Is it possible for something to come from nothing?

There is a way to extract hidden energy from nothing. This can be demonstrated with a simple water wave tank, where you have two wave generators, one at each end of the tank. The wave generators are 180 degrees out of phase. Since the crests and troughs of one generator will over overlap the troughs and crests of another, there will be silence in the middle of the tank; appearance of nothing.

To reveal the hidden energy that is being generated by our wave generators, all we need to do is add a partition. The energy from the two wave generators will suddenly appear on each side of the partition.

One way to make the universe from nothing, is connected to the wave-particle nature of matter. If we had pure waves that were cancelling, like our wave tank, we would have the appearance of nothing. If the pure cancelling wave suddenly become particle-wave, energy appears since particles don't cancel quite the same way as the waves. The particle is the partition.

Since energy is particle and waves, the pure cancelling waves of nothing would need to be a type of phase that is not energy, yet contains the potential needed for energy. This pure waves will phase change into the particle-wave partititon, and something from nothing appears; boom!

This can be done by initially dissociating space-time into separate space and separate time and then combining into space-time=C.

 

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this is not an example of something from nothing though is it !!

 

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Physical absolutes do not exist. The closest we can come to nothing demonstrates something does come from it. Please cite your source on the supposed instability of the vacuum state. Perhaps you are thinking of a false vacuum?

Oh, and the speculations of Michio Kaku don't tend to be rigorously supportable, hence speculative.

 

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It seems to me everyone is having trouble imagining nothing. As an apple moves from beside you up to your mouth, does it move to a new space or does it take its space with it. I think it moves to a new space. Therefore space is something. Energy in particle or wave form needs space to exist in. No space means no energy. How did a big space [universe] erupt from no space without energy. The universe did not come from nothing.

 

Beside getting lost in the idea of space, people also get lost in the idea of non-causality.

If time was created, then there is a non-causal realm in which time does not advance. In a non-causal world, the idea of something from nothing is moot. Nothing causes anything.

 

Not quite, you still have/have to have the energy required to do all that, so it's not really nothing.
Cheers.

 

The 'closest we can come to nothing' is not quite absolute nothingness, is it? So what you seem to be saying there is that something comes from something that is not quite nothing, but is almost nothing.

In fact the moment you define what nothing is, you've failed, because it isn't anything. It's not a 'state'. There is no 'it'. But this is exactly what many physicists have done. They've (re)defined nothing, and the absurdity of such a move should be apparent to anyone with even basic philosophical training. That is not to say that the models themselves are incorrect, merely that they only make sense if you abandon the idea of absolute nothingness and embrace a sort of 'unphysical' fundamental ground state that has the potential to become something else.

Your post was merely a catalyst for a desire to share some thoughts on the matter, so I wasn't really addressing it point by point. What I had in mind when I mentioned instability was the assertion that the Big Bang itself was the result of a quantum fluctuation due to the instability of 'nothingness'. That is, that the universe exists because an unphysical state underwent an inevitable transition into a physical one. These are ideas that are popularly championed by physicists like Krauss and Stegner. But again, I am not declaring that the models are wrong, merely that the cornerstone of them all is a new, scientific definition of nothingness that is clearly not absolute nothingness. It's something, albeit a seemingly unphysical sort of something.

 

Really? Cite your source.

Semantics.

 

Another example of semantics would be an attempt to properly establish the definition of the word "theory" in the scientific context? Such things aren't merely quibbles, they are somewhat important.

 

"A scientific theory summarizes a hypothesis or group of hypotheses that have been supported with repeated testing. A theory is valid as long as there is no evidence to dispute it." -http://chemistry.about.com/od/chemistry101/a/lawtheory.htm​

And?

This "nothing" is defined by its lack of physical properties, so your objection fails.

Your philosophical incredulity doesn't change the facts.

Equivocation.

 

To properly understand quantum virtual particles:

a) Peruse the matrice mathematics of Paul Dirac in regards to quantum mechanics/relativity

b) For a more intuitive understanding... A Theory of Positrons - Richard Feynman (1949)

To visualize the above, employ Feynman Diagrams. The important quantities here will be: charge|time|space|velocity

 

If virtual particles are created from the space, it's obvious that space has energy, you can't have anything/something without energy.
Semantics or not semantics, this is true.
If there was no energy required for the big bang in the first place there wouldn't be a big bang and the creation of the universe.
Cheers.

 

It does not change the fact that the big bang is only a theory, I'd even say it's merely a hypothesis, but it's the best hypothesis we have today (based on observations, detections and measurements).
Cheers.

 

Theoretically, one will find that space still has "weight" even after everything is removed that is possible to remove - stars, planets, gas, dust, radiation, etc.

 

And just as it is important for people to properly understand what a scientific theory actually is, it is important for people to understand that when some physicists use the word 'nothing', they are actually talking about something more substantial than absolute nothingness. Otherwise, discussion on the topic becomes problematic since different people are working with different conceptions of the subject matter, and this happens pretty much every time this topic pops up on these boards.

 

Yes, I get the point JamesR, sorry...

 

If time is created with the emergence of "something from nothing", the question is rendered moot. There is no causality without time. It is therefore wrong to associate the cause (nothing) with the effect (something). All of the mystery boils down to the proper treatment of causality emerging out of non-causality.

It would seem far simpler to assume that "that's they way it always was", e.g. an infinite past, converging at "nothing" (or a static "everything") but never actually arriving there (viewed from the present looking back into the past). Or, in keeping with the premise of the Big Bang, within the first Planck time there is an infinite delay since the "moment of the event". After all, how long does it take to start the clock from zero?

Notice how much easier it is to imagine an infinite future than it is to imagine an infinite past. I suspect this is not a consequence of the physics of the universe per se, but rather, the limitations in the human mind as far as handling certain abstractions that our brains are not wired to accommodate. You might compare this to our ability to easily form abstractions of 1, 2 or 3 dimensions, but then to hit the wall when we get to a dimensions 4 and higher, and needing models, like a Rubik's cube, to help.

We are wired to handle causality. We hit the wall on non-causality. That leaves us to ponder "something from nothing". The whole idea seems to be nothing more than an artifact of our own limitations.

 

I wonder what is your opinion on this matter...if the universe was always existed or that it was actually created?
Cheers.

 

Look up "inflation cosmology" and "ultimate free lunch".

Physics doesn't abandon a working theory without an explanation that better fits the evidence. So unless you can provide a better model, your incredulity is scientifically meaningless.

It is a logical contradiction for "absolute nothing" to exist within something, as the boundaries of the something define it in a finite way. Thus any nothing that may exist would necessarily be bounded by phenomena without itself necessarily being substantive.