About: Why is there something instead of nothing?
From H.
Webster’s Dictionary—————–
Something – an indefinite quantity or degree (nothing , until you know its nothing, could be an indefinite quantity)
Nothing – non-existence, not anything of value or note (nothing could be something of no value) So nothing is really something.
From the Physics view of reality:
I think you could be right. Nothing could be something in a sense, at least physically and when considering the number zero. In a way the question is misleading. Something and nothing describe the overall situation. Everything is nothing.
Modern physics tells us that the ultimate value of the conserved constants of the physical universe is exactly zero. In the Universe as a whole they add up to or cancel out to exactly zero:
Example:
(1) net electric charge is zero. But, you can have local places where there is a surplus of positive charges and other places where there is a surplus of negative charges, but overall there are the same number of both, so overall there is exactly zero charge.
(2) net momentum is zero. But, locally objects can have a certain momentum, locally other objects will have negative momentum that exactly cancels the positive ones.
(3) net mass-energy is zero. But, you can have a certain amount of mass-energy such as our solar system, but this is exactly cancelled out by negative gravitational potential energy. Combined there would be no solar system – it would end up with nothing.
(4) net angular momentum is zero. Locally you can have objects with angular momentum in a certain rotational direction, but there exist other objects that have angular momentum in the opposite direction to cancel it out. So, essentially from the overall perspective there is none.
etc.
From this it can be shown that the Universe can come with a net of nothing, triggered into being by something in another universe. This is why Physicists talk so much about any vacuum being filled with virtual particles — particles that appear for a very short time, then disappear, where all the particles have an overall electric charge of zero, even though some will be positive and some will be negative, also the same with overall momentum, mass-energy, angular momentum and all the other conserved universal constants in nature.
These particles and their affect can be precisely calculated and are being measured, even applications are theoretically possible using these virtual particles.
You could say that nothing exists — that all comes from nothing. Even our whole universe is likely the product of some virtual particle interaction or even a black hole from a universe that existed before ours and came into being 14 billion years ago in the Big Bang. From basic Physics and Astronomy it is very likely that new many universes are being spawned at this moment.
There is much talk about infinite number of universes spawning other ones in infinite time. These other universes may not have the same speed of light and other basic values as ours and most likely would have constants that do not result in life — dead universes.
Although there is evidence that a universe with many Black holes (like ours) spawns a universe from each black hole; and universes with black holes are exactly the ones with the correct parameters to potentially result in life. So, there is sort of a natural selection going on here — universes with few or no black holes will spawn few or no new universes, whereas universes with many black holes, like ours, will spawn many universes, and so on. It is then likely that the majority of universes have the potential of having life. This is still being studied.
Surprisingly some of this can be experimentally tested in large particle accelerators such as the one in CERN, Switzerland and also measured by satellites.
Another mind-boggling thing, each universe, including our own is infinitely large. We can only observe a maximum of about 14 billion light years distance in all directions from us (distance light travels in 14 billion years at a speed of 300, 000 km/second). The part we can observe is actually a very, very small volume of our entire universe. These are astronomical facts.
Another thing: Astronomical evidence shows that our universe is not only expanding, but is actually accelerating in its expansion. So, even if we wait for time to pass and more and more light from a greater distance is seen, the universe (with all the galaxies) is expanding at an increasing rate that the galaxies observed actually decrease because their distance in space is actually increasing faster then that of light — this is not a contradiction of the speed limit of light as set by Special Relativity – this limit is for mass and energy, not space..
Also in Math: the number line (also found to be naturally mapped in our brain, unless that part of the brain has been damaged) starts at very very large negative numbers (approaching infinity to less negative, eventually to zero, then positive to approaching positive infinity.
Example: around zero: … -6, -5, -4, -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. …
for every positive number there is a negative number, zero being the centerpiece.
Also adding all the numbers would result in zero.
Anyway, something and nothing are not that different.
Your thoughts,
O. Hooge
Naturalism and Religious Experience 