From: Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Jan 12 1998 - 12:34:44 MST
>On Sat, 10 Jan 1998 davidmusick@juno.com (David A Musick) Wrote:
>
> >The real question is: Why is there something, instead of nothing?
> >I don't think that question has been answered satisfactorily yet.
I've made the following point in the past, but I'll say it again because it
seems to self-evident to me and so opaque to everyone else.
What is the basis for this alleged contrary `something'/`nothing'?
Contraries, in syllogistic logic, are statements such as `All X are
green'/`All X are other-than-green'. I know what `something' is - it's a
convenient empty lexical slot that we can use to park... well, *anything
particular* in. Everything we see about us, everything we can conceive of,
is something. To imagine a given something removed is actually to imagine
only its transformation into something else, or its physical or temporal
dislocation.
There *is* *no* *`nothing'*.
Vacuum fluctuations do not arise in `nothing', but in a quantum field. The
paradox or deep problem of cosmogeny (given 20th century understanding of
physics) isn't the universe's appearance as `something' from `nothing', but
its failure to have reached `heat death' if it has existed in anything like
the current form since eternity (and while Eric Lerner makes a brave shot
at dealing with this I don't think he succeeds). That's why some version
of the Big Bang is so neat, especially if it takes the form of repeated
buddings into new closed spacetimes. In my HO.
Damien Broderick
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