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Comment by EMM_386 | Hacker News Reader

Pure nothingness has no potential for creation. The laws of physics don't invent themselves, so it would seem that true "nothing" never existed. I'm not talking about the quantum soup of the vacuum of space, because that is something.

If we take Hawking's idea that the universe smoothed out to a zero point where there was no time and nothing else, how does that point because laws of physics, gravity, etc? What properties of a zero point (that had no properties) cause it to create an inflationary universe?

Everything breaks down at that point, because trying to use mathematics or physics to explain something that existed before mathematics and physics doesn't work.

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The problem in your argument is the word 'become'. To 'become', something has to not be so and then later be so- with 'later' implying time on both sides. Hawking's argument is that there is no time on the other side.

My interpretation is that the energy of the universe exists in time and space, evolving across the dimension of time. But it has an edge called 'the beginning'. That's the shape of the beast- a defined edge that we cannot reason outside of.

Edit: At least, I presume your 'because' was meant to be 'become'.

> My interpretation is that the energy of the universe exists in time and space, evolving across the dimension of time. But it has an edge called 'the beginning'.

Actually, Hawking's proposal was that there is no "edge". In his proposal, the 4-D spacetime of the universe has no boundary, just as the 2-D surface of the Earth has no boundary. What we call the "beginning" of the universe is more like the South Pole of the Earth: we pick it out of all the other points because of a particular property we're interested in, but it's not an "edge" any more than any other point is. (Note that this analogy, which Hawking used, is referred to in the article.)

Is the hypothesis still that the limit as time goes to zero still exists as a part of our universe? In your analogy, is the south pole still a point contained on earth or is it just a point you can get arbitrarily close to?

> the limit as time goes to zero

There is no "time" at the "South Pole" point of the universe, or sufficiently close to it. The spacetime geometry in Hawking's model is purely spacelike in that region, not split up into "space" and "time" parts the way it is now. (As I understand the model, the boundary of the "spacelike" region" is at the beginning of inflation.)

> is the south pole still a point contained on earth or is it just a point you can get arbitrarily close to?

It's still contained.

That's really cool. Thanks for the explanations :D

You're welcome!

> Is the hypothesis still that the limit as time goes to zero still exists

Note that in other models of the universe, the ones that have an "initial singularity" which can be thought of as "the limit as time goes to zero", the initial singularity itself is not part of the universe; it can be approached as a limit but never reached. (The reason is that spacetime curvature increases without bound as the singularity is approached, and the equations of GR break down at the singularity.)

One of the nice things about Hawking's model is that it totally avoids this problem; spacetime curvature is finite everywhere and there are no singularities and no points where the equations break down.

This reminded me of a pretty good (and robust) debate with some of the world's leading physicists regarding the existence of and quantification of nothing.

2013 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Existence of Nothing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OLz6uUuMp8

> Pure nothingness has no potential for creation.

I disagree, pure nothingness has the largest potential for creation because by virtue of not being there (nor anywhere) it doesn't prevent anything at all from creating itself.

if this sounds strange is because the concept of nothingness is strange.

rather than asking why is there nothing rather than something, I marvel at how we can conceptualize 'nothingness' in such a way that we can even think of these kinds of questions

You're misunderstanding potential.

Potential cannot exist of its own accord. It is secondary to something already actual and only then can it be actualized.

If in the beginning there was truly nothing, and I mean also the absence of any cause that could make things exist, then there is not only nothing to actualize anything since only actual things can actualize, but not even the potential to be actualized.

So no, absolute nothing can not produce nothing and can never yield anything not even in principle.

You're speaking in tautologies. If you define "Nothingness" as "That which is unable to produce anything" and use that to conclude that it is not possible for there to be nothing at the start of the universe, you are begging the question. Your axioms trivially contain your conclusion, but why should we accept those axioms?

As a layman when it comes to physics, I've always had the impression that the nature of existence must be tautological. If the logic doesn't form a circle, then any attempt to explain the cause and effect sequence that resulted in our universe can always be met with a "well why did the first step occur"?

Logic is a human invention. The universe doesn't owe you the ability to explain the entire chain of cause and effect. Not being able to prove your axioms is what differentiates science from religion.

By definition axioms can't be proven but they are assumptions which we take for granted upon which we build science. However, in science, the axioms are such that they can be observed and discarded if we ever find them to be false. This is where it differs from religion.

I think that using logical fallacies to prove your own assumptions likewise discards observation in favor of a totalitarian explanation of everything, which amounts to a religious belief. A key aspect of science is accepting that our understanding is limited and contingent, whereas religion tends to use faith to prove itself.

Agreed.

EDIT: _Mostly agreed_. Religion never proves itself. It just demands that you have faith.

Science doesn’t prove axioms... Gödel already parsed this problem :)

Pure nothingness cant be detected or measured because nothingness isn't there. if it was there it wouldn't be nothingness it would be something.

the more i think about this the more wrong i think you are.

You're assuming that "nothingness" isn't an impediment to creation of something... it may very well be the ultimate barrier to something being created.

We'll probably never know, but at the end of the day until we can devise a way to define and measure "nothingness" we cant setup any experiments (thought or otherwise) to develop theories from/about it.

but nothingness in fact isn't an impediment to creation because nothingness just isn't. it's not an impediment nor a boon nor anything at all.

and how can you concieve of a way to measure "nothingness" when by definition you would be trying to measure that which isn't there to be measured?

have you ever seen zero of anything? how would you measure that?

I agree that conceiving of nothingness is hard and as yet unsolved.

but I fail to see how this is related to your first statement. >but nothingness in fact isn't an impediment to creation because nothingness just isn't.

Again the statement that nothingness isn't an impediment, literally can not be proven. Because of that, you must leave open the potential that pure nothingness might be not only an impediment to creation but it might also be the ultimate impediment to creation of something.

We dont know what the properties of nothingness holds in our universe or how our universe of stuff behaves around nothingness.

> We dont know what the properties of nothingness holds in our universe or how our universe of stuff behaves around nothingness.

nothingness holds no properties.

I think it's more useful to ponder how can we even talk about it to discuss its precise nature. which it doesn't have, so is it kind of recursive? i.e its nature is its 'own' non-self? ugh..

The act of creation requires there to be something there beforehand. You can't create something from nothing, it doesn't make any sense.

I don't understand why would creation require something beforehand, that seems to be transformation or transmutation of some sort.

in any case, nothingness already makes no sense on its own

> Pure nothingness has no potential for creation

In mathematics, at least, this is not true. For example, a set consisting of the empty set is not empty.

You're confusing formalism with metaphysics.

Emptiness isn't nothingness. Emptiness presupposes something that is empty of something expected to fill it, the absence of something not the total absence of anything. Absolute nothingness isn't empty because there's nothing that can be empty. Nothingness is not a something, but people here seem to be reifying the notion.

Because you can't get rid of the potential to reify.

"Pure nothingness" would be the empty set, not a set with something in it.

Yes, that's their point. Pure nothingness, the empty set, has the potential to create the set containing the empty set, and then the set containing that, sets containing combinations, etc etc.

How does the empty set "create" the set containing the empty set?

By being the contents that make that set exist.

Is there a theory that the beginning and the ending of the universe are directly connected to each other? And that time doesn't so much start over and return to the starting point on a circle, so to speak?

The Big Bounce! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bounce

To me it's more satisfying than the idea of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe

I once heard of the hypothesis that once the last proton decays, the universe will once more be completely uniform in every way. With nothing to distinguish any part of the universe from any other part, space becomes meaningless and the universe has once more entered a state of nothingness much like how it was "before" the Big Bang.

So, in a sense, the heat death is not so different from the big bounce.

Unfortunately I did not bother to bookmark what I had read, and can no longer find a name or anything referring to it on the internet.

You and your parent should definitely read Asimov's short story "The last question", if you haven't yet. Just Google for it.

"You and your parent" definitely confused me for a second!

There is a great mini documentary made that tries to answer this question https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA

Roger Penrose believes in a model he calls Conformal Cyclic Cosmology. He doesn't believe in Cosmic Inflation, and instead proposes that the accelerating expansion of our present universe forms the inflationary period of the next universe. He gets around the second law of thermodynamics by saying that the difference between the two universes is a redefinition of entropy. The mapping between the two different definitions of entropy makes our maximal entropy state look like a minimal entropy state in the new universe.

> What properties of a zero point (that had no properties) cause it to create an inflationary universe?

In Hawking's proposed model, there is no "creation". The 4-D spacetime of the universe just is; it's a 4-dimensional geometric object with no boundary. See my response to mabbo downthread.

>Everything breaks down at that point, because trying to use mathematics or physics to explain something that existed before mathematics and physics doesn't work.

What is the meaning of this paragraph? Mathematics are not dependent on the existence of any particular universe

There was no "before" as time itself was created with the universe.

How was time created, time means changing state, without time there is no change. So in order for a change to happen in the existence of time you'd need a further time dimension; then you're just shifting the problem up the stack.

Creation of time requires a meta-universe of some sort. Though perhaps there's some other way to conceive time not existing further back than a given point that works around creation being something that's done within a temporal dimension.

Although in that case, barring any meta-universe to provide a defintion of time beyond time, time must simply be.

Or not be, but I think we can rule that one out.

It is no different from the question how any other dimension suddenly existed. Time and space are connected.

I have wondered in the past if "time" has varied over the existence of the Universe, like if the first 100,000,000 years relative to our own reckoning was actually more like 100 billion years as time is elastic and changed over some other higher-dimensional axis. Just a musing by a speculator

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