Why is there anything? A new essay (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, September 02, 2016, 19:33 (3005 days ago) @ David Turell

How do you get something from nothing or is something eternal? This essay poses questions, but I don't see answers:-http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/the-bridge-from-nowhere-rp-The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy.” So concluded William James in thinking about that most basic of riddles: how did something come from nothing? The question infuriates, James realized, because it demands an explanation while denying the very possibility of explanation. “From nothing to being there is no logical bridge,” he wrote.-In science, explanations are built of cause and effect. But if nothing is truly nothing, it lacks the power to cause. It's not simply that we can't find the right explanation—it's that explanation itself fails in the face of nothing.-***-The solution to a paradox lies in the question, never in the answer. Somewhere there must be a glitch, a flawed assumption, a mistaken identity. In so succinct a question as “how did something come from nothing?” there aren't many places to hide. Perhaps that is why we return again and again to the same old ideas in new and improved guises, playing the trajectory of science like a fugue, or variations on a theme. With each pass, we try to lay another stepping stone in James's elusive bridge.-***-Following Aristotle's intuition, physicists today conceive of nothing as the ultimate state of symmetry—a relentless sameness that precludes the differentiation one would need to define any “thing.” Indeed, as physicists run the cosmic film in reverse, tracing deep history back in time, they see the disparate shards of reality reunite and coalesce into an ever-growing symmetry, a symmetry that signifies an origin—and a nothing. -***-Wrought by uncertainty, quantum fluctuations are effects without causes, the noise beneath the signal, a primeval static, random to the bone. The rules of quantum mechanics allow—actually, require—energy (and, by E=mc2, mass) to appear “out of nowhere,” from nothing. Creation ex nihilo—or so it seems. -Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle ...says that certain pairs of physical features—position and momentum, energy and time—are bound together by a fundamental indeterminacy, so that the more accurately we specify one, the more ambiguous becomes the other. Together they form what's known as a conjugate pair, and together they preclude the existence of nothingness. Home in on a spatial position and momentum will fluctuate wildly to compensate; specify smaller, more precise quantities of time and energy will vacillate across a wider swath of improbable values. In the shortest eye blinks, across the smallest distances, whole universes can boil up into existence, then disappear. Zoom in closely enough on the world and our calm, structured reality gives way to chaos and randomness.-***-In spite of the way quantum fluctuations are typically described, what sits “out there” in the world is not some preexisting reality wiggling around. Experiment has consistently proven that what sits “out there” isn't sitting at all, but waiting. Unborn. Quantum fluctuations are not existential descriptions but conditional ones—they are not a reflection of what is, but of what could be, should an observer choose to make a particular measurement. It's as if the observer's ability to measure determines what exists. Ontology recapitulates epistemology. The uncertainty of nature is an uncertainty of observation. -***-While cosmologists do believe that the laws of quantum mechanics can spontaneously generate a universe, this story just passes the buck. For where did the laws come from? Remember, we wanted to explain how something came from nothing—not how something came from the preexisting laws of physics. Removing causality from the equation is not enough. The paradox stands. (my bold)
***- the eternal universe reappeared in a strange new form—specifically, in an equation that looked something like this: H(x)|?> = 0. The physicists John Archibald Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt wrote the equation—which is now known as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation,-***-It's the right-hand side of the thing that's worth noting: zero. The total energy of the system is zilch. There is no time evolution. Nothing can happen. The problem, ultimately, is that Einstein's universe is a four-dimensional spacetime, a combination of space and time. Quantum mechanics, meanwhile, requires the wavefunction of a physical system to evolve in time. But how can spacetime evolve in time when it is time? -***- In and of itself, the Wheeler-DeWitt equation elegantly solves our problem. How did something come from nothing? It didn't. Of course, it's a perplexing solution given that, well, we're here. -***- Quantum theory requires this strange reversal of time's arrow. Wheeler emphasized this fact with his famous delayed choice experiment, which he first posed as a thought experiment but that was later demonstrated successfully in the lab. In the delayed choice, an observer's measurement in the present determines the behavior of a particle in the past—a past that can stretch back for millions, even 13.8 billions, of years. The causal chain turns in on itself, its end links back to its beginning: James's bridge is a loop. -Comment: What is always was. Something is eternal is the answer. I choose God.