This morning, CH has by implication raised the issue that has been hotly debated recently: getting a cosmos out of “nothing.”
I thought it would be helpful to headline my comment:
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>> . . . “Something from nothing” is always problematic.
Now, I know I know, here is Ethan Siegel of Science Blogs in partnership with Nat Geog, inadvertently illustrating the problem:
It’s often said that you can’t get something from nothing. And while this may be true for most practical applications of your life, it isn’t true for our physical Universe.
And I don’t just mean some tiny part of it; I mean all of it. When you take a look at the Universe out there, whether you’re looking at the wonders of this world or all that we can see for billions of light years, it’s hard not to wonder — at some point — where it all came from.
And so we try to answer it scientifically. In order to do that, we want to start with a scientific definition of nothing. In our nearby Universe, nothing is hard to come by. We are surrounded by matter, radiation, and energy everywhere we look. Even if we blocked it all out — creating a perfect, cold, isolated vacuum — we still wouldn’t have nothing.
We would still exist in curved spacetime. The very presence of nearby objects with mass or energy distorts the very fabric of the Universe, meaning that if we want to truly achieve a state of physical nothingness, we cannot have anything in our Universe at all.
Physically, that ideal case would be true nothingness. No matter, no radiation, no energy, no spatial curvature. We can imagine existing in completely empty, void space, infinitely far away from the nearest star, galaxy, atom or photon. The spacetime around us, rather than having curvature to it, would appear as completely flat . . . .
The only physical freedom that such nothingness could have is the freedom to expand or contract, depending on the nature of this nothingness. Recently, Edward Feser picked on me — among others such as Hawking, but me in particular — for using this scientific definition of nothing. (Which yes, I’m fully aware is not the same as philosophical nothingness, which I explicitly stated in the fourth sentence of the post Feser criticizes.)
Yet it is a form of this very nothingness that I have just imagined with you that — to the best of our scientific knowledge — the entire Universe is born from, and that it will return to in the distant future.
Here’s how.
You removed all the matter, energy, and sources of curvature from your Universe. You are left with empty spacetime. On large scales — where “large” means larger than the size of a subatomic particle like a proton — spacetime indeed looks like that flat grid we referred to earlier. But if you start looking at ever smaller scales, this picture breaks down.
On the tiniest physical scales — the Planck scale — spacetime isn’t flat at all. Empty space itself vibrates and curves, and there is a fundamental uncertainty in the energy content — at any given time — of nothingness . . .
See the inadvertent switcheroo?
A space-time continuum, at whatever scale, is plainly not genuinely nothing.
{It’s worth adding a picture and a video May 13, HT CR:
But by imagining that — by virtue of wearing the lab coat — one can redefine something as nothing and add an adjectival prefix: physical, one has nothing, one then thinks one can pull a cosmos out of the hat, as if by magic.
Not so.
In the relevant sense, nothing is non-being: no matter, energy, space, time, information, mind, ideas, etc. Therefore, no properties or capacities. An empty blackboard, write a zero, then erase it then erase the board and the space in which the board is. (That is the error in the above.)
Nothingness, classically, is what rocks dream of — as, rocks do not dream.
Nothing, then, cannot be a credible causal matrix from which something comes.
That is, if you appeal to a speculative high-energy quantum vacuum in which there are nano-scale fluctuations, that is not nothing. If you appeal to the forces summed up by laws of gravitation etc, that is not nothing.
Space is not nothing.
A vacuum is not nothing.
Nothing is what rocks dream of.
It is therefore a reasonable first premise of scientific thought, that nothing — non-being — is not a credible appeal as a causal root of being.
So, we can safely say that if something now is, a cosmos with us in it, something always was, with capacities that can credibly account for a cosmos with us in it.
Is it some form of matter-energy in space-time, as an eternal entity? That was what was once thought via what was called the Steady State cosmological model.
It collapsed.
We are stuck with a cosmos that appears strongly to have had a beginning 10 – 20 BYA.
That which begins, is contingent, there is some enabling factor that once set allows emergence.
So, there is something beyond our observed cosmos.
Oscillating models, inflationary bubbles, etc etc all point to that.
The issue is, that at that point we are beyond empirical observation, and we have crossed over into philosophy, unannounced and perhaps unrecognised. Which, means that we have no right to exclude any serious alternative, including that it is not merely something beyond, but at root — even through a multiverse — someONE.
Multiply that by a cosmos that appears fine tuned for C-chemistry, aqueous medium, gated metabolising automaton, molecular nanotech, self replicating, code using cell based life, and we have some relevant empirical facts that point to contrivance.
Not of some small thing, but of a whole universe.
No wonder, Sir Fred Hoyle went on record:
Once we see that life is cosmic it is sensible to suppose that intelligence is cosmic. Now problems of order, such as the sequences of amino acids in the chains which constitute the enzymes and other proteins, are precisely the problems that become easy once a directed intelligence enters the picture, as was recognised long ago by James Clerk Maxwell in his invention of what is known in physics as the Maxwell demon. The difference between an intelligent ordering, whether of words, fruit boxes, amino acids, or the Rubik cube, and merely random shufflings can be fantastically large, even as large as a number that would fill the whole volume of Shakespeare’s plays with its zeros. So if one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to think of in pondering this issue over quite a long time seems to me to have anything like as high a possibility of being true.” [[Evolution from Space (The Omni Lecture[ –> Jan 12th 1982]), Enslow Publishers, 1982, pg. 28.]
From 1953 onward, Willy Fowler and I have always been intrigued by the remarkable relation of the 7.65 MeV energy level in the nucleus of 12 C to the 7.12 MeV level in 16 O. If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you would have to fix, and your fixing would have to be just where these levels are actually found to be. Another put-up job? . . . I am inclined to think so. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has “monkeyed” with the physics as well as the chemistry and biology, and there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. [F. Hoyle, Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 20 (1982): 16]
The big problem in biology, as I see it, is to understand the origin of the information carried by the explicit structures of biomolecules. The issue isn’t so much the rather crude fact that a protein consists of a chain of amino acids linked together in a certain way, but that the explicit ordering of the amino acids endows the chain with remarkable properties, which other orderings wouldn’t give. The case of the enzymes is well known . . . If amino acids were linked at random, there would be a vast number of arrange-ments that would be useless in serving the pur-poses of a living cell. When you consider that a typical enzyme has a chain of perhaps 200 links and that there are 20 possibilities for each link,it’s easy to see that the number of useless arrangements is enormous, more than the number of atoms in all the galaxies visible in the largest telescopes. This is for one enzyme, and there are upwards of 2000 of them, mainly serving very different purposes. So how did the situation get to where we find it to be? This is, as I see it, the biological problem – the information problem . . . .
I was constantly plagued by the thought that the number of ways in which even a single enzyme could be wrongly constructed was greater than the number of all the atoms in the universe. So try as I would, I couldn’t convince myself that even the whole universe would be sufficient to find life by random processes – by what are called the blind forces of nature . . . . By far the simplest way to arrive at the correct sequences of amino acids in the enzymes would be by thought, not by random processes . . . .
Now imagine yourself as a superintellect working through possibilities in polymer chemistry. Would you not be astonished that polymers based on the carbon atom turned out in your calculations to have the remarkable properties of the enzymes and other biomolecules? Would you not be bowled over in surprise to find that a living cell was a feasible construct? Would you not say to yourself, in whatever language supercalculating intellects use: Some supercalculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule. Of course you would, and if you were a sensible superintellect you would conclude that the carbon atom is a fix . . . .
I do not believe that any physicist who examined the evidence could fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce within stars. [[“The Universe: Past and Present Reflections.” Engineering and Science, November, 1981. pp. 8–12]
It is time for us to rethink.
PS: Feser’s comment on the concepts restated in the clip from Segal.>>
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So, everything from nothing morphs into effectively rebranding a quantum vacuum as “nothing” and allowing it to bubble and froth up our cosmos.
Is such truly nothing?
And, is that something genuinely debatable?
What about what happens if we rebrand something as nothing? Is that akin to asking how many legs a sheep has if we rebrand the tail a leg? Or, was Lincoln right to point out that relabelling like that has not addressed the reality of what makes tails and legs inherently different? END
PS, Jan 10 2014: This came up again, and I have provided clips from Feser and Albert, here on:
EXHB A, Feser: >> 404
EXHB B, Albert: >>405
F/N 2: David Albert (philosopher with a background in physics) in his critical review of Krauss:
. . . there is, as it happens, an interesting difference between relativistic quantum field theories and every previous serious candidate for a fundamental physical theory of the world. Every previous such theory counted material particles among the concrete, fundamental, eternally persisting elementary physical stuff of the world — and relativistic quantum field theories, interestingly and emphatically and unprecedentedly, do not. According to relativistic quantum field theories, particles are to be understood, rather, as specific arrangements of the fields. Certain arrangements of the fields, for instance, correspond to there being 14 particles in the universe, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being 276 particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being an infinite number of particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being no particles at all. And those last arrangements are referred to, in the jargon of quantum field theories, for obvious reasons, as “vacuum” states. Krauss seems to be thinking that these vacuum states amount to the relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical version of there not being any physical stuff at all. And he has an argument — or thinks he does — that the laws of relativistic quantum field theories entail that vacuum states are unstable. And that, in a nutshell, is the account he proposes of why there should be something rather than nothing.
But that’s just not right. Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields! The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings — if you look at them aright — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.
Again, nothing is non-being. Anything standing in for non-being is something, not nothing.
Fallacy of equivocation, anyone?
And, onlookers, if it takes so much to hammer home a patent even trivial point in responding to the Darwinist objectors to design thought we tend to see, what does that tell us about matters where we deal with inference to best explanation regarding traces from an unobserved remote past of origins?
As in, fallacies of selective hyperskepticism, here we come.
KF >>
F/N: Feser nailing the key point, on a Krauss interview with Australian TV. I add a parenthesis or emphasis or two in the Krauss clip within the clip:
In short, just remember, nothing, proper is non-being. Anything else standing in to claim the title is a case of not the real McCoy.
KF>>