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.
If there being nothing is easier, or more likely, than there being something, and if there has ever been nothing – even for one zeptosecond (the shortest length of time ever measured, 10^-21) – and if it’s true that there can’t be something after that, how did we all end up in this brief flash of something? Luck? Anthropic principle (we could only be in a universe where there is something…)? Or God?
You know the trouble with God, of course – I mean in this particular situation, at least. What good is it to explain why there is something by reference to God when explaining why (how?) God came into existence is, if anything, harder since God is causally more opaque and more complicated than, well, everything?
Of course, maybe it’s just a brute fact that there is something rather than nothing. Bertrand Russell said the universe “is just there and that’s all.” “Reasons,” his one-time pupil Wittgenstein said, “must come to an end somewhere.”
Or maybe the question is meaningless. Steven Hawking said asking what there was before the Big Bang is like asking “What is north of the North Pole?”
On the other hand, maybe it’s just unanswerable why there is something rather than nothing, not because it is a brute fact or meaningless question, but because it is outside of our actual and possible experience.
In Robert Ottum’s “Ado About Nothing” two astronauts discover a wall at the end of the universe – and a sign that says, “Obviously you are not convinced that this is the end of the universe. If you will place a quarter in the slot below, the peep-hole will open, and you can see for yourself.” When one astronaut asks the other what he saw his answer is, of course, “Nothing.”
Call that being outside of our experience in the mundane sense.
There’s also a Kantian sense in which the question of why there is something rather than nothing might be outside of our experience. Kant says time and space are a priori forms of intuition. Roughly, they are structures we impose and through which we perceive the world, not possible objects of experience themselves. Time and space make it possible to process and understand our experiences, but the things-in-themselves are beyond our experience and, ultimately, always a mystery to us. I guess, from the Kantian point of view, if we don’t really know anything about space and time, we also don’t know anything about how everything came into existence or why there is something rather than nothing.
Brian Leftow argues that since there can’t be a causal explanation of why there is something rather than nothing, because, you know, infinite regress, turtles all the way down, etc. – then it must be the case that something must exist necessarily. I get the first part (no causal explanation because you need an infinite chain of causes), but I don’t know why that leads to something must necessarily exist.
Maybe, this would help. Some people argue that numbers, math, and logic necessarily exist. We even call some things necessary truths, though I’m not sure that’s really what that means. (If this helps, contemporary logicians and metaphysicians tend to say a necessary truth is something that is true in all possible worlds. (Yeah. I didn’t think that would help.))
But even though mathematical objects can get along without something to be true about, it’s not clear how they can bring anything else into existence. If physical analogues of triangles (which, of course, are fundamentally mathematical objects only approximately duplicated by any physical object) exist, we will already know that their interior angles will add up to 180 degrees. However, that won’t bring actual, physical triangle analogues about.
Parmenides, the coolest of pre-Socratic philosophers, argued that since nothing is nothing, and nothing comes from nothing, nothing does not – and cannot – exist. If he had lived a little later, I think this might have been called Sophistry. Or maybe that’s just me.
On the other hand, Frank Wilczek, who won the Nobel Prize in physics, said “nothing is unstable” and so something is bound to happen. Sean Carroll argues that even if this accounts for the existence of matter, it doesn’t account for the existence of the universe as a whole. Still, it looks like progress to me.
Hawking and Lawrence Krauss say that quantum mechanics, with its vacuum states, virtual particles, and spacetime bubbles, implies that in our universe things do spontaneously come into existence out of nothing. Beyond the math, there is some actual evidence for this. So, other cosmologists may be coming around to the possibility that the universe did come into existence out of nothing.
Some cosmologists, on the other hand, have argued that this isn’t really something coming out of nothing because it assumes that the laws of nature already existed before the universe. Hence, even before the physical universe began there wasn’t nothing there. (Normally, that clause – “there wasn’t nothing there” – would be ungrammatical. Deep questions threaten even grammar, I suppose.) Can the universe only come into existence if the laws of nature already exist?
I’ve written about this before. In my nonexpert opinion, there’s no need to presuppose that the laws of nature existed before the universe. The universe does not need to obey the laws of the universe. That’s just a metaphor. It’s the other way around. The laws of nature are a description of how the universe behaves.
So, when the universe comes into existence and does whatever it does, that’s no reason to think that what it is doing is following laws that existed before the universe. Those laws are about what the universe does after it comes into existence, not enforceable prohibitions on what the universe can or can’t do.
In terms of the original question, “why is there something rather than nothing?” that leaves us, surprisingly, at “Because something can come out of nothing.” Why or how exactly? I have no idea.
Don’t care for this conclusion? Well, as Sidney Morgenbesser, an American Philosopher often described as New York’s “Sidewalk Socrates,” said, “Even if there was nothing, you still wouldn’t be satisfied!”
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*There are actually a number of other possible scenarios, some of which don’t have the universe going out of existence, but the most widely held is still heat death (or as it sometimes called) “The Big Freeze.” Other scenarios include, “The Big Crunch” (the expansion of the universe slows and then collapses back into a singularity and, for the optimists out there, maybe, there is another Big Bang); “The Big Rip” (the acceleration of the universe continues until it tears apart everything, including individual particles and space-time itself); and Big “Quantum Vacuum Decay” (for the pessimists, at any moment a vacuum bubble could spontaneously appear and consume the whole universe). I just added the “Big” to Quantum Vacuum Decay. Sorry. I probably shouldn’t hassle physicists for overusing the word “big.” We are talking about the end of the entire universe, after all. (I don’t try to provide citations for all of these scenarios, but they are all readily available with a bit of googling.)
Bonus Sidney Morgenbesser story.
Supposedly the English philosopher of language J.L. Austin said to Morgenbesser that, while in most languages a double-negative means a positive, in no language does a double-positive mean a negative. To which Morgenbesser supposedly replied, “Yeah, yeah.”