Quantum Creation – what came before the big bang – the mechanism of a universe out of NO-thing? Ancient Greek cosmologist Parmenides said “Nothing comes from nothing.” He was likely referring to the law of conservation of energy, that no new energy can be created.
This is true and is a scientific fact even today.
So how could the Universe come from nothing it was argued. It had to come from something.
Well, since the discovery of quantum physics and relativity, we have discovered a flaw in this argument that allows the creation of something from truly nothing.
How is this possible and what is the exact mechanism?
We have very good evidence the Universe indeed had a beginning about 13.8 billion years ago, with the Big Bang.
But one of the fundamental questions has been, what was there before the Big Bang? How did the universe come about from nothing.
The flaw that we have uncovered in Parmenides original argument of “nothing comes from nothing” is that gravity has negative energy. And matter has positive energy.
And in a closed universe, a spontaneous splitting of 0 energy into an equal amount of positive energy and negative energy would not violate any conservation laws, because no new energy would have been created.
And in quantum mechanics, anything that is not forbidden by conservation laws has a probability of occurring. A small probability, but nevertheless non-zero.
In fact, not only is the splitting of 0 energy into an equal amount of positive and negative energy allowed, but is inevitable, in a universe that obeys quantum mechanics.
In other words, a closed universe will spontaneously nucleate according to the laws of quantum mechanics. So that is how our universe can come from the vacuum.
But then you might say, you did not start with nothing. You started with something, you started with the vacuum of physics.
This is true.
A vacuum in physics has virtual particles that come in and out of existence, over very short periods of time. A vacuum has a weight.
And it has energy and pressure that can be scientifically measured. So this is not nothing, it is something.
So a more fundamental question is can a universe really be created with truly nothing – that means no-thing – no space, no matter, no time, no nothing?
To answer this question, let’s work our way back from where we are now.
We know that we live in an expanding universe.
If you solve Einstein’s equations for a universe like ours, you discover that it describes a universe that is either contracting or expanding. At the beginning of the big bang, it has a finite size, below which you cannot go any smaller.
How does an explosion like the big bang occur from this finite size universe?
In late 1979, a Stanford physics postdoc named Alan Guth offered an explanation for this bang or explosion.
He showed that using the theories in particle physics, at extremely high energies — much higher than we could ever create in a lab — a special state of matter turns gravity upside down, causing it to be repulsive rather than an attractive force.
A patch of space that contains even a tiny bit of this unusual matter, much smaller than the size of an atom, could repel itself so violently that it would blow up. And expand to a huge size.
This would have happened for a very short time, a tiny fraction of a second, because this repulsive force quickly decays into the attractive force of gravity we see today. But this short period of time is enough to cause the “bang” in the big bang.
So now we are at the Big Bang. We have a finite size universe with extremely high energy density that exploded in a brief inflationary period, and caused the big bang.
Now, let’s go back further…the question now is how did a zero-size universe (a nothing) become Guth’s finite size universe.
Physicist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University published a paper in 1984 that showed how this was possible using currently known laws of quantum mechanics.
And he originated the idea of something called Quantum Creation.
He showed that there is some energy barrier that the zero-size universe had to overcome in order to become finite size.
This is where a phenomenon called quantum tunneling comes into play.
It turns out that there is a probability, not very large, but a non-zero probability that a zero-size universe can tunnel through an energy barrier, and become a finite size universe.
Quantum tunneling is a real phenomenon that can be measured and is known to exist. It is not made up.
Quantum mechanics shows that particles are waves of probabilities – and these waves have a non-zero probability of showing up spontaneously outside a barrier
This is how for example, an electron or even atom behind a barrier has a small probability of showing up on the other side of the barrier.
Our zero-size universe can, through the process of quantum tunneling, become a finite size universe.
And once it does that, then Guth’s cosmic inflation occurs, triggering the Big Bang. Then Einstein’s laws take over, and the universe’s expanding journey begins.
And 13.8 billion years later, we observe the universe as we do today.
So quantum mechanics gets you from zero size to a finite size, and then to the Big Bang. And then general relativity can get you from there to where we are today.
And what triggered all this?
Well, in quantum physics, events do not necessarily have a cause, just some probability.
So there is some probability for the universe to pop out of “nothing.
Vilenkin’s theory is not proven, but if it is true, our existence had the humblest beginning of all – from nothingness itself.
You might say, well even if we buy into all that, you are still not starting with nothing, because you have to start with the laws of quantum mechanics. This is not nothing. This is definitely something.
Where did these laws come from? Why do we have these laws? Do they exist independent of space and time?
So far nobody has answers to this question. So this may be the ultimate question for humanity.
What do you think? Do you have a theory that you would like to express? I would love to hear about any ideas you may have, especially if they sound crazy.
I’ll see you in the comments below.
