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In a vacuum with no matter or radiation, presumably the laws of physics still exist, and therefore it will be emptiness forever. As King Lear said, nothing will come of nothing. But if the laws of physics themselves did not exist, then nothing could indeed come from nothing - what’s to stop it?
When I told this to a friend he answered, "Everywhere."
Survivor bias. If nothing existed [1], we wouldn't be here to ask the question. It's like asking what is P(A|A). The question "Why do I not exist" has never and will never be (seriously) asked. [1] To be clear, if only nothing existed, and there existed nothing other than nothingness. [2] [2] I sense epistemologists warming their guns here, asking if the "existence" of "nothing" counts as the existence of "something"…
He was an incredible intellect, but not everything he said is going to be a winner.
IOW words or phrases that skip the rather prominent liabilities of those same (tired?) words/models but also work well at such a global scope and scaffold nicely.
Thanks for posting.
In a vacuum with no matter or radiation, presumably the laws of physics still exist, and therefore it will be emptiness forever. As King Lear said, nothing will come of nothing. But if the laws of physics themselves did not exist, then nothing could indeed come from nothing - what’s to stop it?
Imagine a wave that can at any point oscillate up or down. If it does both and splits, it eventually will create all possible states of anything imaginable. Some of the waves become more and more complex, until in very rare cases structure and rules form within the wave function itself. Akin to Conway’s Game of Life. So universes with (seemingly) deterministic laws of any kind are just extremely rare sub-trees of this wave of ”every possible wavestate”.
All the peculiarities like dimensions are illusions the same way a multidimensional array to a computer is ultimately just one-dimensional, with logic to treat it as multi-dimensional.
I also like the explanation that concept of nothingness is categorically invalid because there clearly is existence (or is there? Maybe this is the ultimate ”nothing”?), but the theory of all possible states sounds even better.
Definitely not claiming this is true but intuitively feels like the best explanation for this existence… that this universe with all its laws is a rare sub-tree of all possible states of a simple oscillator. Other universes with other laws exist further up the tree in its other branches. In between, voids and vacuums and undeterministic universes
> Why does anything exist?
> Because necessity requires logical laws; logical laws imply incontrovertible truth; such truth includes mathematical truth; mathematical truth defines numbers; numbers possess number relations; number relations imply equations; equations define computable relations; computable relations define all computations; all computations include algorithmically generated observers; and these observers experience apparent physical realities.
I'm not convinced. Does anyone follow this?
In a vacuum with no matter or radiation, presumably the laws of physics still exist, and therefore it will be emptiness forever. As King Lear said, nothing will come of nothing. But if the laws of physics themselves did not exist, then nothing could indeed come from nothing - what’s to stop it?
The laws of physics are true; why do they need to "exist"?
In a vacuum with no matter or radiation, presumably the laws of physics still exist, and therefore it will be emptiness forever. As King Lear said, nothing will come of nothing. But if the laws of physics themselves did not exist, then nothing could indeed come from nothing - what’s to stop it?
Survivor bias. If nothing existed [1], we wouldn't be here to ask the question. It's like asking what is P(A|A). The question "Why do I not exist" has never and will never be (seriously) asked. [1] To be clear, if only nothing existed, and there existed nothing other than nothingness. [2] [2] I sense epistemologists warming their guns here, asking if the "existence" of "nothing" counts as the existence of "something"…
It is still possible that nothing exists. For example, if physics rules are an algebra where you start with nothingness, and nothingness is then combined with nothingness in various ways. Then, from the inside it appears as if things exist, but from the outside it seems that nothing exists. Somewhat similar to a computer game which may look like an entire world from the inside, but you see only a bunch of computer ch…