The Theory of Nothing (TON)

I was thinking that with a name beginning with 'Stoni' that you might smoke.

So, what new? Nothing is new here in this thread.

Now-here, no-where; now here, nowhere.

 

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Im having a hard time digesting this, are you saying there was a state of nothingnes from wich existence sprung. or are you saying the oposite.
I kinda got the idea you are saying there is a state of nothingness followed by a state of existence and then nothingness again a cycle which you feel where in the middle of.

would nothingness be stable? in all my mental experiments it is cas when I start whith nothing nothing persists.

 

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The basic idea is that nothing is an impossibility; that it's perfectly unstable by virtue of the fact that it can't exist, not even for an instant.

 

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ok, this is the conclusion I come to as well then, I use to think the opposite becouse it is natural and human to look for a begining. then one day it hit me, no beggining.

 

The problem is of course that one of our best scientific theories points to the fact that there was a beginning. Additionally, a growing number of physicists are suggesting that the universe did indeed actually come from nothing.

In the end however I see it as a philosophical question about the nature of nothing itself. If one understands everything that nothing is not they may reach the conclusion (as I have) that when a physicist proposes that the universe has come from nothing that what they are really saying is that the universe exists because nothing can't.

Time will tell, I guess.

 

Used to smoke tobacco, quit a long time ago. I am a graduate of the 1960's school of street drugs, motorcycles and hard knocks too.

A friend on another forum used some pretty unique words to describe the process of fossilization. He did not possess a university education and had some serious mental challenges, but he was very enthusiastic about fossils, so he made up some of the words he used to describe them.

One such word was "Medusification", as in a creature was simply turned to stone in a flash, like if they were gazed upon by Medusa. Another such word was "stonified", as in a creature had been transformed into stone. I liked that one, so I combined it with my favourite number - "phi", which is the ratio of the base to a side in one of the triangles in a standard 5 pointed star, an irrational number that rounds to 1.62. It was important to the Pythagoreans.

Thus, my handle here, no deep significance in it though.

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Updates:

OK, hc is not the “photon energy”, so, that description mix-up was incorrect, but the formula is still good for something. I also purposely left out a unitless constant, the proportionality defined by the way the energy of the individual photons is gemetrically distributed into space, as it doesn’t add to the dimensional analysis.

The question is: What does hc represent? I looked online and found only this one definition… Planck's constant times c, the speed of light, hc, represents the fundamental Charge quantity in the Universe, (and Potential Charge Energy E= - hc/r and GmM is the fundamental Matter quantity in the Universe and Potential Matter Energy E = -GmM/r.)

Anyone have any other ideas about what hc represents?

Since E=hf and c=wf, where ‘f’ is wave frequency and ‘w’ is wavelength (Lambda), then hc = Ew. So, what does Energy times the wavelength represent?

Next, what does hc / EnergyDensity represent? Or Ew / EnergyDensity?

For me, I guess, it is about somehow deriving unit hypervolume as distance^4.


More notes from the hazy past:

The finite 4D hypercube idea became an idea since an infinite space of N dimensions has a finite size in N+1 dimensions that it can contain. Infinite three-dimensional space thus corresponds to finite four-dimensional space. This finite four-dimensional constant is what Planck’s constant is, more or less. Since unit hypervolume is a four-dimensional finite, it represents the one and only bounding condition for anything, in particular the quantization of energy, just as would be expected of the hypervolume of the universe.

This is also why Planck’s constant has units of J-m, and why it is associated with the quantization of energy. Joules, as energy, is three-dimensional, and meters are one dimensional, for a total of four dimensions of td^3, which is essentially spacetime. Planck’s constant isn’t exactly equal to space’s four-dimensional size, as the proportionality between the two is 2 Pi (now, I’ll have to verify that).


Visualization

To visualize the finite 4D hypercube, take the three-dimensional space of the universe, divide it into innumerable finite cubes, and lay these onto each other, infinitely close together, along the fourth dimension. Or, but sightly differently, perhaps, use the infinite slices of Einstein’s 4D block universe.

An analogy in 1D to 2D is to cut up an infinite line into segments which can then be aligned into a finite plane.

For 0D to 1D, align infinite points into a line. The line is finite since it can be neither zero nor infinite, which is why we arrive at infinity times zero = one.

For 2D to 3D, stack an infinite number of planes into a cube.

The funny thing about all this is that the finite hypercube is probably but a fraction of a millimeter in size, although touching and being in 3D space everywhere.

Just as Planck’s constant is the four-dimensional quantization of photons, elementary charge is the four-dimensional quantization of matter particles.

Photons are the encapsulation of time by space, while matter particle fields are the encapsulation of space by time.


All in All

It is totally obvious that there is nothing to make anything of and that this necessary distribution of nothing into something must ever sum to zilch, showing up here as a zero-sum balance.


Forever

This “something of nothing” has been going on forever, and always will, so now we can delve into the strangeness of forever, which would seem to be circular, for this causeless basis is ever its own precursor, thus eliminating the chicken and the egg problem. There were always stars, there being no first one. Matter always made light and light always made matter. Anyone want to take a trip about this kind of mobius strip or Klein bottle? Seems like the chicken and the egg came about at the same ‘time’ somehow.


Now

Is there only ‘now’, all history and future somehow contained in it, as the center of what would have been the future and past eternities, which are nonexistent?


The Package

Seems like the whole package must relate to and include infinity, the largest and the smallest; eternity, the past and future one; everything and nothing; no-where and now-here.

 

|| Thread moved from "Free Thoughts" to "Pseudoscience".

 

As far as "nothingness" goes, there is/was/always will be distance and time.

According to a timeline, mass wasn't created, nor is it being created now. SPACE is what is being created. You can't get mass from empty space, but you can go in the direction of mass to empty space, never actually reaching total empty space. In other words, mass evolves to space. Mass gets less dense over time.

Something can't be created from nothing, but something could be turned into nothing over time.

 

What was something created from? And what determined its amount and its properties? What choices are there?

 

Other feedback (from Hypography forum):

I’ve been personally in this camp for at least a decade. I’ve been disappointed to find little literature on the subject since it first (AFAIK) appeared in Ed Tryon’s short and terribly dated (a lot has happened in physics since 1973!) article “Is the Universe a Vacuum Fluctuation?” (Nature, 246(1973), pp. 396–397 – like most Nature articles, a bit hard, but not impossible, for the non-subscriber to find online, and worth the effort), wherein he repeats a slightly fancied-up version of his semi-famous catchphrase: “I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of this things that happens from time to time”.

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What has been written appears to me to consist of failure-finding with Tryon’s original speculation in light of new observation (the universe looks a lot different than it did in 1973), with few or no attempts to revise and repair the theory. This 1994 Harper’s magazine article mentions “a small group of physicists known as the ‘nothing theorists.’”, but I’ve not been able to find anything by or about them - forgive the cheesy wordplay, but I went looking for nothing, and found a lack of it that yet wasn’t something.

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You seem pretty energized by nothing theory, Sci – do you know of some literature I’ve missed? or feel like seriously hunting for some? Inquiring minds want to know!

Getting at the key of what Tyron said, and what I think you’re saying, Sci, but I suspect may not see as key:

Nothing theory – that is, the quantum theory that underlie it – requires that all conserved quantities, both discrete (eg: lepton and baryon number, charge) and continuous (eg: momentum and mass-energy) are approximately conserved.
For particles and antiparticles, this conservation, or symmetry, is simple – just have every particle have an antiparticle (most of the time)
Conservation of mass-energy is trickier, as all the standard model’s particles have positive mass-energy. Gravitational potential energy plays the role of conservation/symmetry preserving negative energy.


The great problem in this seems to me to be that, although the standard model superbly describes positive mass-energy particles, attempts to extend it to explain gravity – to include gravitons, in a quantum gravity theory – have so far failed. Some formalism where the vacuum emits positive mass-energy SM particles paired with negative energy gravitons simply hasn’t been written.

In his pop sci book The Trouble with Physics, Lee Smolin suggested that lack of attention to this problem is due to a recent (since about 1980) fashion in physics that’s discouraged new physicist from pursuing formalisms other than string theories. I don’t entirely agree – there are so many more well-educated physics students now than every in human history, and likely will be even more in the future, that it seems to me even if 99.9% of them are on a “wrong path”, the remaining 0.1% will be more than enough for the work along the “right path”. More likely, to my thinking, is that cosmogenies lack scientific popularity, though they’re a favorite of science enthusiasts and the general public, because they’re impractical – people, including physicists, are more interested in what’s happening in the universe here and now than far in the past or future.

It’s fertile, uncrowded territory.


CraigD: Moderator: Computers and Technology; Medical Science; Science Projects and Homework; Philosophy of Science; Physics and Mathematics; Environmental Studies

 

Literature on 'Nothing' theories

There really isn’t a lot of literature on nothing theories. Russell Standish has a book, ‘The Theory of Nothing’, and while he touches on ‘nothing’ at first, as in “…the radical idea that the reality we see around us is but one of an infinite ‘library’ of alternate realities, the sum of which contains no information and is in fact ‘Nothing’, he then goes off for the rest of the book to talk about the ‘Many Worlds’ idea instead. He liked my redo of Borges’ Library of Babel story and put it on his web site, as this was showing that everything and nothing have the same information content: zero.

Victor Stenger, who has an e-mail list called AVOID (for atoms and the void), is mainly interested in proving that a Theistic God can’t exist, the God who is said to be everywhere doing everything (as opposed to a Deity who just started things off and left), and in promoting atheism, but he has some talk about ‘something’ having to be the natural and normal state of affairs because ‘nothing’ is unstable, as well as much physics information. That AVOID list is mostly now about world politics now, which is strange. He’s doing a new book now, called ‘The Folly of Faith’, that some of us AVOIDers are helping him with. I don’t really know these guys personally—just had a one or two direct correspondences from that e-mail list. I’m just a regular guy trying to put different ideas together, as there really not much more to find under the sun that’s really original by itself.

Lawrence Krauss has a video about nothing somewhere, as well as a book on nothing coming out. Hope it doesn’t just have blank pages in it.

Other than that, there is not so much, I guess (but I may remember more), but for a guy on ToeQuest a while back, named Nobody Nowhere, who had a slightly different take—that everything happened all at once but that it takes time to play out; however, he didn’t get much into how ‘nothing’ could differentiate itself. He had gravity somehow erasing light.

I am waiting for actual physicists to realize that either all is of nothing or that something was forever. We know that one of these must be correct, like it or not, so this spurs us on, and the something forever theory seems unlikely, as I’ve suggested, seeming not only incomplete but also problematic.

 

I love this quote
LOL how is this crank rambling a theory on anything

 

It is real simple Joey . A single thought did it. That thought was " To Be" or just Me . The thought moved to the future. The future pulled the past into existence by it being Me or " To Be"
That is how I did it

 

And your answer would be what? Nothing?

Hey, you got it right.

 

I don't know why joey used the crank word but I think it must have been directed to the author of the book you sited, "The Theory of Nothing", and not to the discussion here.

Obviously you have given it much thought and I have seen your talent displayed in other threads. I haven't come across Joey yet but will pay more attention.

As for the comment that I quoted, you will be waiting for awhile

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. Physicists already realize the options you mention but it would be unprofessional for them to address the question like you and I might. The question is not one of science, it is philosophical. I told you on my thread that I don't mind the philosophical discussion and that is why I want to address you two options.

Since the question of "something from nothing" vs "an eternal universe" is a philosophical debate, you might as well include the third rail, I mean the third option to explain the existence of the universe. The third option is "God did it", which I'm think is the easiest to dismiss. Any irrefutable evidence of the existence of God would certainly change the nature of science, lol, but that is something else that we will be waiting a long time for.

So let's dismiss "God did it" and look at the two options you mention, "something from nothing" and "an eternal universe". I confess being spurred on by the question but disagree with your conclusion that eternity is less probable than something from nothing.

Something from nothing seems like a hard event to have happen. Energy always existing is perfectly in line with the law that energy cannot be created or destroyed. On that basis alone I put "something from nothing" as the more improbable.

 

(Since Joey can't counter, his only resort is to hide behind name-calling.)

Energy forever in impossible since it's amount and its several properties would have had had no place to be defined as what they are, whereas a distribution of nothing has the support of the noted balances of the limited states of opposite charge and matter/antimatter state and the stuff/gravity balance, the vacuum fluctuations, plus surely that there is nothing to make anything of.

 

The preceeding has been written by a random sentence generator.

 

I know how "right" it seems to see a zero balance in the universe. The charged particles being positive and negative almost sound like they want to be netted out. Matter and antimatter annihilating each other sounds like a great plan. Even gravity and mass zeroing out has a nice ring to it.

However there is a flaw in reasoning that matter and antimatter net out, and positive and negative net out, and gravity and mass net out. Not everything gets netted out in any of those circumstances. If all the positively charged particles zero out the negatively charged particles then you still have neutron mass. If all the matter and antimatter net out, well, where is all that antimatter anyway. It is nowhere. And if gravity were to net out with mass what is there to net out the photons? Netting out to zero requires too many special circumstances IMHO.

 

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