far the bullet is from the gun, how far the target is from the gun, and therefore how long it took the bullet to travel from the gun to the target. But no frame of reference exists in which people observe the target being hit and then the gun firing the bullet.

Re: Nothing?

[HiThere]

Yes, but if space and time are non-existant, then there's no time for a quantum transition to happen in. So it can't happen. And there's no place for it to happen. So it can't happen. So I feel that must be a mistake.

So space and time must pre-exist, even if there's nothing in them. And given that, there's little reason to presume that we live in the "first" universe to erupt. But if dark energy (or a Big Crunch) is a built in characteristic of erupting universes, and if they rarely happen, then we would see very little evidence of them. And that would imply that there should be traces of the prior universe at the time of the subsequent universe erupting. But the traces are likely to be minisicule even at the time of the new eruption. Because it's quite difficult to do a thorough cleaning job. This doesn't mean that there will be any way to detect their presence, however.

Unfortunately, this does raise the question of "What do you mean 'time passing' when there's noting present?". The best answer that I have is that if someone were there to measure it they could measure it by noticing virtual pair creation, but they couldn't be there to measure it without disrupting the state of the system. Still, it's a definition, and if space and time exist it should be valid. And it's required to be valid or you couldn't have the kind of large eruption that yields a universe.

Okay, but

[31415926535897]

1. Quantum fluctuations are not nothing, but I guess we have to sell headlines here
2. Inflation Theory seems faster than "exponential" expansion. We're talking about a theory that went from the size of a singularity to something bigger than the visible universe in 10^-32 seconds. Exponential is quite pedestrian compared to what is theorized.

Re:Okay, but

[Immerman]

1) Depends what you mean by nothing. by standard measures of "mass" or "energy" quantum fluctuations are pretty much nothing. In fact I'm pretty sure virtual particle pairs are *exactly* nothing if measured from a sufficient distance.
2) Are you sure? I thought I had heard the growth rate referred to as exponential by cosmologists, though I couldn't swear it wasn't "science reporters" inserting fancy-sounding words they don't understand. After all in a scientific context "exponential" says nothing whatsoever about speed, it specifically refers to the shape of the growth curve: size = A^(Bt). If B is negative that can actually represent an infinitely slowing convergence to zero, as in nuclear radioactivity. And if A and/or B are large enough an exponential growth can be as insanely fast as you like.

Re:Okay, but

[radtea]

Depends what you mean by nothing. by standard measures of "mass" or "energy" quantum fluctuations are pretty much nothing. In fact I'm pretty sure virtual particle pairs are *exactly* nothing if measured from a sufficient distance.

There's a joke attributed to Abraham Lincoln: Q: If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? A: Four. Calling a tail a leg does not make it one.

Nothing in ordinary parlance (headlines, say) means an absolute absence, which is an empty concept, like the Philosopher's Stone or an honest politician. You don't get to decide for the sake a headline that it means something else. Only grasping little scumbag shills do that, people who are so fundamentally and thoroughly debased that they turn everything they touch--even language--into garbage.

"Pretty much nothing" is not "nothing". "In terms of mass and energy" is not a relevant restriction. The quantum vacuum is rich in properties. There is absolutely no basis to ignore those properties for the sake of a dishonest, misleading and confusing headline. It's like people who say "Before Europeans arrived North America had no people in it!" Which is true, for a certain value of "people". This is why precision in language matters, because there are people who actually say things like that to the considerable detriment of their fellow-humans.

"From a sufficient distance" would mean "infinity" if you want to talk about asymptotically vanishing properties of the vacuum, which would still leave all the other properties, so again: it isn't clear why anyone would dishonestly and stupidly restrict the discussion to one particular set of properties unless they wanted to dishonestly and stupidly made a false, dishonest and stupid claim that "the universe came from nothing!"

So other than being dishonest, stupid and wrong, there is nothing at all dishonest, stupid and wrong abut the claim "the universe came from nothing."

Something, not nothing

[Str1der]

The theory still implies something was there before...otherwise what were these quantum fluctuations "in" ?

Re:Something, not nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

From the summary:

This allows a small empty space to come into existence probabilistically due to fluctuations in what physicists call the metastable false vacuum.

and

"We prove that once a small true vacuum bubble is created, it has the chance to expand exponentially," say the researchers.

So, yes, this is a model by which a hyper-infinite sea of not-quite-nothing can have vastly expansive bubbles of actually-nothing. If you're wondering how this relates to the origin of our universe, it doesn't. The lopsided matter and energy of our universe indicates that it was not the result of a singular true-vacuum by any measure. If they had some model that allowed the metastable false vacuum to spawn vastly expanding non-vacuum bubble pairs of opposite matter/energy profiles, then that might be relevant to our reality.

Dishonesty

[MikeRT]

Ex nihilo means literally nothing. There is not even the slightest trace of physical reality in the concept of ex nihilo. If quantum fluctuations are even possible, you are operating a level of existence above ex nihilo.

Re:Dishonesty

[Ceriel Nosforit]

That's pretty much the reason why the catholic pope got in on the game.

As a discordian pope, I excommunicate catholic assumptions of the meaning of such as blasphemy.

The mathematics is only a model of the physics

[uberdilligaff]

Please. Mathematics provides a basis to model the physics. The mathematical model is not the physics. Models fit the physical world remarkably well, but not perfectly. For example, the equations of Newtonian mechanics fit the observed world very well until we could measure relativistic effects accurately. There are singularities in many of these equations where the behavior of the model may not fit the actual physics. To assert that properties of the model at obvious singularities "proves" the physics should be looked at with a great deal of skepticism.

Re:The mathematics is only a model of the physics

[MouseR]

Given the universe expanded from a singularity, any point in this singularity is the center of expansion.

So, there's the geocentric proof.

Re:Rules

[Immerman]

The nothing they are referring to is mass-energy. I think that basically they have mathematically confirmed the theory that a cold, empty false-vacuum universe could spontaneously spawn a bubble of stable true vacuum filled with the seething energy that eventually cooled to become the universe we see today.

Turtles. Mofo'ing turtles all the way down.

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> Wouldn't there need to be "something" for the quantum fluctuations to take place in?

Turtles. Mofo'ing turtles all the way down.

Re:Try communicating

[jythie]

Words rarely mean 'the same thing', esp when you are talking about domain specific language with an explicit taxonomy/lexicon.

Re:Car analogy?

[jythie]

Ok, so you don't actually have a car, but there is a parking lot, and you have pieces of cars and their antipieces (statistically, for every crankshaft, there is a crankshaft sized hole somewhere else), and given enough time a whole car worth of pieces appears in the parking lot, at which point the driver, who is now quite sick of having to watch where they are going due to the materialization of random heavy metal chunks in the air, can finally leave and get to their job at the car factory.

Oh, and probably something involving proprietary gas. All the cars made at the plant after this one all use Void brand gasoline and explode unexpectedly if you try using any other kind.

Coincidence?

[neo-mkrey]

That the slashdotism currently at the bottom of the page is: "The universe is an island, surrounded by whatever it is that surrounds universes."

Re:Logically only God could have created..

[alexgieg]

Of course there is: Everything appears due to interdependent coorigination. There's no beginning, and no end. All supreme gods are, like us, interdependent cooriginated beings who mistakenly believe themselves eternal and infinite and creators, but who will, in due time, also cease existing like everything, giving thus origin to other causal sequences. Behind it all the only constant is Vacuity, which we can access and become one with by following the eightfold path (right action, right thinking etc.), thus achieving the positive extinction of the self (nirvana).

Also, relying on a god, even a supreme one, is a fools' errand. No matter how many eternities you get to live in bliss in that god's paradise (or in torment in that god's hell), once he himself ceases to exist you're back at the starting point, still bound by causation. The only real escape is nirvana. Everything else is suffering either now, or in future, even if it's a very, very distant future.

That's Buddhism 101 for you. :-)

Re:Rules

[ledow]

Define "nothing". That's why you're confused.

Because a vacuum is "nothing". But there's energy and waves passing through it all the time.

To get "nothing", you have to remove the dimensions entirely so there's "nothing" to oscillate in at all.

In that case, what happens if a set of dimensions that we *can't* perceive as they aren't part of our reality exist out there? Is that "nothing"?

To us, "nothing" means nothing material or energy-based within the 3 dimensions we know and our time. That's quite a big nothing.

But outside of that, things still exist and we hypothesise that they might create universes like ours elsewhere. Hence it's not "nothing" at all. If fact, there might be billions of universes and a universe factory that pervades them all.

But, like a small child covering their eyes so you can't find them, just because we can't see them doesn't mean they don't exist.

Re:To What End?

[jfbilodeau]

I, for one, am thankful that people through history pursued 'pointless' research such as the motion of the heavenly spheres, the strange phenomenon known as electricity and though experiment involving looking at one self in a mirror approaching light speed.

Bullshit, as usual

[gweihir]

You cannot "mathematically" prove any properties of physical reality. You always have to abstract, losing accuracy. There is no way to prevent this inaccuracy and for proofs like this one, it is critical to not have this inaccuracy. Hence, this proof is meaningless. Really, this is basic stuff, stop getting it wrong.

Re:Rules

[gweihir]

You are missing that their claim is nonsense. They take a mathematical model that seems to fit reality and then claim things derived from that model apply to reality. That is not how it works, mathematical models are always inaccurate to some degree.

Re:so is this a fancy proof of

[jellomizer]

Sure...
As we all know a Fraction where the numerator and denominator are equal is equal to one.

All fractions with a numerator of 0 is 0

So the Fraction of 0/0 is both 0 and 1. so 0 = 1 QED.

Re:Before the Big Bang

[AchilleTalon]

There was no before. Time was created with the Big Bang. Otherwise you are saying the Big Bang occured in a pre-existing universe, which is not the case. Then you have to ask yourself about this pre-existing universe and how it was created and so on. The before question is pointless.

Schrödinger's cat

[s.petry]

Schrödinger's cat would have been a more common and well known argument, but that does not happen to fix the paradox of whether or not the Universe requires something in order to exist. Schrödinger's cat it's a separate paradox that attempts demonstrate that reality is not only subjective, but two alternative realities exist simultaneously.

A Universe from Nothing is a book that came out a few years ago, explaining the Expanding Quantum Vacuum theory (and has a few slight derivations). The problem is that "nothing" is completely bogus. EV/EQV requires that space, time, matter, energy, and all of the laws of physics already exist. Just like Big Bang which also can't resolve the paradox.

I happen to like this theory better than a big bang, but it has some problems that the BB crowd despises. Outside of the obvious evil competing theory, the Universe would be much older than BB claims.

Intellectuals

[Art3x]

"There are some ideas so preposterous that only an intellectual could believe them."

--- George Orwell

Re:Logically only God could have created..

[Black Parrot]

something from nothing, or at least the physical from the non-physical. Lets all just admit that there is a single Holy God, who created the physical universe as we know it. He has always, and will always exist in spirit (non physical). For reasons unknowable to us He decided to create the physical universe - logically there is no other possibility.

Invoking an uncaused god to "explain" an uncaused universe doesn't do anything except add a middle man, and ultimately leaves *more* unexplained than before.

there is no such thing...

[u19925]

There is no such thing as completely mathematical proof. All mathematical proof require some axioms (fundamental assumptions) and all proofs depend on those axioms. You can't prove something mathematically to someone who refuse to accept your axioms (and there is nothing wrong with it). For example, if I don't accept Euclid's 5th postulate, you can't prove me that sum of triangle is 180 degrees. The same goes for this proof. There are set of axioms and what the author is saying is that "if you accept my axioms, then" "i have a complete mathematical proof...". The title of this story eliminates the first part to sensationalize the second part.

Re:Before the Big Bang

[Dcnjoe60]

Something had to create the nothing that created the something (the last something we call Universe)? That's an interesting theory. Why don't you try to prove it?

I don't have to prove it. Even Stephen Hawking accepts it and relies on it in "A Brief History of Time" It isn't new, what is new, for this research is that they have re-defined what nothing is. No longer is it the absence of everything, but now is a quantum vacuum. It ignores though, that for there to be a quantum vacuum, by definition there already has to be quantum particles, somewhere. And if quantum particles already exist, then so does the universe. Therefore, if nothing requires something, then it isn't really nothing. Put differently, if nothing really is something, then division by nothing (zero) is possible and we can prove that 0 = 1.