Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

Contributed by Rex Bennett

A philosopher on MySpace recently mused whether all questions have an answer. He gave as an example of unanswerable questions these two:

“What is the meaning of life?” and
“Why is there something rather than nothing?”

I responded to him in a comment that all questions have the potential to be answered as long as they are formed correctly and use proper terminology. So to provide an example of this, I propose to answer the two unanswerable questions in successive blogs. First this one and then the next.

The answers to both these questions will probably be far from what you expected. The answer to the second question in the following blog may even shock you. You will find out that you have believed something all your life that is not true and it has affected the way you see the world.

I encourage the reader to re-read the first article, “What Is The Meaning Of Life,” and pay particularly close attention to the section on epistemology and what is a “belief” and what is “knowledge.” In this article, we are dealing with a trick of the brain, and anyone reading may be unaware whether they are reacting to beliefs or reacting to knowledge. As I pointed out in the first article, we can reject knowledge in order to retain what is perceived to have emotional value. Are we interested in “knowledge”? Or are we interested in affirming values through beliefs? You must decide for yourself.

” ‘ I see nobody on the road,’ said Alice.
‘I only wish I had such eyes,’ the king
remarked in a fretful tone, ‘To be able
to see nobody! And at that distance too!
Why, it’s so much as I can do to see real
people by this light.’” – Lewis Carroll [1]

Words are important. They are the tools we work with when we think. And yet, we use words so loosely, so recklessly, as though they deserve hardly any consideration at all. If we use words improperly, then what we end up with bears no resemblance to reality at all. If we see “nobody,” and we see “nothing,” then are we seeing “something”?

Our brains like to put things in neat packages. It feels very comfortable with neatly packaged opposites: on/off, in/out, up/down, light/dark, something/nothing. What we may not notice is that most of our word groupings are relational to each other – they are alternative states of “something.” Think carefully. Can we flip a switch and turn “something” into “nothing”, and “nothing” into “something”? The law of conservation of matter and energy says “no!” We can change the form, but we cannot create and destroy matter and energy. Matter and energy are interchangeable. They can be converted to one another. The cow ate grass which used photosynthesis to turn radiant energy from the sun into matter. The cow converts the grass to a different form of matter, as well as to chemical energy. Matter and energy are interchangeable and can be converted from one to the other, but neither can be destroyed nor created. When you get right down to it, everything that exists is really energy.

Modern minds seem to like the concept of nothingness and do not want to let it go. I’ve met people who would fight to the death for the right to believe in nothing. The brain simply refuses to believe that nothing does not exist. But yet, that belief is a self-contradiction.

The ancients felt differently. The ancient Greeks abhorred the concept of nothingness. It horrified them. And they recognized it as a logical self-contradiction. To say that “nothing exists” is a contradiction of terms. To exist is definitional opposite of nothing. How can nothing “be?” To be a state of something is to exist. If nothingness is the state of the absence of matter, then what we are calling “nothingness” exists. What is it that nothingness is a state of? Space. We have taken the concept of empty space and expanded the concept to mean the absence of everything, including space.

Something And Nothing As Cycles

In our macro world (the everyday world we see around us), we are used to cycles. Everything in our macro world is a process. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. People are born, they live, and they die. And after they die, their body will eventually cease to exist. Microbes will do their jobs, and what we perceive as an entity – as a “thing,” will eventually disappear into nothingness. And thus the concept of nothingness seems very real to us. But yet these beings form from an atom and a molecule at a time, and they disappear the same way – converted to another form of matter and energy which no longer possesses the characteristics of the full-fledged living processes which we give identity. Only the current process ends, the matter and the energy of the processes are converted to other forms and other processes which we no longer give identity. It is my belief that it is this process which gives the concept of nothingness such emotional value to us.

We live in a macro universe that is made up of matter and energy. Everything is made of particles, even our major forms of energy – the electron and the photon. These subatomic particles form atoms. Atoms bond into molecules and eventually enough molecules will make up elements and compounds and form materials that we can see and touch and perceive as real “things.”

What we have come to perceive as nothingness is simply the absence of macro matter. We have come to perceive empty space as “nothingness.” It is the vast reaches of space where there is no atmosphere and no particulate matter that fill our image of “nothingness.” It must be nothingness since there is nothing there. But is that really the case? First ask the question, “Is space nothingness?” And then ask, “Is space really empty?” The answer to both those questions is definitely, NO!”

Not only is space full of energy fields (electromagnetic, gravity, etc.) space itself is a field! Space is ENERGY! Space is a form of existence – not nothingness! Space is the field upon which macro existence occurs. Without space, there could be no macro existence. The macro universe we know could not form.

What does it mean to our original question if there is no state of “nothingness?” It means the question was formed using a false concept that does not have correspondence to the real world. The answer to the question is “There is something because there is no nothing. There is no ‘alternative state’ to existence. Only the form of existence may change.”

This answer applies also to the quantum world, where we are going next to look at this a little closer.

Check Your Paradigms At The Door

“A peasant asks an engineer to explain how a steam engine works. The engineer gives a detailed explanation, drawing diagrams, explaining the fundamental concepts, showing where the fuel goes in and the steam comes out, how heat is transferred into motion, and so forth. When the engineer is finished, the peasant says: “Now I understand perfectly! But where is the horse?” [2]

We have beliefs, and these beliefs filter how we see the world. We call these filters paradigms. Paradigms are often useful, but they can also prevent us from seeing other relationships that change our understanding. A person who has an “Aha!” moment has just broken a paradigm and is suddenly seeing what is now obvious to him but to which he was blind before. The relationship suddenly becomes clear. The quantum universe is a very strange place that operates differently from our macro universe. Our macro paradigms will only hinder us here. We must let them go.

Wow, Harry, This Is Really Small!

To visit the quantum universe, we must go down in size to the very small. How small is the quantum world? I’m going to use a series of analogies to give you a conception of just how small is quantum small. Take a look at the tiny period at the end of this sentence. Insignificant in size! To form this period took 100 million atoms! Wow, that’s tiny! Are we there yet? Not quite. The atom is the beginning of the macro world. We have further to go.

If we take a single one of those atoms and blow it up in size so that the proton is the size of a green pea and place that green-pea-proton dead center in a modern sports arena, the outside walls of the sports arena would represent the electron, which is so wispy it is barely there at all. An atom is almost nothing but empty space. 99.9999999 percent of the atom is empty space. The particulate matter of an atom represents only one part in a billion. All this macro matter you see around you – that feels so ‘solid’ – is almost all empty space.

You could place 100 thousand protons in a straight line within the radius of an atom. Are we there yet? Not quite.

Inside a single proton we could place 1 trillion superstrings (strings). Strings are believed to be the smallest unit of existence. That means that we are now at what is believed to be the “bottom” of the quantum world. A string is a vibrating string of pure (non-particulate) energy. If true, all of existence is made up of vibrating strings of pure energy. How small is that? A single string occupies 1 Planck area. A Planck area is a Planck length squared. How small is that? The Planck length is 10^-33 centimeters (10 to the minus 33 centimeters.)

That’s 1/10,000,000,000,000,000,000,0​00,000,000,000,000th of a centimeter. That is the smallest unit of space there is. There is nothing smaller.

All these invisible strings together make up what is called the quantum vacuum. The quantum vacuum goes by a variety of names. It’s also called the quantum sea, the quantum foam, the quantum void, and the quantum landscape. String theorists prefer “quantum landscape” because they use that to explain why the macro universe has certain values for the four forces: strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravity. These four forces are important to remember. They are the basis for the existence of macro matter. The macro universe only exists because the quantum universe exists. The macro universe sits atop the quantum universe. How extensive is the quantum universe? It is everywhere! Our macro universe is believed to be only a tiny, insignificant area of the quantum sea.

Some physicists like to refer to the quantum vacuum as “nothingness” because it is almost nothing – but not quite. Remember that the atom is almost nothing, but it makes up the macro universe! It turns out that “nothingness” is “everything.”

The quantum vacuum is void of particulate matter – but not quite. Virtual particles are ceaselessly appearing and disappearing. The quantum vacuum is empty of energy – but not quite. It is simply the lowest energy state below which it cannot go. The quantum vacuum is almost zero – but not quite. And the quantum vacuum has the “jitters.” The quantum vacuum is almost super symmetry – but not quite. It fluctuates!

You can only tell an energy state when there is a differential. For instance your body is full of electrical charges but they all cancel each other out so that your “energy potential” is zero. But walk across a carpet on a cold day and you suddenly zap anything you touch. How can you tell the energy potential of something if there is no differential? You can’t. But yet this strange vacuum seems to have infinite potential. This ‘nothing’ is ‘everything.’

“Real systems are, in this sense, ‘excitations of the vacuum’ – much as surface waves in a pond are excitations of the pond’s water….The vacuum in itself is shapeless, but it may assume specific shapes. In doing so, it becomes a physical reality.” [3]

Some quantum physicists now believe that fluctuations in the vacuum is what leads to the creation of universes. Areas of the quantum vacuum develop what is called a “false vacuum.” A false vacuum is an area that develops a higher energy state than the lowest possible energy state and then goes through a phase transition where its energy level falls to the lowest possible level. This sudden release of energy results in the explosive creation of a universe.

Our universe, as vast as it is, started life as a quantum universe smaller than a single proton and then ‘inflated’ exponentially to the size of the Milky Way Galaxy in a few nanoseconds, and then continued expanding at slower rate. Each stage of expansion took our universe through yet another phase transition, and with each transition, the properties of the universe changed. Think of water starting out as a gas (water vapor), then phase transitioning to a liquid with completely different properties and structure, and then phase transitioning yet again to ice (a solid) with a crystalline structure.

Writing any more would take us into the evolution of the universe, and I am not ready to write that article yet, so let’s return once again to the original question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

Physicists and cosmologists have searched high and low, from the very large to the incredibly small, and nowhere has physics been able to find a true level of nothingness.

What they found, instead, is infinite potential.

References:
[1] The Book Of Nothing, John D. Barrow, 361p
[2] The Hole In The Universe, KC Cole, 274p
[3] Nothingness: The Science Of empty Space, Henning Genz, 340p
The Void, Frank Close, 166p
Black Hole War, Leonard susskind, 480p
The Cosmic Landscape, Leonard Susskind, 403p
Quantum Mechanics, The Teaching Co., 24 lectures
Black Holes Explained, The Teaching Co, 12 lectures