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'.

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.)

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.

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.

2013 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Existence of Nothing

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

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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..

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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