Which existed first "something" or "nothing"?

[Ben Dhyan]

Basically it seems that all the "conserved" properties of the universe net out to zero. There are a number of them, the best known being mass/energy, electric charge, momentum and angular momentum.

It is fairly easy to see that electric charge nets to zero, because it does so short range. That there is no prevailing motion or rotatation to the universe is observed as accurately as we are able, so they seem to net to zero as well. Mass/energy is offset by the negative energy of the expansion.

So, as has been said, the universe appears to be a free lunch.

Hmmm...ok....though it seems there is no scientific consensus on this....

 

[Ben Dhyan]

I have no idea what the phrase might mean. I might surmise some notion that everything is connected, the way the astrologers talk, but everything is not connected, at least to the extent we might conceivably measure.

Yes...the prefix uni of universe which means one in Latin actually is an appropriate prefix..there is nothing that exists that exists outside of the universal oneness....we are all expressions of the one that is all.... Even if the big bang was a correct model..everything that exists has its genesis in the original singularity... There is an underlying unity of the universe that is not perceived by our common senses because our sensory perception is designed for the limited planetary purpose we serve in the bigger cosmic scheme of things.. Science has no problem stating that...zpe...or dark energy... or Higg's field... or quantum vacuum...are omnipresent though...

 

[ArtieE]

Isn't nature/creation evidence ?
A biotechnologist Dr. Hans Kristaian Kotlar at the Norwegian Radium Hospital it seemed reasonable to him that only an intelligent Source of energy could account for the order in the universe. Could the immune system originate in a mindless manner ? The more he studied the immune system the more he realized how complex and effective it is which led him to conclude that life is a product of intelligence. He thinks the power and sophistication of our immune system points to intelligence.

Where there is intelligence, there is a mind, where there is a mind there is a person, and where there is a person there is a personality.

And what explains the existence of this intelligent mind, person, personality in the first place?

 

[ArtieE]

Oh but there is. If time has always existed, then it is endless. "Infinity" is not a number. It means endless. Infinite time means endless time, and you cannot get here from endlessly far away. The frog can never get to the top of the well if the well has no bottom.

The frog can theoretically always get to the top of the well no matter where he starts climbing. Besides, if your well is endless it can't have a top either because that would be one end.

 

[Ouroboros]

@LegionOnomaMoi
Great post. Didn't know that conservation of emergy is questionable. Just wow!

 

[URAVIP2ME]

And what explains the existence of this intelligent mind, person, personality in the first place?

Only Psalms 90:2 explains that only God was there in the first place meaning God always existed. Only God was before the beginning.
Eternity is also in our hearts. For each day we can count we can count both forwards and backwards forever and ever.

 

[leibowde84]

So please explain how you get to believe the sum total of all the energy of the universe is relatively zero...I mean can you elaborate so I can form some idea where you are coming from?

The following explanation should help a bit, at least. Let me know what you think.

Considering the amount of energy packed in the nucleus of a single uranium atom, or the energy that has been continuously radiating from the sun for billions of years, or the fact that there are 10^80 particles in the observable universe, it seems that the total energy in the universe must be an inconceivably vast quantity. But it's not; it's probably zero.
Light, matter and antimatter are what physicists call "positive energy." And yes, there's a lot of it (though no one is sure quite how much). Most physicists think, however, that there is an equal amount of "negative energy" stored in the gravitational attraction that exists between all the positive-energy particles. The positive exactly balances the negative, so, ultimately, there is no energy in the universe at all.
Negative energy?

Stephen Hawking explains the concept of negative energy in his book The Theory of Everything (New Millennium 2002): "Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less [positive] energy than the same two pieces a long way apart, because you have to expend energy to separate them against the gravitational force that is pulling them together," he wrote.
Since it takes positive energy to separate the two pieces of matter, gravity must be using negative energy to pull them together. Thus, "the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero."
Astrophysicists Alexei Filippenko at the University of California, Berkeley and Jay Pasachoff at Williams College explain gravity's negative energy by way of example in their essay, "A Universe From Nothing": "If you drop a ball from rest (defined to be a state of zero energy), it gains energy of motion (kinetic energy) as it falls. But this gain is exactly balanced by a larger negative gravitational energy as it comes closer to Earth’s center, so the sum of the two energies remains zero."
In other words, the ball's positive energy increases, but at the same time, negative energy is added to the Earth's gravitational field. What was a zero-energy ball at rest in space later becomes a zero-energy ball that is falling through space.
The universe as a whole can be compared to this ball. Initially, before the big bang, the universe-ball was at rest. Now, after the big bang, it is falling: light and matter exist, and they are moving. And yet, because of the negative energy built into the gravity field created by these particles, the total energy of the universe remains zero.
Ultimate free lunch
The question, then, is why the ball started falling in the first place. How did something – composed of equal positive and negative parts, mind you – come from nothing?
Physicists aren't exactly sure, but their best guess is that the extreme positive and negative quantities of energy randomly fluctuated into existence. "Quantum theory, and specifically Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, provide a natural explanation for how that energy may have come out of nothing," wrote Filippenko and Pasachoff.
They continued, "Throughout the universe, particles and antiparticles spontaneously form and quickly annihilate each other without violating the law of energy conservation. These spontaneous births and deaths of so-called 'virtual particle' pairs are known as 'quantum fluctuations.' Indeed, laboratory experiments have proven that quantum fluctuations occur everywhere, all the time."
Cosmologists have constructed a theory called inflation that accounts for the way in which a small volume of space occupied by a virtual particle pair could have ballooned to become the vast universe we see today. Alan Guth, one of the main brains behind inflationary cosmology, thus described the universe as "the ultimate free lunch."
In a lecture, Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll put it this way: "You can create a compact, self-contained universe without needing any energy at all."

 

[Ben Dhyan]

The following explanation should help a bit, at least. Let me know what you think.

Considering the amount of energy packed in the nucleus of a single uranium atom, or the energy that has been continuously radiating from the sun for billions of years, or the fact that there are 10^80 particles in the observable universe, it seems that the total energy in the universe must be an inconceivably vast quantity. But it's not; it's probably zero.
Light, matter and antimatter are what physicists call "positive energy." And yes, there's a lot of it (though no one is sure quite how much). Most physicists think, however, that there is an equal amount of "negative energy" stored in the gravitational attraction that exists between all the positive-energy particles. The positive exactly balances the negative, so, ultimately, there is no energy in the universe at all.
Negative energy?

Stephen Hawking explains the concept of negative energy in his book The Theory of Everything (New Millennium 2002): "Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less [positive] energy than the same two pieces a long way apart, because you have to expend energy to separate them against the gravitational force that is pulling them together," he wrote.
Since it takes positive energy to separate the two pieces of matter, gravity must be using negative energy to pull them together. Thus, "the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero."
Astrophysicists Alexei Filippenko at the University of California, Berkeley and Jay Pasachoff at Williams College explain gravity's negative energy by way of example in their essay, "A Universe From Nothing": "If you drop a ball from rest (defined to be a state of zero energy), it gains energy of motion (kinetic energy) as it falls. But this gain is exactly balanced by a larger negative gravitational energy as it comes closer to Earth’s center, so the sum of the two energies remains zero."
In other words, the ball's positive energy increases, but at the same time, negative energy is added to the Earth's gravitational field. What was a zero-energy ball at rest in space later becomes a zero-energy ball that is falling through space.
The universe as a whole can be compared to this ball. Initially, before the big bang, the universe-ball was at rest. Now, after the big bang, it is falling: light and matter exist, and they are moving. And yet, because of the negative energy built into the gravity field created by these particles, the total energy of the universe remains zero.
Ultimate free lunch
The question, then, is why the ball started falling in the first place. How did something – composed of equal positive and negative parts, mind you – come from nothing?
Physicists aren't exactly sure, but their best guess is that the extreme positive and negative quantities of energy randomly fluctuated into existence. "Quantum theory, and specifically Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, provide a natural explanation for how that energy may have come out of nothing," wrote Filippenko and Pasachoff.
They continued, "Throughout the universe, particles and antiparticles spontaneously form and quickly annihilate each other without violating the law of energy conservation. These spontaneous births and deaths of so-called 'virtual particle' pairs are known as 'quantum fluctuations.' Indeed, laboratory experiments have proven that quantum fluctuations occur everywhere, all the time."
Cosmologists have constructed a theory called inflation that accounts for the way in which a small volume of space occupied by a virtual particle pair could have ballooned to become the vast universe we see today. Alan Guth, one of the main brains behind inflationary cosmology, thus described the universe as "the ultimate free lunch."
In a lecture, Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll put it this way: "You can create a compact, self-contained universe without needing any energy at all."

Thank you for your considered reply....but I want to examine this...."The positive exactly balances the negative, so, ultimately, there is no energy in the universe at all."

I don't see this negative energy except as a concept at this stage.... Take electrical charge energy....the positive and negative charge cancellation only applies to differential potential...it does not translate into zero energy as the potential arises from electron and proton particles and they both contain positive energy as in E = MC^2.. so until science can show that any type of energy or mass can ever be made to become zero or nothing...or to create any type of energy or mass from zero or nothing....it is mere speculation....nothing can not exist!

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

@LegionOnomaMoi
Great post. Didn't know that conservation of emergy is questionable. Just wow!

Thanks! I did something right for once

 

[Ouroboros]

Thanks! I did something right for once

Of course you did. Even a chicken can find its way around a blind corner now and then... ... no, wait... was it a deaf chicken finding a popcorn? Bah. Don't remember.

 

[Thief]

Why?

Is thought so horrible? Thought is the world.

thought is dealt in living

That's possible but I don't think so. Movement and time are not necessarily dependent on each other. Time, at least, seem to have an independent pulse to it (quantized to Plank time) and could be ticking away with nothing to tick. The premise of this thread is that there is nothing before the beginning, which means no time, which means no eternity while only emptiness existed, as there was to time to form an eternity. This is the simplest, but not the only possible scenario.

We understand space-time as being a single thing, but that implies possible places where there is only space and no time and places where there is only time and no space. Such transformation calculations are now regular in relativity theory, all bound up with the speed of EMR -- massless particles travel through space but experience no time.

movement requires two points.
the singularity ( to be singular) has no second reference 'point'
no movement....nothing to measure

 

[midopafo]

or none of them unless the ONE who created/evolved them communicates and informs us which one.
Topic open for Theists and Atheists alike.

Regards

I think this topic is way above our pay grade and we should just try to live a decent life without much guilt and then see what happens.How about that ?

 

[viole]

How does one climb out of a well that has no bottom?

By using a monotonically increasing (and divergent) velocity curve that allows one to leave the infinite well in finite time, and then by changing sign to that speed when that finite time has elapsed. That is your return trip that goes through the entire well.

It is actually pretty easy to do that. The obstacle is nomological (you cannot go faster than light) not logical.

Ciao

- viole

 

[Ben Dhyan]

By using a monotonically increasing (and divergent) velocity curve that allows one to leave the infinite well in finite time, and then by changing sign to that speed when that finite time has elapsed. That is your return trip that goes through the entire well.

It is actually pretty easy to do that. The obstacle is nomological (you cannot go faster than light) not logical.

Ciao

- viole

All apparent space and time is relative.....the universe is an indivisible one....it is everywhere simultaneously (omnipresent)...there is nowhere to go. ...It is only sentient expressions (humans for instance) of the one who perceive the universe as separate from themselves, who invent time as a mental record/measurement of the change of the ever changing aspects/expressions of the universe in which they exist... I mean how long does it take the universe to get from here to a location one billion light years away? No time of course...funny too though, if you were to travel at the speed of light the same one billion light year distance....it also take no time for you to do so.....and furthermore, if you were to keep traveling at the speed of light, you would become an immortal....

 

[psychoslice]

We will never know what came first, we can all play around with philosophical ideas, but that is as far as we can go, but as egocentric animals we will try to work out the enigma, no matter how we try.

 

[viole]

All apparent space and time is relative.....the universe is an indivisible one....it is everywhere simultaneously (omnipresent)...there is nowhere to go. ...It is only sentient expressions (humans for instance) of the one who perceive the universe as separate from themselves, who invent time as a mental record/measurement of the change of the ever changing aspects/expressions of the universe in which they exist... I mean how long does it take the universe to get from here to a location one billion light years away? No time of course...funny too though, if you were to travel at the speed of light the same one billion light year distance....it also take no time for you to do so.....and furthermore, if you were to keep traveling at the speed of light, you would become an immortal....

Yes, more or less. Probably the best analogy is to imagine the Universe as a film and our perception of time the running of that film under a projector. We think we see actors moving and doing things, but in reality we just see a sequence of static events, one after the other, (each photogram) that our brain interpolates to create the illusion of time flowing. The past is just the photograms left behind by the projector (but still there) and the future are the photograms not yet played (but already there). But the whole film, seen as the sequence of all its photograms, is not flowing anywhere. It is not changing at all.

Therefore, to say that the Universe popped out into existence at the Big Bang, is like saying that the movie popped out into existence at its first photogram. Which is obviously ridiculous.

And, in a sense, we are immortal. For instance, the event of my birth did not disappear out of existence. It is just a photogram that is not currently played by the projector in my skull.

Ciao

- viole

 

[Aupmanyav]

And what explains the existence of this intelligent mind, person, personality in the first place?

Chemical and electrical impulses.

The frog can theoretically always get to the top of the well no matter where he starts climbing. Besides, if your well is endless it can't have a top either because that would be one end.

First image for manifold with Google search.
More at:
https://www.google.co.in/search?q=manifold&newwindow=1&rlz=1C2LENP_enIN576IN576&biw=1455&bih=705&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjN5Oaq-YPMAhUCm5QKHRUmA7kQ_AUIBigB#newwindow=1&tbm=isch&q=manifold+math&imgrc=ROnTo1os4lwuOM:

 

[Ben Dhyan]

Chemical and electrical impulses.

And what organizes these chemical and electrical impulses?

 

[Aupmanyav]

Sensory inputs. They start a chain of reactions, mental as well as physical.

 

[Ben Dhyan]

Sensory inputs. They start a chain of reactions.

Are you implying the organization of chemical and electrical impulses comes from outside the brain....the sensory inputs?