eh

There is an article an the Infidels site that discusses the idea of creation ex nihilo, written by Mark Vuletic. The link is at <a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mark_vuletic/vacuum.html" target="_blank">http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mark_vuletic/vacuum.html</a>

One of the ideas discussed is that of the universe containing a net energy of zero. This caught my interest, and so I've been searching the net for various articles. Though I seem to be grasping the basic concept of this, my brain is having difficulty putting together a picture of how this would work with cosmology.

Specifically, I'm trying to picture how this would work with the big bang scenario. If this concept of zero energy with inflation is true, what does this do to classic vision of the singularity? I've always thought of all the energy in the universe existing prior to the big bang in the super dense singularity, but this seems to be wrong.

Can anyone help me to grasp this concept? I have read various website articles on inflation models proposed by Guth and Mr. Multiverse, Linde. It just doesn't seem to sinking in.

Also, I don't seem to see this brought up in arguments against the first cause - God claim, why do you suppose that is?

David Gould

I know nothing about the theory except that it exists and I do bring it up with theists. My arguement is:
"The universe could have a net energy level of zero. God bringing zero energy into existence is not that big a deal - I just did it then."

Facetious, I suppose but hey, what the hell?

I too would be interested in knowing more about this.

Francois Tremblay

Creation "ex nihilo" is meaningless, since nothingness, by definition, cannot exist. It cannot contain the potentiality of creation. For some kind of creative potentiality to exist, there must be some entity or mechanism present that contains this potentiality.

Otherwise, someone who proposes some kind of "ex nihilo" creation has no choice but to invoke an exterior potentiality such as God, but even that solution is fraught with problems.

Vuletic's "quantum vacuum fluctuations" is such a mechanism that permits an actuality. However, his whole reasoning has the same problem than any such theorizing that starts from a minimum of processes, that is, why start with almost-nothing rather than everything ? Such a choice dictates the whole felt need for an explanation, but is based on nothing except assumption. Here is a quote from that article that expresses the fallacy I am talking about :

The answer is, it did not necessarily "come from" anything. It may be that the meaningfulness of such a question is about on par with "Where did gods come from ?" (assuming one has a consistent concept of gods in the first place, of course). Ultimately, only science is able to validate one or the other assumption.

[ February 21, 2002: Message edited by: Franc28 ]</p>

Answerer

Hi eh, I think what the article means is not that the universe has no energy in the beginning but a net energy of zero magnitude. Just like an hydrogen atom having a net charge of zero magnitude, doesn't mean that it has no postive or negative charges. As for the multiverse theory, since most of the scientists believe that the multiverse is made up of countless number of universes. So, if you extended the model of universe with zero net energy to the multiverse, I think you will got a zero net energy for the multiverse too.

eh

This what I got from reading the various articles as well. The part that confuses me is when cosmologists start refering this universe as a cosmic free lunch. Does it simply mean that in the singularity, there was an unbelievable amount of energy, that was simply balanced to amount to a net charge of zero? I though so, originally.

But then I hear explainations that the universe started out as a mere particle that inflated into our universe. Some also go further to say that the universe came out of a larger vacuum, say in the 5th dimension or so.

When they say the universe may have started out as a perfect vacuum, does this mean a hyperspace, larger vacuum that our universe arose from, or that the universe itself was a very small vacuum?

Any thoughts?

Answerer

Well, I prefer to think that things start from a dimensionless point instead of a complex and high dimension point as it is harder to visualize such high dimension space.

Bill

<a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/vic_stenger/index.shtml" target="_blank">Vic Stenger</a> is one of the atheist physics professors who believes in the "net zero energy" hypothesis. He writes a short bit about it <a href="http://spot.colorado.edu/~vstenger/Cosmo/inflat.html" target="_blank">HERE</a>, and a much longer piece <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/cosmo.html" target="_blank">HERE</a>, for the Talk Origins archives. He is using that point (zero energy) to defend the First Law of Thermodynamics against an allegation of violation: I would suggest reading <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/cosmo.html" target="_blank">the whole article</a> for more on the related concepts.

== Bill