Why is there Something rather than nothing?

                                                  Lawrence M. Krauss
                           A Universe from Nothing, Why is there something rather than nothing?

The deepest, most far reaching and sublime question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” has always been a cosmological mystery ever since it was first posed in the intellectual history in 17^th century. From theology to philosophy, ontology to teleology to epistemology there have been enumerate answers given for this ultimate question but as far as scientific rationality and empirical studies are concerned, we have reached nowhere. Standing amidst the vastness of ever expanding universe, sometimes with huge telescopes, sometimes with mathematical models, sometimes with melancholy and sometimes with faith, men stood and wondered “Why is there something rather than nothing?”


Why does this question matter so much? Ludwig Wittgenstein, the greatest philosopher of 20^th century says “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical; it’s that the world exists.” And Arthur Schopenhauer, another great philosopher went on to say as much that those who don’t wonder about the contingency of their existence and the contingency of world’s existence are mentally deficient.  

Since about 1960s and 1970 physicists, with the development of quantum mechanics, started to purport the idea that a universe could actually come from sheer nothingness or out of a void. Among great physicists of today who support the spontaneous origin of universe from nothing, Stephen Hawkins and Alex Vilenkin are the prominent ones, but never was this bright and breath-taking idea more popularized than it was by Lawrence M. Krauss. 

In classical physics (applicable to macroscopic phenomena), empty space-time is called the vacuum. The classical vacuum is utterly featureless. However, in quantum mechanics (applicable to microscopic phenomena), the vacuum is a much more complex entity. It is far from featureless and far from empty. The quantum vacuum is just one particular state of a quantum field (corresponding to some particles). It is the quantum mechanical state in which no field quanta are excited, that is, no particles are present. Hence, it is the "ground state" of the quantum field, the state of minimum energy. The picture on the left illustrates the kind of activities going on in a quantum vacuum. It shows particle pairs appear, lead a brief existence, and then annihilate one another in accordance with the Uncertainty Principle.

The Uncertainty Principle states that for a pair of conjugate variables such as position/momentum and energy/time, it is impossible to have a precisely determined value of each member of the pair at the same time. For example, a particle pair can pop out of the vacuum during a very short time interval.

These are few questions which been raised with the advent of quantum mechanics. We may not know for sure why is there something rather than nothing. If we wish to draw philosophical conclusions about our own existence, our significance, and the significance of the universe itself, our conclusions should be based on empirical knowledge. A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa, whether or not we like the implications.     

Lawrence M. Krauss is a theoretical physicists, cosmologist, professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration and director of its Origins Project at Arizona State University, America. He is the bestselling Arthur of “The physics of Star Trek”, “The fears of physics” and “A universe from nothing” among other great books. He, by this day has published more than 300 scientific peer reviewed journals and is hailed as a formal public intellectual.

Science is the best guide to the nature of reality. The epistemology of our universe, with the lambda-cold dark matter (_CDM) model and all available observations (cosmic microwave background, abundance of light elements), is usually explained as an event of big bang aided by inflation, where a singularity underwent exponential expansion which is still going on. Big bang, inflation and expansion may well be considered as facts in scientific community but where did singularity come from, or how did it form still remains a mystery. This is a scientific question, not a theological one and science must answer it, but can it?

Aristotle defined “nothing” as “What rocks dream of” while others define nothing as “Absence of something”. But nothing in science is different from that of philosophy. Nothing is though absence of something or in scientific terms can be defined as absence of space, time and matter or absence of space, time and energy.Something that has zero energy is actually nothing and can come out of nothing,  with the development of flat model of our universe it has been proved that the total energy of our universe is zero. There is repelling gravity in outer space that plays the part of nagitive enery so the rotal energy of universe comes out to be precisely zero. Lawrence Krauss, supporting his insight with quantum mechanics says that nothing is actually something and it is unstable. If you take everything out of this universe, what you are left with is nothing or vacuum. Our vacuum is the fabric of cosmos and it is a bubbling, boiling gas of virtual particles which emerge and emerge out in it due to quantum fluctuations. 

Quantum fluctuation is the temporary appearance of energetic particles out of nothing, as allowed by the Uncertainty Principle, in the temporary change in the amount of energy in a point space, That means that conservation of energy can appear to be violated, but only for small values of t (time). This allows the creation of particle-antiparticle pairs of virtual particles. The effects of these particles are measurable.

We have to keep in mind that universe was created as a singularity underwent exponential expansion, where singularity itself was so small that not even quark could exist in it. Here Lawrence Krauss (in his book Universe from nothing) emphasized that a little quantum fluctuation could have formed the singularity which underwent expansion.   A vigorous mathematical proof of the idea has also been given.

If particals like virtual particals can come out of nothing, spontaneously then why can't our universe? Or if there can be a slight chsnge in quantum enery due to uncertainity, why can't singularity be formed spontaneously some 13.7 billion years ago? A vigorous mathematical proof of the idea has also been given.

We have to keep exploring asking 'Why' and ''How'' instead of ''Who?'' We may try and fail or we may succeed but the final arbiter of this question will not come from hope, desire, revelation, or pure thought. It will come, if it ever does, from an exploration of nature.