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.

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 :)

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