by Tim Sommers

Most of the evidence available to us suggests that there is something.
There are probably electrons and other fundamental particles, as well as fields and fundamental forces, likely there are planets, stars, black holes, and galaxies, and there are probably even, what Quine called, “medium-sized” objects: tables, chairs, dogs, and us.
As far as I understand it, however, there is nothing that we know of that couldn’t not exist or go out of existence – including electrons. Although, an electron’s lifespan is long – something like 66,000 yottayears. (I know, I know yottayears sound made up, but it’s 1028 years.) This is a much longer life span than the life span of the universe itself – which won’t extend to more than 100 trillion years or so.
Anyway, if every single thing could not exist, then everything could not exist all at once, and so there would and could be nothing. And if there could be nothing, why isn’t there nothing? Existing is more complicated – and energy intensive – than not existing, so, it would seem that the universe would tend towards nothing.
On the other hand, when I said that the lifetime of the universe, though long, is finite, I was following cosmologists who don’t really mean that the universe will literally go out of existence eventually. They mean that the universe will undergo heat death.
Everything interesting thing about the universe – including life and information – is a result of energy gradients. They cool your coffee, make your computer compute, and create waterfalls. Energy gradients make stuff happen.
Energy gradients exist wherever two points sufficiently proximate to one another have different levels of energy, causing the energy to flow from the more energetic point to the less energetic point. Energy gradients, in action, eliminate themselves by spreading their energy out more evenly. Entropy is the measure of this process. Energy gradients push the universe towards a state where everything is distributed uniformly and nothing interesting can ever happen again. Heat death.
However, the point is that heat death is not itself, literally, the end of the universe. Nevertheless, if the fundamental particles have finite life-spans, no matter how long, the universe as a whole will eventually experience heat death and then, some time later, go out of existence entirely.*
Nothing is coming. And nothing can come from nothing. As Heidegger put it, “The Nothing Nothings.” So, once there is nothing, the conventional wisdom goes, there can’t ever be anything again. Read more »