those scientists who hypothesize 'a universe from nothing'
rede, I'm don't believe there are very many scientists who really say that the universe came from nothing. That may sound like what they are saying, but in fact they have no idea where the universe came from. At this time they can't extrapolate back in time any further than the big bang. Before that scientists just don't know what was going on. There has been a lot of speculation, but there is nothing to really guide them. Given time we may develop some idea of what happened way back then, but I'm not going to hold my breath. The best we know is at the big bang the universe as we know it came into existence. What it was like before that is completely open. About the best they can say is that the universe came from a singularity where the whole universe was compressed into an infinitely small point. And of course that raises some philosophical questions that I don't want to get into.
Now as far as something coming from nothing, the closest thing I know of are the quantum virtual particles that occur just because the Uncertainty Principle requires them. They pop up and disappear all the time, but have almost no effect on the bigger world around us. I say almost no effect because they have been detected in well constructed experiments on the Casimir Effect. But they are well understood theoretically, even if they don't make any sense to us. And the fact that they don't make sense to us is what bothers a lot of people. For people who evolved to see a macroscopic world, the microscopic quantum world seems to be totally insane.
Bill Gill
