There are two possibilities -
1. There is something, and it has always existed. 2. There is something, and it once did not exist.
Either one is weird.
The author doesn't address this, and I feel, despite their sparkling credentials, that they should have.
Two downfalls of this approach that I see:
1. It increases the likelihood of believing things to be true, that are not actually known to be true
2. Since these things are not known to be true, it can increase societal polarization, because some others are able to see and elaborate that it is actually not known, and this can lead to "warring" tribes, who seem to often let isolated disagreements bleed into their behavior on unrelated matters, such as how they perceive others, or how they vote at the ballot box.
A lot of people seem concerned about the results of #2, but very few people seem to be interested (to put it nicely) in the underlying cause(s).
Conclusions like "It is not conclusively known one way or the other...but all things considered, <x> seems like the most reasonable estimate until we receive more data" are not only possible, but superior, in my opinion.
OTOH, you're failing to comprehend what the key word - nothing - means :-) Look here:
> how if there was at one point nothing, how is there now something?
See, you're imagining two points in time. Some stuff exists in the second moment, but not the first. However, since you're saying "one point" and "now" you are assuming that time exists in both instants. But if time exists then this is already something and not nothing. The true nothing excludes time, space and all the junk in it. Nothing is really just
We can think about the fact that while we look at a distant galaxy 2 million light years away, that galaxy is in fact at this current moment, doing its own thing and we won't know about it until that light arrives here.
Since we can't observe that galaxy's current state until another 2 million years, it's not very useful to think about it in those terms.
Similarly, we can imagine a time when there was absolutely nothing. It doesn't make sense, but we can imagine it.
We can then imagine what it would take to go from that state into a state where there is matter and other laws of physics and wonder how we went from one state to another.
Then you might suppose that there was never a state of nothingness, and then you might wonder how that could be.
I feel that the author fails to address these basic points of the question "why is there something rather than nothing", so it's hard to move on from that, personally.
Is nothing really qualitatively different from something? Some greeks held that numbering started at 2, because 1 of something is not a "number of things". It took much longer after 1 was generally accepted as a whole number for 0 to be. These days we often look askance at formal systems which don't have an identity.
(going further back, many old languages have a plural that applies to 3 or more, because 2 of something gets the dual, with its own marking)
What we know is that there is no "nothing" as we understand or define it.
At the end of the video he says "We can't prove that we came from nothing, But it's plausible." from our limited understanding of whats going on in empty space. I don't know why you think "Krauss is often mocked for" this - because this is not unique to Krauss personal interpretation but there is scientific consensus within the community.
We can't tell where quantum fields came from the same way we can't tell for sure what happened before the big bang - other than the fact that we know it happened.
- We don't know or its not possible to know what came before something.
- After Big bang, nothing (as you define it), doesn't exist to the best of our understanding.
We both seems to agree on this two key point. So what are you exactly arguing against?
"We don't know yet." is really the answer to whatever you are mad about. Krauss or pick-your-favorite-scientists doesn't really shy away from this fact.
Are you mad because of the wording "UNIVERSE FROM NOTHING", then you just judging the book by its cover.
>"We don't know yet." is really the answer to whatever you are mad about. .
I explained it perfectly well above, why people are mocking him, I also said the following: "I personally don't care about Krauss either way, if he can make money using such tactics, good on him." so your accusation of being mad is nonsense.
>Are you mad because of the wording "UNIVERSE FROM NOTHING", then you just judging the book by its cover.
I am making clear arguments devoid of any emotions, you seem to be hallucinating. I argued against the deceptive nature of Krauss' formulation of "nothing" which is not nothing, which is not "judging a book by it's cover" it's judging the deceptive nature of his rhetoric, which he has also demonstrated in many appearances on TV. And again, I don't care about Krauss either way, if he can make good money by that, good on him.
Then there was 1 and -1, and within each was an entire universe. But the sum total of both of these universes was not more or less than that which came before.
And then the universes of 1 and -1 combined their power and reformed, as zero.
It's like the monthly accounts, all the T diagrams must end up balancing each other out or you've missed something. Accountants are black holes, bringing the universe back into the perfect balance of eventual, and inevitable, nothingness.
The most fundamental rule: There can not be nothing, but all the things that are not nothing cannot add up to more than nothing.
That's easy. "All of this" came from what came before it, and all of that came from what before it, and so on, and so on. Your first question, "If there was at one point nothing, how is there now something?" is far more vexing.
That's absolutely not true. Science is not certain at all about the origins of the universe. We don't understand the big bang, we don't understand how time and space can seemingly spring from nothing, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find a physicist who would claim to know very much at all about the big bang.
>That's absolutely not true.
It absolutely is true, I was specifically talking about the steady state theory: "While the steady-state model enjoyed some minority support in the scientific mainstream until the mid-20th century, it is now rejected by the vast majority of cosmologists, astrophysicists and astronomers, as the observational evidence points to a hot Big Bang cosmology with a finite age of the universe, which the steady-state model does not predict" [0]
And the observational evidence is interpreted as pointing to a Big Bang. There are other interpretations which don't require a finite age or an initial singularity.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
it's the steady state model that science knows not to be true, but not the fact that the universe has no beginning and no end, and not the fact that there was no first cause. Science doesn't know anything of the sort.
how can you even imagine that there's nothing? what are you really imagining when you think of "nothing"?
clearly anything which you imagine is something being imagined by you, how is that "nothingness"?
On the other hand nothingness itself can be a cause. Is it different from any other cause?
Because our everyday experience and intuition dictates it?
Our everyday intuition cannot hold a candle to the quantum world. Hell, our everyday intuition cannot hold a candle to our macro world and to our human everyday affairs.
Why should I concern myself with an open question first asked thousands of years ago?
It is just a grim reminder about thought and knowledge and its limitations, our abstract thoughts helped us become the most successful species of our planets, but being too caught and too serious about our logic and thought is just so silly.
I mean, I get it, it is just an itch that we love to scratch because the thknking itch sensation helped us so much before, but there are just itches we cannot scratch away, by scratching we just make the itching worse.
So, I think I should just enjoy life, embrace and trust my functional humanity.
If some great insight comes from science, great, but I highly doutb it would ever come, and even if it did, how would that change human condition?
Perhaps some great computer in the future will be able to "answer", but I think the answer will most likely be so unspeakable and not a coherent answer, sort of like Alpha Go's way of playing GO, probably cannot be summed in a coherent GO strategy book.
The author TOTALLY misses the point of the question "why is there something rather than nothing". Of course there is something, hence why we are here talking about this at all.
The main problem people grapple with in the question of "why is there something instead of nothing" is how if there was at one point nothing, how is there now something? What caused it?
Further, if there WASN'T at one point nothing, where the hell did all of this something come from?