Dark Energy http://news.discovery.com/space/dark-energy-camera-sees-first-light-120920.html

It's not nothing at all, you are looking at dark energy :P

 

ps: I hope you guys don't really think this camera can take pictures of dark energy lol....

Jay520 said: Soleron said: I favour the idea that 'nothing' is a sea of random spontaneous energy. Sometimes, given enough time, a universe forms. Sometimes a universe is destroyed. This is the simplest and most natural extension of what we already know about vacuum. The universe's laws and so on are actually unique to it and a property of its formation rather than universal truth. Your conception of 'nothing' as truly empty and uneventful is a human thing and at odds with quantum mechanics. I don't want to make any assertions on what 'nothing' is. just used the concept of 'nothing' that almost everyone thinks of when thinking of "before the universe."

Changed "your" to "the", wasn't against you.

While I agree we can't know anything about before the universe right now directly, that doesn't mean that all ideas are equally valid. We can still use logic and our local experience of the world to say what might happen. And nowhere in the world do we see the kind of true nothingness that people think of. Why would it be the default assumption when we're talking about before the universe?

If you're willing to throw out the "something can't come from nothing" idea, why not the "all things must have a beginning" idea? The universe could have existed forever in some form forever (oscillation Big Bangs and Crunches, or an interconnected multiverse spawning baby universes).

Our default ideas are limited by the space we think we inhabit: flat, three-dimensional, deterministic, and on a large scale compared to the atom. They're not a good guide to how the universe actually operates on very large or very small scales.

Nem said: VXIII said: Nothingness means no possibilities . Read Soleron's first post. You will understand that the problem is your definition of "nothingness".

At least we both agree that this definition is not faulty :). Actually, I'd argue that Soleron's definition is, but that isn't what I'm here for.

Jay520 said: Stefan.De.Machtige said: It's a pointless OP. Unless someone has put together an experiment where something come forth out of nothing, it's just a bunch of words. Pointless? Perhaps. As for your experiment, that would be impossible to create. In order for there to be an experiment, there must also be a universe consisting of laws. The fact that these laws exists makes it impossible for a scientist to create an artificial nothingness. Just a bunch of words? Correct, but you could have inferred that much just by reading the title. After realizing how pointless the OP was, why devote energy into reading it and later responding to it?

 

As an agnostic, I've always had difficulty with the idea that something (i.e. the universe) can come out of nothing. The human brain is the most complex organism in the known universe, and yet human beings aren't able to create universes -and I believe there are Einsteinian laws preventing us from realising such a proposition even if we could theorize it correctly. 

All laws within realm of classical physics make perfect logical sense, but that still leaves the potential anomalies of quantum mechanics, dark energy, dark matter etc. So I don't think we'll ever 100% understand everything in the universe, let alone how it began.  

there is always "something" energy turns into matter and the other way around.

particles are always there and they just pop-up into existence and pop-out (there are a few theories why this hapens)

GameOver22 said: Well, the argument in the OP is flawed, particularly because we don't talk of laws having existence. Abstract laws and rules, by definition, do not exist, even now. Point being, someone cannot point to law, and say, "There it is. It resides under my dining room table." In other words, a law is not a thing.

An entity doesn't have to be concrete, tangible, or an object for it to exist. It still exists, just not physically. And we do talk about laws in terms of existence. For example, there's a law in the U.S. making murder illegal. However, there is no law stating that breathing is illegal. That law does not exist. There are laws that exist that govern our universe. For example: water freezes when under 32 degrees. This fact or law exists, even if we cannot touch it. Laws/facts describe our universe. And before the universe ever existed, if such a time is possible, then its safe to say there were no laws.

I'm not an expert by any means.

But I think that the only way we can exist is because 'something' MUST ALWAYS come from nothing. That is something related to the laws of Quantum Mechanics.

My understanding is that, the question in the OP is based on this premise of 'Classical Physics'. In Classical Physics we assume that for something to happen we must first have an instant of causality. So cause equals effect.

However for things at the smallest scale, which we call the 'quantum' scale we find that a different set of rules apply. And we believe that our universe came out of this quantum scale.

These Quantum Mechanical rules are EXTREMELY different from those of Classical Physics. Cause does not necessarily have to precede effect.

Honestly I don't know much about this stuff, but based on what we think we know; the universe as we know can have come out of nothing. In fact according to some scientists, it is necessary for that to happen (for reasons I don't know).

The key thing here is that the question in the OP is based on this idea of cause and effect. Quantum Mechanics does not operate on that principle, there are a completely different set of rules that do a pretty good job of explaining the formation of the universe up to this point in time. The Higgs Boson (allegedly) discovery reinforces the standard model of Particle Physics, however this is proving to be a problem now, since we need more data for the standard model to work.

Roma said: so because the rule itself did not exist it allowed itself to create itself in order to create the rule that nothing can come out of nothing? It makes perfect Sense!! well done I'm an athiest now!

no need for your sarcasm. I'm not trying to convert anyone or push my beliefs on anyone. I didn't even say I believe this. I just said it seemed plausible and asked what others thought. If you disagree, then you can express yourself maturely.

Jay520 said: GameOver22 said: Well, the argument in the OP is flawed, particularly because we don't talk of laws having existence. Abstract laws and rules, by definition, do not exist, even now. Point being, someone cannot point to law, and say, "There it is. It resides under my dining room table." In other words, a law is not a thing. An entity doesn't have to be concrete, tangible, or an object for it to exist. It still exists, just not physically. And we do talk about laws in terms of existence. For example, there's a law in the U.S. making murder illegal. However, there is no law stating that breathing is illegal. That law does not exist. There are laws that exist that govern our universe. For example: water freezes when under 32 degrees. This fact or law exists, even if we cannot touch it. Laws/facts describe our universe. And before the universe ever existed, if such a time is possible, then its safe to say there were no laws.

That's not entirely true.

Also, I'm definitely dropping Physics next year.

If anyone's interested in the quantum mechanics, the reason why we can get something from nothing there is that particles are not just hard spheres moving around, they exist mathematically as a probability distribution - saying where they are most likely to be at one time. You can't pin down a particle to an exact location and measure everything about it.

So when we measure vacuum and say 'there is nothing there', that is only an average, or likely, measurement of it. There might be something there, our measurement didn't rule it out completely. So sometimes when we look, there is something there. You can't even say that it was definitely created there, it might have just teleported in from somewhere else. The best example is that a particle in a well, where the walls require X energy to climb over, can sometimes get out of it with less than X energy because its position is uncertain so it MIGHT actually be outside the well. And if we wait long enough that will turn out to be true.

The universe only has to obey its laws on average.

This is different to just saying what we don't know what happens. We have very good laws saying what is allowed at what probability, and very precise experiments showing us that quantum mechanics is a good description of the universe.