Michael, you are coming dangerously close to demanding that people know what they are talking about. That is verboten. Now go to your room.
--- Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu Jan 17, Shane Mage wrote:
>
> > Meaningless "questions" like "Why is there
> something instead of
> > nothing?" cannot yield a meaningful answer to
> scientific, or any other,
> > technique.
>
> There are many scientists who would disagree with
> you about that.
> They're called "nothing theorists" and they think
> about exactly this
> question.
>
> One of the clearest answers comes from a guy named
> Alex Vilenkin, who has
> a scientific definition of nothing: a closed
> four-dimensional space-time
> continuum of radius zero. He then goes to show
> mathematically that
> quantum tunnelling effects would produce something
> out of nothing.
>
> Of course, on this model, the laws of the universe
> -- at least the ones
> that that govern quantum tunnelling -- have to exist
> even when there's
> no universe.
>
> Stephen Hawkings takes up the question explicitly in
> _A Brief History of
> Time_. His way of phrasing it is slightly different
> -- "Why does the
> universe go to all the bother of existing?" -- but
> it's obviously the same
> question and he considers it an important one.
>
> So I don't think the idea that this question is
> scientifically meaningless
> can be defended. Scientists seem to be treating it
> with the same
> seriousness they treat, say, inflation theory.
>
> Michael
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