• Gregory
    4.7k
    Zero energy models assume a quantum system exists. That ain't nothing.Relativist

    As the name implies, it says all ENERGY in the cosmos is zero. So something can come from nothing says Hawking's in Hawking's Universe documentary. I agree something comes from nothing but not that the world is zero energy
  • Relativist
    2.6k
    As the name implies, it says all ENERGY in the cosmos is zero. So something can come from nothing says Hawking's in Hawking's Universe documentaryGregory
    I know he calls this "something from nothing." Laurence Krauss and Alexandar Vilenkin make the same assertion, but it's still not a true nothingness. Here's an excerpt of a review of Krauss' book. The criticism is equally applicable to each of them:

    “It happens that ever since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, what physics has given us in the way of candidates for the fundamental laws of nature have as a general rule simply taken it for granted that there is, at the bottom of everything, some basic, elementary, eternally persisting, concrete, physical stuff. Newton, for example, took that elementary stuff to consist of material particles. And physicists at the end of the 19th century took that elementary stuff to consist of both material particles and electro­magnetic fields. And so on. And what the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all there is for the fundamental laws of nature to be about, insofar as physics has ever been able to imagine, is how that elementary stuff is arranged. The fundamental laws of nature generally take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of that stuff are physically possible and which aren’t, or rules connecting the arrangements of that elementary stuff at later times to its arrangement at earlier times, or something like that. But the laws have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where the elementary stuff came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular elementary stuff it does, as opposed to something else, or to nothing at all.

    The fundamental physical laws that Krauss is talking about in A Universe From Nothing--the laws of relativistic quantum field theories--are no exception to this. The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on--and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story
  • Gregory
    4.7k
    Period. Case closed. End of storyRelativist

    Lawrence Krauss actually does think science can speak about nothing. A lot of physicist do. As I said, I don't agree with them. My approach is from Hegel, Buddhism, and philosophy in general. Not from science
  • Relativist
    2.6k
    Lawrence Krauss actually does think science can speak about nothing. A lot of physicist do.Gregory
    They define "nothing" as an absence of particles (matter).
  • Gregory
    4.7k
    So space-time creates the nothing of the world in the zero energy theory?
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