Some of you may have been following a tiny brouhaha (“kerfuffle” is so overused, don’t you think?) that has sprung up around the question of why the universe exists. You can’t say we think small around here.
First Lawrence Krauss came out with a new book, A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (based in part on a popular YouTube lecture), which addresses this question from the point of view of a modern cosmologist. Then David Albert, speaking as a modern philosopher of science, came out with quite a negative review of the book in the New York Times. And discussion has gone back and forth since then: here’s Jerry Coyne (mostly siding with Albert), the Rutgers Philosophy of Cosmology blog (with interesting voices in the comments), a long interview with Krauss in the Atlantic, comments by Massimo Pigliucci, and another response by Krauss on the Scientific American site.
I’ve been meaning to chime in, for personal as well as scientific reasons. I do work on the origin of the universe, after all, and both Lawrence and David are friends of the blog (and of me): Lawrence was our first guest-blogger, and David and I did Bloggingheads dialogues here and here.
Executive summary
This is going to be kind of long, so here’s the upshot. Very roughly, there are two different kinds of questions lurking around the issue of “Why is there something rather than nothing?” One question is, within some framework of physical laws that is flexible enough to allow for the possible existence of either “stuff” or “no stuff” (where “stuff” might include space and time itself), why does the actual manifestation of reality seem to feature all this stuff? The other is, why do we have this particular framework of physical law, or even something called “physical law” at all? Lawrence (again, roughly) addresses the first question, and David cares about the second, and both sides expend a lot of energy insisting that their question is the “right” one rather than just admitting they are different questions. Nothing about modern physics explains why we have these laws rather than some totally different laws, although physicists sometimes talk that way — a mistake they might be able to avoid if they took philosophers more seriously. Then the discussion quickly degrades into name-calling and point-missing, which is unfortunate because these are smart people who agree about 95% of the interesting issues, and the chance for productive engagement diminishes considerably with each installment.
How the universe works
Let’s talk about the actual way physics works, as we understand it. Ever since Newton, the paradigm for fundamental physics has been the same, and includes three pieces. First, there is the “space of states”: basically, a list of all the possible configurations the universe could conceivably be in. Second, there is some particular state representing the universe at some time, typically taken to be the present. Third, there is some rule for saying how the universe evolves with time. You give me the universe now, the laws of physics say what it will become in the future. This way of thinking is just as true for quantum mechanics or general relativity or quantum field theory as it was for Newtonian mechanics or Maxwell’s electrodynamics.
Quantum mechanics, in particular, is a specific yet very versatile implementation of this scheme. (And quantum field theory is just a particular example of quantum mechanics, not an entirely new way of thinking.) The states are “wave functions,” and the collection of every possible wave function for some given system is “Hilbert space.” The nice thing about Hilbert space is that it’s a very restrictive set of possibilities (because it’s a vector space, for you experts); once you tell me how big it is (how many dimensions), you’ve specified your Hilbert space completely. This is in stark contrast with classical mechanics, where the space of states can get extraordinarily complicated. And then there is a little machine — “the Hamiltonian” — that tells you how to evolve from one state to another as time passes. Again, there aren’t really that many kinds of Hamiltonians you can have; once you write down a certain list of numbers (the energy eigenvalues, for you pesky experts) you are completely done.
We should be open-minded about what form the ultimate laws of physics will take, but almost all modern attempts to get at them take quantum mechanics for granted. That’s true for string theory and other approaches to quantum gravity — they might take very different views of what constitutes “spacetime” or “matter,” but very rarely do they muck about with the essentials of quantum mechanics. It’s certainly the case for all of the scenarios Lawrence considers in his book. Within this framework, specifying “the laws of physics” is just a matter of picking a Hilbert space (which is just a matter of specifying how big it is) and picking a Hamiltonian. One of the great things about quantum mechanics is how extremely restrictive it is; we don’t have a lot of room for creativity in choosing what kinds of laws of physics might exist. It seems like there’s a lot of creativity, because Hilbert space can be extremely big and the underlying simplicity of the Hamiltonian can be obscured by our (as subsets of the universe) complicated interactions with the rest of the world, but it’s always the same basic recipe.
So within that framework, what does it mean to talk about “a universe from nothing”? We still have to distinguish between two possibilities, but at least this two-element list exhausts all of them.
Possibility one: time is fundamental
The first possibility is that the quantum state of the universe really does evolve in time — i.e. that the Hamiltonian is not zero, it truly does push the state forward in time. This seems like the generic case (there are more ways to be not-zero than to be zero), and it’s certainly the one that we spend time considering in introductory courses when we foist quantum mechanics on fearful undergraduates for the first time. A wonderful and under-appreciated consequence of quantum mechanics is that, if this possibility is right (the universe truly evolves), time cannot truly begin or end — it goes on forever. Very unlike classical mechanics, where the universe’s trajectory through the space of states can bring it smack up against a singularity, at which point time presumably ceases. In QM, every state is just as good as every other state, and the evolution will go happily marching along.
So what does this have to do with something vs. nothing? Well, as the quantum state of the universe evolves, it can pass through phases where it looks an awful lot like “nothing,” conventionally understood — i.e. it could look like completely empty space, or like some peculiar non-geometric phase where we wouldn’t recognize it as “space” at all. And later, through the relentless influence of the Hamiltonian, it could evolve into something that looks very much like “something,” even very much like the universe we see around us today. So if your definition of “nothing” is “emptiness” or “lack of space itself,” the laws of quantum mechanics provide a nice way to understand how that nothing can evolve into the marvelous something we find ourselves inside. This is interesting, and important, and worth writing a book about, and it’s one of the possibilities Lawrence discusses.
Possibility two: time is emergent/approximate
The other possibility is that the universe doesn’t evolve at all — the Hamiltonian is zero, and there is some space of possible states, but we just sit there, without a fundamental “passage of time.” Now, you might suspect that this is a logical possibility but not a plausible one; after all, don’t we see things change around us all the time? But in fact this possibility is the one you immediately bump into if you simply take classical general relativity and try to “quantize” it (i.e., invent the quantum theory that would reduce to GR in the classical limit). We don’t know that this is the right thing to do — Tom Banks, for example, would argue that it’s not — but it’s a possibility that is on the table, so we should think about what it would mean if it turns out to be true.
We certainly think that we perceive time passing, but maybe time is just emergent rather than fundamental. (I don’t like using “illusory” in this context, but others are not so circumspect.) That is, perhaps there is an alternative description of that single, unmoving point in Hilbert space — a description that looks approximately like “a universe evolving through time,” at least for some period of duration. Think of a block of metal sitting on a hot surface, not evolving with time but with a temperature gradient from top to bottom. It might be possible to conceptually divide the block into slices of equal temperature, and then write down an equation for how the state of the block changes from slice to slice, and find that the resulting mathematical formalism looks just like “evolution through time.” In this case, unlike the previous one, time could end (or begin), because time was only a useful approximation to begin with, valid in a certain regime.
This kind of scenario is exactly what quantum cosmologists like James Hartle, Stephen Hawking, Alex Vilenkin, Andrei Linde and others have in mind when they are talking about the “creation of the universe from nothing.” In this kind of picture, there is literally a moment in the history of the universe prior to which there weren’t any other moments. There is a boundary of time (presumably at the Big Bang), prior to which there was … nothing. No stuff, not even a quantum wave function; there was no prior thing, because there is no sensible notion of “prior.” This is also interesting, and important, and worth writing a book about, and it’s another one of the possibilities Lawrence discusses.
Why is there a universe at all?
So modern physics has given us these two ideas, both of which are interesting, and both of which resonate with our informal notion of “coming into existence out of nothing” — one of which is time evolution from empty space (or not-even-space) into a universe bursting with stuff, and the other of which posits time as an approximate notion that comes to an end at some boundary in an abstract space of possibilities.
What, then, do we have to complain about? Well, a bit of contemplation should reveal that this kind of reasoning might, if we grant you a certain definition of “nothing,” explain how the universe could arise from nothing. But it doesn’t, and doesn’t even really try to, explain why there is something rather than nothing — why this particular evolution of the wave function, or why even the apparatus of “wave functions” and “Hamiltonians” is the right way to think about the universe at all. And maybe you don’t care about those questions, and nobody would question your right not to care; but if the subtitle of your book is “Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing,” you pretty much forfeit the right to claim you don’t care.
Do advances in modern physics and cosmology help us address these underlying questions, of why there is something called the universe at all, and why there are things called “the laws of physics,” and why those laws seem to take the form of quantum mechanics, and why some particular wave function and Hamiltonian? In a word: no. I don’t see how they could.
Sometimes physicists pretend that they are addressing these questions, which is too bad, because they are just being lazy and not thinking carefully about the problem. You might hear, for example, claims to the effect that our laws of physics could turn out to be the only conceivable laws, or the simplest possible laws. But that seems manifestly false. Just within the framework of quantum mechanics, there are an infinite number of possible Hilbert spaces, and an infinite number of possibile Hamiltonians, each of which defines a perfectly legitimate set of physical laws. And only one of them can be right, so it’s absurd to claim that our laws might be the only possible ones.
Invocations of “simplicity” are likewise of no help here. The universe could be just a single point, not evolving in time. Or it could be a single oscillator, rocking back and forth in perpetuity. Those would be very simple. There might turn out to be some definition of “simplicity” under which our laws are the simplest, but there will always be others in which they are not. And in any case, we would then have the question of why the laws are supposed to be simple? Likewise, appeals of the form “maybe all possible laws are real somewhere” fail to address the question. Why are all possible laws real?
And sometimes, on the other hand, modern cosmologists talk about different laws of physics in the context of a multiverse, and suggest that we see one set of laws rather than some other set for fundamentally anthropic reasons. But again, that’s just being sloppy. We’re talking here about the low-energy manifestation of the underlying laws, but those underlying laws are exactly the same everywhere throughout the multiverse. We are still left with the question of there are those deep-down laws that create a multiverse in the first place.
The end of explanations
All of these are interesting questions to ask, and none of them is addressed by modern physics or cosmology. Or at least, they are interesting questions to “raise,” but my own view is that the best answer is to promptly un-ask them. (Note that by now we’ve reached a purely philosophical issue, not a scientific one.)
“Why” questions don’t exist in a vacuum; they only make sense within some explanatory context. If we ask “why did the chicken cross the road?”, we understand that there are things called roads with certain properties, and things called chickens with various goals and motivations, and things that might be on the other side of the road, or other beneficial aspects of crossing it. It’s only within that context that a sensible answer to a “why” question can be offered. But the universe, and the laws of physics, aren’t embedded in some bigger context. They are the biggest context that there is, as far as we know. It’s okay to admit that a chain of explanations might end somewhere, and that somewhere might be with the universe and the laws it obeys, and the only further explanation might be “that’s just the way it is.”
Or not, of course. We should be good empiricists and be open to the possibility that what we think of as the universe really does exist within some larger context. But then we could presumably re-define that as the universe, and be stuck with the same questions. As long as you admit that there is more than one conceivable way for the universe to be (and I don’t see how one could not), there will always be some end of the line for explanations. I could be wrong about that, but an insistence that “the universe must explain itself” or some such thing seems like a completely unsupportable a priori assumption. (Not that anyone in this particular brouhaha seems to be taking such a stance.)
Sounds and furies
That’s all I have to say about the (fun, interesting) substantive questions, but I am not strong enough to resist a couple of remarks on the (tedious but strangely irresistible) procedural questions.
First, I think that Lawrence’s book makes a lot more sense when viewed as part of the ongoing atheism vs. theism popular debate, rather than as a careful philosophical investigation into a longstanding problem. Note that the afterword was written by Richard Dawkins, and Lawrence had originally asked Christopher Hitchens, before he became too ill — both of whom, while very smart people, are neither cosmologists nor philosophers. If your real goal is to refute claims that a Creator is a necessary (or even useful) part of a complete cosmological scheme, then the above points about “creation from nothing” are really quite on point. And that point is that the physical universe can perfectly well be self-contained; it doesn’t need anything or anyone from outside to get it started, even if it had a “beginning.” That doesn’t come close to addressing Leibniz’s classic question, but there’s little doubt that it’s a remarkable feature of modern physics with interesting implications for fundamental cosmology.
Second, after David’s review came out, Lawrence took the regrettable tack of lashing out at “moronic philosophers” and the discipline as a whole, rather than taking the high road and sticking to a substantive discussion of the issues. In the Atlantic interview especially, he takes numerous potshots that are just kind of silly. Like most scientists, Lawrence doesn’t get a lot out of the philosophy of science. That’s okay; the point of philosophy is not to be “useful” to science, any more than the point of mycology is to be “useful” to fungi. Philosophers of science aren’t trying to do science, they are trying to understand how science works, and how it should work, and to tease out the logic and standards underlying scientific argumentation, and to situate scientific knowledge within a broader epistemological context, and a bunch of other things that can be perfectly interesting without pretending to be science itself. And if you’re not interested, that’s fine. But trying to undermine the legitimacy of the field through a series of wisecracks is kind of lame, and ultimately anti-intellectual — it represents exactly the kind of unwillingness to engage respectfully with careful scholarship in another discipline that we so rightly deplore when people feel that way about science. It’s a shame when smart people who agree about most important things can’t disagree about some other things without throwing around insults. We should strive to be better than that.
About the only useful thing I learned as a philosophy major, long ago, was that it is usually fruitless to start debating an intriguing question if you haven’t established a clear mutual understanding of the meaning of the question and what a valid answer would look like. So my knee-jerk reaction to the question “Why is the universe (at all, or as it is)?” is to ask myself the question “What do we mean by ‘why’?”… it implies some sort of necessity. How could this question be answered?
As I think about it we seem to have (only) two kinds of answers to ‘why’ questions: causality, and logical consistency.
Causality-based answers to ‘why’ questions rely on our understanding of how things evolve over time, and are based on identifying the precedent conditions for the event being discussed and our understanding of processes to show how those precedent conditions inevitably led to the outcome we are discussing. For example, something like “The plane crashed because XYZ…”.
Logic-based answers are essentially much simpler- identify the appropriate category of the ‘thing’ being discussed, and refer to its inherent properties. For example, “The sum of the interior angles of a plane triangle is 180 degrees because XYZ…”.
If causality and logical consistency are our only two real alternatives to attempt to answer the “Why is the universe ?” question, then we can get some perspective… along three lines:
1. A causality-based answer simply can’t work, because causality relies on the concept of time, whch is an attribute of the universe but not a possible explanatory reason for it. We’ve been trying this approach for as long as humanity has existed because we live in a world governed by causality (in its broadest sense), but precedence can’t explain the ‘start’ of time- it’s a logical contradiction.
2. A logic-based approach doesn’t work either, because logic is based on predefined categories and attributes and relationships- and the universe doesn’t present us with such things. It can be intriguing to postulate an underlying principle that ‘requires’ the universe, and I suppose that is at the heart of some forms of religious faith, but it doesn’t really answer anything, it just raises additional “whys”- why that principle instead of some other?
3. So that leaves me with the conclusion that the “Why is the universe ?” question isn’t really a valid question at all- there is no possible answer to it. We can expend any amount of time discussing it, but in the end it’s like all ‘paradoxical’ questions. What is the number greater than all numbers? Who shaves the barber of Seville? It looks like a real question, it sounds like a real question, but it isn’t really a question. A very disappointing conclusion.
I suggest that the real challenge for those of us who yearn for a deeper understanding of things is to somehow think ‘out of the box’ of causality and logic. If the fundamental “Why?” question isn’t valid… what alternative form of philosophy or science could lead us to a deeper understanding?
Scribbler,
Why does space have to have an edge? Doesn’t that raise the usual question of what is on the other side?
As for beginnings, that presumes time is an actual dimension, with endpoints. Which raises the same question; What came before, what comes next?
Mature belief systems presume themselves to be hermetic and asking questions of what is outside is heretical. Why would physics fall in that trap?
I’m not seeking a primary cause, I’m just making the argument that space, devoid of all reference, is physically nothing and that it is the imposition of limits and definitions on space; singularities, boundaries, curvature, etc. which make it something.
Time is like temperature, a measure of action. Any measure of space is a measure of space.
There is the vacuum. It fluctuates.
ITS LAUGHABLE that someone who is constantly belittling the people, oh yeah the majority of the human race throughout history, who see there’s a Designer and creator to the universe is all of the sudden up in arm about wise cracks.
You cant read read many response from you that dont expose the fear atheists have of being wrong. People who are confident dont resort to such transparent tactics unless they are trying to counterbalance some type of fear.
You never see this in agnostics. Its an atheistic trait. The number 1 self indulgence is young earth wise cracks by you guys. You cant refute the majority view so pick on the straw man–as if that helps you sleep in any way. I mind as well go challenge my hamster to an arm wresting completion so I too can feel strong too.
The atheists in the field are the very cause of the mistrust of the Young earthers. Trusting a bunch of misfits that spend lunch time with apple sauce in their hair as priests of the universe is not on the top of many people lists especially when every new theory is more absurd than the last.
The day when Mr Chicken chow mein hair can tell the human race Nothing is something is not coming. Kick the can down the street all you want but there’s a reason God has been on the top of the mountain in human thought for ohhhh…ever. Its because its the only explanation of the Design, odds, and purpose of reality.
How’s that for wise cracks? At least I did it out of fear for you and not myself.
If the discussion has as its goal the disproof of the existence of God the discussion is absurd from the outset; as if the human mind can understand all aspects of being; certainty the scientist ego loves to imagine that it understands all aspects of being — that’s to be expected, but it’s just so childish to imagine that any scientists view of things disproofs that which can neither be proved or disproved by the human intellect.
@Chad English: “It is impossible to define such a “nothing” from which you’d expect that “something” can’t spontaneous emerge because that restriction would constitute a law of physics, and then one simply asks where that law comes from.”
Richard Carrier has an interesting and rather entertaining (semi-serious?) post, Ex Nihilo Onus Merdae Fit, where he elaborates on this very idea: a truly featureless nothing couldn’t “forbid” the possibility that something comes out of it, because that would be a physical law and therefore a feature — but there can be none by hypothesis. His take on this theme is couched in termes of probability theory, and – damn it – I can’t find fault with his reasoning. The conclusion is essentially the same as that for the nothing of QM, i.e.: absolute nothing is also (if it can exist at all) inherently unstable.
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” absolute nothing is also (if it can exist at all) inherently unstable.”
I wonder what the odds are of an inflationary universe not encountering other instabilities, or debris from previous universes, given there is no time limit on nothing.
Quote: “There is the vacuum.”
OK…
Quote: “It fluctuates…”
And how EXACTLY does one have a fluctuation when there is NO THING to fluctuate against or in reference to???
Not rhetorical…
We presumed that the “vacuum” of space was empty. We have corrected that folly. That presence of something in what we thought was a vacuum in no way implies it was always so full, does it? Why not presume that whatever put the rest of matter there put the stuff in the “vacuum” there as well? At least until PROVEN otherwise?
Let’s not get into the “measurement vs. reality” quagmire. I proffer that true measurements reflect/quantify reality… 😉
@ 129: Personal experience is personal proof. Personal proof is testimonial and cannot be seen and weighed by others. Therein lies the flaws of those who try to prove the existence of God by personal experience. It is personal proof that brings one to that conclusion and to the conclusions as to His Nature. It can then be offered up as testimony but cannot be tossed into the arena of “scientific proof”. Science is about the quantifying of measurable aspects of a thing and making cogent predictions based upon those quantifications. Personal proofs are about the acceptance by an individual of certain things that have crossed a threshold of acceptance to them.
Again, as testimony to be accepted by another that leads them to find and accept the same Truth, it is invaluable. As something proffered as proof to those at large who not only do not accept it but have no way to quantify and test it, not useful at all…
To that End and at the risk of being redundant, the only two things that we can infer and that others can infer about the Universe, since it is in motion, is that something bigger than the Universe gave it a push and that having a beginning, that something had to have existed before the Universe…
Again and at the risk of being redundant, bigger/powerful enough to have pushed the Universe and preexistent to the Universe sets that something outside of the general Laws of Physics…
Any cogent scientific discussion of the origin of the Universe must start here, in my humble opinion. Anything else denies all scientific observations since such things began and flies in the face of the scientific method…
The answer can be found in the book of Genesis, chapter 1, verse 1 of the Jewish and Christian scriptures.
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Folks who keep going back to their assertions that faith and God explains everything should realize that this indeed explains everything and these also then explain nothing. In science we take the measure of our theses by examination, repeatability and by all means the use of logic. Introducing the mystical realm of faith is a foolish endeavor since faith, per se, is NOT a tool of cognition. Got that?
@ 138 DEAD WRONG!!! My faith is the result of the scientific process! I had an idea and tested it and now react in accordance with the results. It was the Perfect use of cognition…
Like I said above, my EXPERIENCE is useful for testimony and not empirical study, on that we agree. However, to disrespect those who offer this testimony and call them liars without PROOF of falseness is small minded and if I may, mean…
Some of us feel like those who tried to testify to the existence of gorillas and platypuses. They had to bear the ridicule of their peers until they saw the beasties for themselves…
Your disbelief is not proof of nonexistence and certainly not of prevarication…
😉
Jeeeeeeeesus Christ ! Carroll, Crauss and David Albert represents todays physicists and philosophers. Even a pigeon understands more than them and the above commenters. Have you ever heard about something like the principle of simplicity?: The simple answer to the question “Is there something rather than nothing?” is posted in my blog here:
http://anomalies-of-physics.blogspot.com/
For “God’s” sake, are you able to chew an apple for once ?
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Having taught Eastern and Western thought for a long time, I soon realized that in the west we ” assume” that what is or may be “god” on the one hand and the “universe” on the other are separate entities. If “god” is understood as the search for meaning, then there is no reason why there is a problem with there being “just a universe. The discussion, as I read it in general, presupposes the dichotomy between cause or first cause and any resulting effect. If reality is essentially “one”, then Occam’s razor does not rule out an effort to seek understanding of inherrent meaning. Both aetheist and theist assume that “god” and the universe are separate. Questionable assumption. Where language assumptions can cause many bad arguements.
I do not have the savvy to edit my possible typos but I hope the gist of my point comes through. I understand religion to be a search for “meaning” in this universe, not an effort to prove creation ex nihilo”.
I have to soundly commend John Merryman on his elegant description of something from nothing. It certainly does not add sweetness to the equation to brush arrogance all over science, at the cost of philosophy, which the human mind cannot do without. But his observation that all of modern science since Copernicus stands on the shoulders of monotheism is incontrovertible, not from a scientific view, but from a cultural one, which is more pervasive. Even Albert Einstein made constant reference to the Deity in his writings.
See the Solvay Conferences for data.
Whether we like it, or not, the DNA of religion is inextricably rooted in our genetic legacy, and does not look to being evicted from our consciousness any millenia coming. As far as its vast and pervasive cultural influence on all of human civilization, there is not even an iota of doubt. But it does make a critical difference today with the vast shifts of religious and scientific paradigms as to how we learn from both disciplines as to WHO homo sapiens sapiens really is. Judging from the most gruesome last 100 years we have passed on this planet, such issues as where the universe came from, is there a Higgs Boson, why G-d, suddenly take on cosmic importance. Remember that Galileo Galilei, the acknowledged father of modern science, in spite of his persecution by the Church for his dialogues, did not abjure his Christian faith, when he certainly had hundreds of reasons to do so.
Just for arguments sake, or maybe against it, we may be able to think, speak and act about science and G-d as two separate disciplines, and as S.J.Gould showed us, that is the case. Every religion AND philosophy worth five minutes of reading accepts them as indivisible, inseparable, and inextricably united. But in order for science to untangle this ‘entanglement’ of indivisibility, it only has to proceed with science as usual. An ordained minister or priest who does not understand quantum physics or relativity is in no way hampered in his responsibilities to his parish because there are scientists who do understand them. Conversely scientists who do not understand religious beliefs are in no way hampered in their responsibilities to conduct their work ‘scientifically.’
We might even approach the conundrum with – Is all of G-d contained in science or, is all of science contained in G-d? We can begin to wrap our brains around these for starters.
I am certain this will continue the discussion for at least the next millenium.
Truly, without offending, the question is stupid. We exist. Therefore, something caused existence (I know this is the anthropomorphic solution). Quantum mechanics completely supports the, however minutely possible, creation of an entire universe from nothing. Given that we have no time counter before creation, we also have no concept of just how long it took the improbable event to occur. It could have been 10^100 or 10^1000000000, but, none of these numbers means anything because the only reference point is the act of springing into existence. In support of this notion are the numerous examples of highly improbable (by our living standards) events that occur naturally. By extension, extremely, extremely improbable events must also occur.
Rather than expend thought energy on why we exist, I would truly appreciate the global science community answering the question of how we went from understanding 99.99999% of existence (in the 80s) to now understanding maybe 5% of existence. Interesting how one recent observation of masses of stars and clusters perpendicular to our galaxy’s plane of rotation might completely explain dark matter. Hmmmmm! No magic hand-waving required!
And, finally, the whole quantum wave entanglement issue and the creepy faster-than-light action at a distance. Consider this: What if entanglement is a manifestation of dimensional projection. That is, certain particle interactions project the particles into new dimensions. The projections of those new dimensions in our normal 4-dimensional space appear to be two particles that are quantum entangled. But, this is only because the one particle is now traveling in a new dimension. It’s 4-dimensional projection is now two images, like a corner mirror. As I move away from the corner, my two images separate.
@91. Bengt Frost:
Quantum mechanics does not say what Krauss believes, and he is also very confused about quantum field theory.
“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it” – Niels Bohr
Thus, not easy to understand or interpret quantum mechanics…
The use of the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics in the creation of virtual particles (i.e. quantum fluctuations in the universe’s space-time fabric produces particles). The probability of a quantum outcome occurring increases in proportion to the passage of time is another principle Lawrance M. Krauss uses in his book to explain “A Universe from Nothing”.
Still no answer to the question: Where are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from?
The well-known uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics does not say that “quantum fluctuations in the universe’s space-time fabric produces particles”.
Krauss also fails to understand the energy-time ‘uncertainty’ relations. It is a pity that such serious misunderstandings of basic science are spread to broad audiences.
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@148. Juan Ramón González Álvarez
Quantum fluctuations in the universe’s space-time fabric to produce particles sure implies the uncertainty principle.