How can something

And the finding could ultimately help scientists build incredibly powerful quantum computers or shed light on the earliest moments in the universe's history. Quantum physics explains that there are limits to how precisely one can know the properties of the most basic units of matter—for instance, one can never absolutely know a particle's position and momentum at the same time.

These virtual particles often appear in pairs that near-instantaneously cancel themselves out. Still, before they vanish, they can have very real effects on their surroundings. For instance, photons—packets of light—can pop in and out of a vacuum. When two mirrors are placed facing each other in a vacuum, more virtual photons can exist around the outside of the mirrors than between them, generating a seemingly mysterious force that pushes the mirrors together.

This phenomenon, predicted in by the Dutch physicist Hendrick Casimir and known as the Casimir effect , was first seen with mirrors held still. Researchers also predicted a dynamical Casimir effect that can result when mirrors are moved, or objects otherwise undergo change.

The speed of light in a vacuum is constant, according to Einstein's theory of relativity, but its speed passing through any given material depends on a property of that substance known as its index of refraction. By varying a material's index of refraction, researchers can influence the speed at which both real and virtual photons travel within it.

The researchers began with an array of superconducting quantum-interference devices, or SQUIDs—circuits that are extraordinarily sensitive to magnetic fields. They inserted the array inside a refrigerator.

By carefully exerting magnetic fields on this array, they could vary the speed at which microwave photons traveled through it by a few percent. The researchers then cooled this array to 50 thousandths of a degree Celsius above absolute zero.

Because this environment is supercold, it should not emit any radiation, essentially behaving as a vacuum. What happens if the vacuum is the signal? The researchers detected photons that matched predictions from the dynamical Casimir effect.

For instance, such photons should display the strange property of quantum entanglement—that is, by measuring the details of one, scientists could in principle know exactly what its counterpart is like, no matter where it is in the universe, a phenomenon Einstein referred to as "spooky action at a distance. Another study from physicist Christopher Wilson and his colleagues recently demonstrated the dynamical Casimir effect in a system mimicking a mirror moving at nearly 5 percent of the speed of light.

The investigators caution that such experiments do not constitute a magical way to get more energy out of a system than what is input. For instance, it takes energy to change a material's index of refraction. Instead, such research could help scientists learn more about the mysteries of quantum entanglement, which lies at the heart of quantum computers—advanced machines that could in principle run more calculations in an instant than there are atoms in the universe.

For instance, there are predictions that during cosmic inflation in the early universe, the boundaries of the universe were expanding nearly at light-speed or faster than the speed of light. Stephen Hawkings has recently argued as to how the universe can come out of nothing, but to my mind his argument is rather circular and it's not provable.

The Hindu scriptures say that the universe is eternal; there never was a time when it was not, nor will there be a time when it will not be. Rather they say that there are 'cycles' - the universe kind of ebbs and flows like the tides so to speak. The scriptures say there is a periods of expansion and periods of contraction, one following the other. At the end of a cycle, the universe almost completely contracts into Brahman where it rests in potentiality before expanding again. Brahman which is by definition neither existence nor nonexistence.

The current scientific theories as to a big bang, point to a beginning of the universe as we perceive it now, most people in the West get the scientific big bang theory confused with their Judeo-Christian beliefs that was taught them when they were young and lingers in all their analysis. They confuse 'beginning' with 'creation'. There is an assumption that before there was the big bang, there wasn't anything, that the universe thus came out of nothing - thus a creation.

The big bang theory doesn't address what happened before; laymen assume there was nothing. Cosmologists don't know and we can never know by scientific means what came before. There are cosmologists that are now addressing that there are many universes; that we can only perceive our own. We are one verse in the mulitverse. In the Hindu scriptures it is said that our universe is like a small bubble on the ocean of Brahman, and there are many bubbles.

I believe the current theory of Quantum Mechanics is that some particles pop into and out of existence all of the time. I think they call that a "quantum fluctuation". I have heard it postulated that the Big Bang was a sorta helluva quantum fluctuation. Very improbable to happen, but if you can wait around for eternity, I guess anything can happen.

Skeptic magazine founder Michael Shermer was asked about this and he said something sorta intriguing: "Perhaps something is more stable than nothing. But once we've transitioned from nothing to something despite the unlikelihood, but eventually even the unlikely will happen as long as it is possible then, when the state is something the likelihood to transition back to a state of nothing amidst the zillion of other something states is also tremendously unlikely.

Nothing is a state sorta like perfectly balancing a pencil on its tip. Theoretically, if you get it to balance perfectly and if there are no disturbing forces, the pencil should stay balanced on its tip.

But if, for whatever reason, including randomness, it were to tilt slightly in any direction, that unstable state of balanced on its tip will transition to a far more stable state of lying on its side in some a priori unknown direction.

I think this is sorta what Shermer means when he says that the union of a zillion different states of something is far more stable than the singular state of nothing.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason is a powerful and controversial philosophical principle stipulating that everything must have a reason or cause. Science is founded upon the idea that effects have causes which can be rationally investigated and characterized. To posit that there is no reason for something is as anathema as to say "God did it" and leave it at that.

It's not clear that we could ever know that something came from nothing. Scientists often say that quantum fluctuations our universe could be an exmaple of this are random, but that's not a causal explanation. What we can say is that quantum fluctuations arise from a 'place' that has certain rules.

But once you say that certain rules apply to that 'place' the vacuum , is it any longer 'nothing'? Another way to go about this is to try to construct a chain of causes, starting from 'nothing'.

You essentially have two options:. Option 1 doesn't explain anything. Option 2 explains everything up to the set of boundary conditions. It doesn't explain the origin of the laws, but we can at least rule out the vast majority of logical possibility space, which is what science does according to Karl Popper. But does 2 really make semantic sense?

How can 'nothing' have properties? We have never observed "nothing". Actually, we will never and cannot ever be able to observe "nothing", because this would imply that we exist and therefore there isn't "nothing". In physics, we observe things sometimes by making experiments and observing the results , and then we create theories about laws of physics which would hopefully be consistent with our observations.

We then design often clever experiments that would let us observe things inconsistent with the theory if the theory is wrong, to get more confidence with the theory. If we are reasonably sure that the theory matches reality as far as observed, we accept it. Since we can never observe "nothing", we cannot use this method to create theories in physics describing what would happen when there is "nothing". We also have mathematics.

Many physical theories can be matched with mathematical models. Actually, all physical theories that I know of can. But we can create mathematical models without having a theory. So we could create mathematical models that would describe what happens if there is "nothing". The two simplest such model will say that if we have "nothing", we will have "nothing" forever. Or that if we have "nothing", we don't even have time, so we will have "nothing" not forever, because there is no time.

Now we observe that there isn't "nothing" now. And we can postulate that there was always something, but we could also postulate that at some point there was "nothing". Which means that "something" has come from "nothing". We don't know. Since we cannot observe back in time infinitely far, we don't have physical theories for that postulate either. We can then try to create mathematical models: Mathematical models that describe how there was always something, or mathematical models that describe how something came from nothing.

If one model is significantly simpler or we can only find a model for one case , we might declare this model as likely correct. But really, at that point we are only guessing. The problem is caused by the assumption that anything fundamentally, metaphysically or independently exists.

Clearly many things seem to exist but what exactly do we mean by 'exists'. We usually mean 'appears to exist'. A common metaphysical view would be that nothing really exists and this changes the nature of the question being asked here. The problem goes away if we adopt a certain view of existence. It will continue to plague us while we do not adopt this view.

The Perennial philosophy deals with all such problems but for some reason this is not enough to make it plausible to most of those who cannot solve them. Their seems to be a certain amount of confusing the issues here. Asking if something can come out of nothing is not the same asking if their is no cause. It is entirely possible than their was nothing until a transcendent causal agent came along and decided to create something. It seems the popular intuition that something cannot come from nothing is at odds with the current scientific view that whatever there is, it must have had some kind of a beginning.

I do not think this is really true. Einsteins era of physicist where convinced of an eternal universe. Why anyone would claim that everything has a beginning is beyond me. Why would exclude things from being eternal? However, when something can come from nothing then something may not have existed always and can have a beginning. Is that entity the Universe or something else, is also another question.

This seem right to me. Asserting that a thing has some type of cause to its existence does seem to remove the quality of being eternal from it. Recently a very intelligent question has been raised by a famous American atheist: how can a non-thing have any attributes? Atheists do not believe in the existence of God. So, as per them God is a non-thing, and therefore this non-existent God, or this non-thing, cannot have any attributes at all.

But here I will show that even if God does not exists, still then this non-existent God non-thing can actually have many attributes. For this purpose I will take the case of a stone that does not exist, and I will ask the question: can we destroy a non-existent stone? The answer is very simple indeed: no, we cannot.

A non-existent stone cannot be destroyed, simply because it does not exist at all. So we can say that a non-existent stone is indestructible. This is one attribute that the non-existent stone can have. Similarly it can be shown that this non-existent stone can have many other attributes also.

The non-existent stone is not within any space, because it does not exist, and therefore it cannot have any space at all. Therefore it is spaceless. The non-existent stone is not within any time, because it does not exist, and therefore it cannot have any time at all. Therefore it is timeless. As the non-existent stone is neither in space nor in time, so the non-existent stone cannot change at all. This is because change can occur either in space, or in time. So the non-existent stone does not get any chance to change at all, and thus the non-existent stone is changeless.

A non-existent stone can never cease to be, because ceasing to be is also some sort of change. And we have already seen that no change can ever occur for the non-existent stone, because the necessary condition for the occurrence of any sort of change in it does not exist at all. So the non-existent stone will never cease to be.

But what does it mean that the non-existent stone will never cease to be? It means that the non-existent stone will forever remain a non-existent stone. Similarly it can be shown that the non-existent stone will always be unborn, uncreated, without any beginning and without an end.

This is because it has already been made very clear that no change can ever occur for the non-existent stone. But to be born is some sort of change. Being created is also some sort of change. Having a beginning is also some sort of change. Coming to an end is also some sort of change. As the non-existent stone can never change at all, therefore it will always be unborn, uncreated, without any beginning and without an end.

But what does it mean that the non-existent stone is without any beginning and without an end? It means that the non-existent stone is everlasting. But if the non-existent stone is everlasting, then the next question will be: is it everlasting in its existence? Or, is it everlasting in its non-existence? As the stone does not exist, so here we will have to say that it is everlasting in its non-existence. But if it is everlasting in its non-existence, then we can also say that it is everlastingly non-existent.

But if it is everlastingly non-existent, then that will mean that it can never come into existence from its everlasting non-existence. It will forever remain into its everlasting non-existence. This will further imply that something can come from something only, and that something can never come from nothing. Our "laws of physics" are actually just observations of the world as we currently experience it.

One of them is "Nothing can come from nothing". If there is nothing, then there are also no 'laws of physics' - meaning the statement "nothing can come of nothing" has no meaning, and so in those circumstances, all our humanly assumptions are null. It certainly is a possibility for the Creator, since that is one of His powers. However, even the Creator did not "abuse" His powers and created "something from nothing.

Since the Universe was created from His essence, it is eternal. Only the form of the Universe had a beginning. Just like ice, even though its form has a beginning, it is still the same water molecules that existed before becoming ice. The universe is probably something like infinity, but you also don't know the base of the log, and k the Boltzmann constant is a bias in present science in favor of the atomic model of matter. Nothing in the context of universe and creation, need not be assumed to be indeed nothing like having no property or no physical law etc.

We just need to understand how the universe came into being and then what was before it came into being. Science has proved that nothing is unstable and there is a quantum fluctuation that creates pair s of particle and antiparticle which may or may not annihilate each other. Overall particle and antiparticle can be said to represent positive and negative with net equal to zero or nothing. The total mass and energy in the universe are exactly zero. Gravity is considered to be negative energy.

At the time of big bang, the time as we understand, need to be understood in different way. The events were quantum events and were mixed in 3-dimensional space so that it becomes meaningless to define what is "before" and what is "after".

Before big bang, there was nothing that was giving rise to particle-antiparticle pair s , possibly for infinite time, if we insist to define time in that context.

There must be nothing "outside" of our universe, in which the universe is expanding. In this sense, nothing can be considered as a kind of space. So to summarise, something, if we accept one of the form of the same as the particle-antiparticle pairs, can come out of nothing and this nothing can have properties like dimensions of space and can be said to obey the physical laws. We might say that something exists if it has at least one measurable property. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.

Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Can something come out of nothing or not? Ask Question. Asked 8 years, 1 month ago.

Active 11 months ago. Viewed 41k times. So, let us justifiably assume right now something exists. So, which way is it? Improve this question.

Saul Saul 1 1 gold badge 3 3 silver badges 15 15 bronze badges. Just thinking out loud here. It's not clear what the notions of "appearing" and "beginning" are in this context. When you write "something just might have appeared into existence and can have a beginning", it seems you are presupposing an existence in which that something wasn't there. If you think carefully about this, you'll see that, assuming "something coming from nothing" is coherent, that something cannot "appear" nor have a "beginning".

After all, for such a something, there would no time when it didn't exist. If there was the same amount of matter and antimatter in the Universe so that they could mutually annihilate together into absolutely nothing this may require anti-energy, but let's pretend that's possible. Would you consider there is something in the Universe or just nothing unevenly distributed? Saul No, as always the burden is on you to establish why it is reasonable to assume something exists, with a precise definition of 'exists', which you have not given and will not give because you can't coherently give one because modern physics doesn't know what the fundamental building blocks of our universe are yet.

Saul - You cannot talk about existence and not define it. If you do, your words will amount to nothing and a discussion becomes impossible. Show 51 more comments. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Mozibur Ullah Mozibur Ullah Are we not then forced to conclude that something must have always existed or in other words, there is something eternal?

How about Kant? Did he refute what Parmenides concluded? In simple terms, he said that it was reasonable to say both that time had a beginning and that it did not. Thus being contradictory - or what he calls an antinomy - he says that the question is beyond our capacity to actually answer.

On the whole, his project was to describe the limits of reason, and the conditions that made knowledge possible in a profound sense; he made consciousness complicit in our understanding of time and space, these are conditions which allow us to make sense of the world.