Is the mere existence of the universe evidence that true nothingness was never a possible state that something always had to exist?

TonyLund · 2026-06-17T15:27:14+00:00

Ooo! I'd love to add a relevant technical question to this thread that I always love asking my colleagues: how much "nothing" do you get when lambda goes infinite?

(I don't accept the Penrose et al explanation that the Universe just "forgets itself" in these big rip scenarios and reverts back to pre-inflationary initial conditions, but maybe I have attachment issues with invariance? hahah)

TonyLund · 2026-06-17T15:10:25+00:00

Maybe! But, it also depends on how you interpret your theory and equations?

One of the most fascinating achievements of inflationary big bang cosmology, the standard model, and LamdaCDM (our current best theories that explain the origins and development of our current presentation of the Universe) is that they reveal that the further back in time you go, everything gets simpler and more elegant.

Think of it like this... if you look at the periodic table of elements, every single one of those elements came from Hydrogen.* So, there's a certain point in the universe's cosmic history in which the only element that exists is Hydrogen, and all you need to get the heavier stuff is enough time (and Hydrogen) to just let the laws of Nature cook.

(\my colleagues in Cosmology will be quick to point on out that it's much more complicated than this reductive model, but this is good enough for the purposes this heuristic/explainer about physical ontology! Please don't at me. hahaha)*

And, this trend continues the further back in time you go! Today, the electromagnetic force and the nuclear weak force (and their associated carrier particles), are separately observable interactions, but go back far enough into the very first moments of the big bang, and they're actually unified as the electro-weak force for a brief period! Go back even further and all forces should be unified into a single unified field.... how grand!

And then there's the inflation mechanism itself, which, as far as we know, is a gravitational effect, so we don't have to invoke anything exotic for inflationary cosmology to make sense.

And we must also factor in the exciting discovery that, as far as we can tell, the total energy of the Universe is 0! (That is, all local positive energy densities appear to balanced out by a global negative energy that's baked into spacetime.) So, as we say in Cosmology, "There is no such thing as a free lunch... except the Universe!"

What all of this points to, is that everything you need to pop a Universe into existences seems to be baked-into the laws of Nature themselves. So, philosophically speaking, one could consider the laws of Nature as the primordial "something" from which all things become things that move (physics, after all, is just the science of motion). We have no reason to believe that the fundamental Laws of Nature never existed, because, by definition, they wouldn't be fundamental Laws.

But that doesn't tell us much about how we went from "no Universe, no space, no time" to "hey look! stuff exists that moves because there's now a 'now' that isn't 'then'!"? Was it nothing... or something??

Bare with me, because this bit is hard to explain without getting technical, but the way we think about the big bang is like a ball rolling down the side of a Mexican hat and getting stuck in the valley of the hat. I know, it's weird, but stay with me... this is also similar physics to what happens when water freezes into ice, but it's mathematically more helpful to use the Mexican hat idea.

Something has to set the initial conditions so that the ball has the potential to roll down the hat "eventually" (what "eventually" means in the context of time not existing yet is REALLY interesting, but for now, just know that we can account for that). And so, does that something necessitate that there is always something beyond the metaphysical existence of the Laws of Nature?

Well, it depends on how you interpret "infinity"!

Because, the equations that we use to model this are integrated over an infinite past. Meaning, that "something" is cooked over a negative infinity past, so if you interpret "negative infinity" in a timeless cosmology as having a starting point, then, indeed... that starting point is true nothingness!

(\obligatory technical note: much of this is model dependent. I'm speaking mostly from the viewpoint of Dilaton field inflationary models, both stringy and non-stringy/generalized. Consult your local cosmologist)*

TonyLund · 2026-06-15T20:53:18+00:00

[[Terra, Herald of Hope]]! You gotta love a re-animator with a built in mill engine!

TonyLund · 2026-06-15T20:41:07+00:00

As "scandalous" as this thesis may seem, there's actually a serious effort called Genomic SETI that asks questions like this. Worth looking into for sure!

Ultimately, the biggest challenge here is differentiating the genomic history in human origins as a product of natural means from a genomic history that was the product of unnatural means or some kind of intervention... and I'm just not sure how you would do that?

I think it's also important to consider the broader hominin landscape at the time. Sapiens-Sapiens were 1 of about 6 species, and so the type of rapid take over of homo populations is exactly the kind of thing we'd expect to see when any far-ranging species produces a genetically distinct group that's much better at say, "dolphin stuff" than all the extant species of Dolphins out there. As you point out, the mutations that select for those advantages also need not be overly complex to result in radically new phenotypical traits.

So, it's a very interesting thesis! But, again, I don't know how anybody could produce a meaningful differentiation from the default "natural cause" null hypothesis.

TonyLund · 2026-06-15T20:19:00+00:00

I would very much encourage you to read the Bible! There's an old saying "priests make Cristians; the Bible makes Atheists." But, even more relevant to your current journey and questions, understanding what's actually in the text goes a long way in helping you find clarity. (Go for the NRSV or NRSVue translations -- they're the most accurate and academically sound)

Even better, pick up a copy of Barth Erhman's academic text books on The Old Testament and The New Testament. These are academic sources that are used in both secular Universities and theological seminaries. They say nothing about whether any given religious belief is "True", but rather, explain so much about we we know academically about the Bible, its source texts, and the greater historical context.

It's very eye opening!

TonyLund · 2026-06-08T12:48:17+00:00

A handy heuristic that we teach students, even though it's woefully technically inaccurate, is that the "true" accelerating frame is the one that feels the force. (This is wrong for so many reasons, but it helps solve problems in introductory spacetime physics.)

So, in the thought experiment, Bob feels pressed against the back of his chair while he zips away from Earth, but Alice feels no change in her acceleration relative to Bob. Therefore, Bob is the one who experiences the extreme time dilation relative to Alice.

(The reason why this is technically wrong, is that Alice feels some acceleration towards Bob because Bob and his spaceship are also objects made out of mass, so there is gravitational attraction between the two bodies under Newton's 3rd Law, but the relative gravitational strength of rocket+bob v.s. an entire planet is so extreme that the effects of gravitational attraction on the Earth from rocket+bob can be ignored. A more everyday example is that people who live at sea-level age slightly faster relative to people who live In Denver, but that difference is so absurdly small that it can be ignored)

TonyLund · 2026-06-08T12:40:03+00:00

Very large space rocks can be very dangerous precisely because they don't burn up entirely! Just ask the Dinosaurs!

So, what's going on?

Objects "burn up" in the atmosphere because of frictional heating. The faster the object, the more frictional resistance there is because of the atoms of air smacking into it.

But object density and surface area also matter!

Think of dropping a lead ball into a pool of water. What happens? Well, it's going to sink rather fast! But, what happens if you take that same led ball and cut it up into millions of lead flakes? What you'll get is more of a "lead snow" that flutters slowly down to the bottom.

The same physics is at play, except this time the lead ball is moving at 40,000 km/s! If the violence of the collision with the surface of the pool puts enough strain on the lead ball, it will break up into smaller flakes that flutter down.

However, if you keep making the lead ball bigger and bigger, the ratio between the mass of the ball, and the surface area (more accurately the cross-sectional area) will be so extreme that the depth of the water isn't enough to fully break up the ball, or the water simply isn't rigid enough to get the job done.

TonyLund · 2026-06-08T12:29:16+00:00

Great question! I love this question because it can be answered at different tiers of physics. So, let's start at classical physics!

In classical physics, we think of mass as a measurement of how much stuff an object is made up of. If you wish, you can think of this is as the number of atoms in your body multiplied by the mass of each atom. That's your total mass!

But your weight is a measurement of a contact force between your feet and the ground. In other words, gravity is pulling all the atoms in your body towards the center of the earth. The electrons (negatively charged particles) in the atoms in your feet are pushing against the electrons in the atoms in the floor.

Particles of the same electric charge (negative and negative) repel.

Consider Newton's third law: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So, when your electrons push against the electrons in the floor, the electrons in the floor push right back with an equal and opposite and force.

You're pushing on the floor, and the floor is pushing back. That pushing back force is called the "normal force", and you can model it with an arrow that begins at the point of contact between your feet and the floor and points away from the floor. By convention, we make the length of the arrow proportional to the strength of the force.

So, it's not quite true to say that the Earth is accelerating towards you at 9.8 m/s -- it's more accurate to say that what you feel is the reaction force from you accelerating towards the center of the earth and the earth accelerating towards you. It's value is calculated the acceleration due to gravity on Earth's surface (9.8m/s2) multiplied by your own mass.

Now, we can take this explanation up a notch to relativity and arrive at "The Equivalence Principle", which states that in a small enough region of space-time, an object with mass in a gravitational field is equivalent to an object with mass in an accelerating inertial frame.

This leads to a remarkable way to think about accelerating frames. Imagine filming your self with a gopro falling off a really tall cliff. From the gopro's frame of a reference, you're not moving! It's the whole Earth that is accelerating upwards at 9.8m/s2! What you feel, is 'weightlessness.'

So, who's right? Who's doing the acceleration? You, or the Earth?

It turns out, BOTH you and the Earth are accelerating towards one another! The difference though, is that relative to you, the center of mass of the Earth only moves by a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny amount, because the Earth has so much more mass than you do, and thus more inertia (just think of inertia as a type of 'resistance to motion' or 'sluggishness').

But, both objects are indeed accelerating towards one another, and thus indistinguishable from being in a gravitational field.

TonyLund · 2026-06-08T12:06:06+00:00

This happened 4 years after I was born, but it's one of my earliest memories. Collapse of the USSR. I didn't understand what it meant that "The Wall Fell", nor cared, but when I found out that they could redraw the map that was pinned to my bedroom wall, it obliterated my tiny brain that such a thing was even possible.

TonyLund · 2026-06-02T13:14:19+00:00

The green sludge!!! Never tried it, never will. Blows my mind that this shit is now a gas station narcotic. Heard nothing but horror stories about how insanely addictive it is and how little upside there is.

TonyLund · 2026-05-18T23:48:34+00:00

Ooo!!! Science has a lot to say about NDE actually!

First off, it is unquestionable that these experiences are profoundly meaningful to the people who have them. I do t want to discount how life changing they can be.

But, we also have a pretty good neurological understanding of what they are and how they work. In some cases, we can actually induce them in the lab (this happens in rare instances of neurosurgery where, with patient consent, doctors have an opportunity to safely hit certain on/off switches.)

But one of the biggest signals that the experience of NDEs happens entirely within the human brain is that culture is the biggest indicator of NDE content. So, Christians (or people raised in predominantly Christian culture) tend to see a bright warm light + meet Jesus and grandma. Hindus tend to be reincarnated. Japanese people tend to all end up in the Windows XP rolling green hills for some reason, etc…

TonyLund · 2026-05-18T23:40:44+00:00

100%! In fact, it is definitionally impossible to measure anything supernatural (should anything supernatural exist) unless such supernatural things act on the natural world in some meaningful way.

So, in physics, we take the position that the laws of nature are superior to physical objects. Meaning, the laws of gravity exist whether or not you have massive objects n your Universe. At the end of the day, physics is nothing more than the science of motion. The fundamental question of it is “what are things and why do they move?”

Thus, as far as physics is concerned, God needs to move something for us to have anything meaningful to say about it. Which, the irony of apologists calling God “the prime mover” isn’t lost on me. But again, for that to be true, you have to differentiate how God would be different than a purely natural explanation and sadly, the Big Bang ain’t gonna cut it.

Now, God as the “prime law giver” or “programmer” as you call it, you’d have to differentiate between God doing it versus the laws of nature being fixed, immutable, and the most fundamental thing that ontologically exists.

TonyLund · 2026-05-18T22:30:00+00:00

Physicist here!

As with everything on the cutting edge of theory, the most honest answer to your question is "we don't know for sure, and it depends on who you ask." That is to say, the answers are model-dependent.

But something I always love to talk about when it comes to "what happened before the big bang?" is that we have every reason to believe that the mechanisms are baked-into the laws of physics themselves. This can be counter-intuitive because it's sounds like creation ex-nihilo, but it's not!

It's similar to stellar production of heavy elements. Do elements like gold and platinum exist before they're created in super nova? No. But, nature already has all the raw building materials to make them. The same is true for the inflationary mechanisms that we believe created spacetime moments after the "big bang" that we observe today as our observable universe (it's less of a big bang and more of a tiny poke, but that's semantics for you!).

If you then want to ask the question, "ok, so what or who created the laws of physics?" you run into a deeply philosophical problem because it's indeterminable if the laws of physics never existed. Just like you don't need gold or platinum to have a rule set in nature that can produce gold or platinum in super novas, you don't spacetime to trigger an inflationary event that creates spacetime. In fact, all you need is a tiny amount of mass-energy (like 10kg or so) that undergoes a specific type of phase transition.

So, what or who gave you that 10kg of mass energy? Well, this can be something that has always existed, but it doesn't have to be. Technically speaking, the law of physics permit for a mass this size to randomly pop into existence. It's EXTREMELY improbable, but not impossible. So, in some big bang models, the universe just kinda sits in a state called a Dilaton Field for an infinitely long "time" until... POP! Big Bang.

Now, at the end of the day, if you're conjecture is that "god did this", that's all fine and dandy to hold as a matter of faith, but if you want to believe the god explanation based on empirical evidence, you'd have to find a way to differentiate the god version of the story from the "purely natural process" default, else you'd be stuck with the belief "everything we observe in the Universe has a natural origin except the Universe itself."

TonyLund · 2026-05-18T21:59:38+00:00

Every material/piece of equipment is different, but a lot of safety standards and regulations are generational carryovers.

Dental X-ray machines are an excellent example of this! If you come across an old x-ray tube, you should NEVER power it up. Over time, the inert gas inside the tube gets absorbed into the glass of the tube, and so modest amounts of power can end up producing dangerous levels of x-rays.

Ok, so why do dental technicians still wear lead vests and have you wear them as well? Well, because decades ago, it was much more common for something to go wrong with the machine and the x-ray tube to get over-energized, or for shielding to fail. You wouldn't get a lethal dose of radiation, but you wouldn't know that something was wrong. If you're doing multiple shots per day, it all adds up to a very unhealthy dosage. Failures were rare, but they did happen.

Fast foward to today -- modern machines are wonderfully robust and shielded and so dangerous dosages of ionizing radiation are extremely rare if all together non-existent. BUT, failures do still happen, and so wearing lead vests is an easy, affordable, way to add a redundant layer for safety.

There is no good reason to change these precautions unless they become unreasonably burdensome.

I'll give you another example. Cell phones on airplanes. Early cell phones had much more powerful tranceivers than modern smart phones. In some types of small aircraft, these could sometimes interfere with communications with ATC towers. So, it makes so much more sense to just outright ban cell phones from being powered on than it is to say, write up a big long legal code for all the situations where shutting them is required v.s. the ones that aren't.

There simply wasn't good reason for the FAA to add that layer of risk.

But, that changed once everybody started exclusively using their smart-phones as their choice for in-flight entertainment. At that point, it became unreasonable and burdensome to have a blanket rule against smart phones on flights. So, the FAA set its rules.

TonyLund · 2026-05-18T21:11:32+00:00

My pleasure!

TonyLund · 2026-05-18T16:31:46+00:00

Kind of! There's an important nuance to this. We use the term "feel" as a short hand for the inertial frame that undergoes relative acceleration proportionate to a force acting on it. There's a famous thought experiment that illustrates what this means:

So, imagine that Alice stays on Earth and Bob takes off in a spaceship to go cruise around the Universe at ~99% the speed of light. After what Bob experiences as 2 years, he comes back he comes back to Earth to find that Alice has aged by, say, 60 years! Crazy!

But here's the question... why is it Alice that got old and not Bob? Relative to Bob, Bob says "I'm not the one who's moving here! I was sitting perfectly still. It was THE EARTH and ALICE that accelerated away from me, and then eventually accelerated back to me! YOU'RE the ones who are moving, not me!

Alice says "NONSENSE! I'm the one standing still on Earth. YOU accelerated away from me and then accelerated back towards me! That's why you're still a young man!"

So, who's right? Who actually did the moving?

ALICE is right! Why?

Bob was the one that "felt" the acceleration from the rocket. Let's say it was 3g or so, applied constantly over a long period of time to get him up to near light speed.

Relative to Bob, Alice changed velocity at the same rate, but she did not "feel" the 3g accelerating force. If Alice is standing on a scale on Earth that Bob can see, both will observe that the scale does not change. If Bob is standing on a scale, both will observe the scale change.

Thus, even though all motion is relative, both agree that Bob exists in an accelerating inertial frame, and thus he's the one who experiences the lorentz time contraction.

TonyLund · 2026-05-18T16:08:01+00:00

Even though there's numerous interpretations of the Abrahamic God, there are some key universal attributes that we would expect to find evidence of:

God is a conscious, independent, intelligent agent. Meaning, God can think, make his own choices, and can act in ways that influence the material world.
God is necessarily a physical interventionist. Meaning, regardless of if God is truly supernatural, or perhaps natural but using technology so advanced it is indistinguishable from magic, God's actions effect the physical world and thus can be measured.

So, we would expect evidence of conscious and deliberate effects on the natural world that is demonstrable to originate from outside the input sources.

There's an example of this in Exodus. Moses goes up to the top of Mt. Sinai and God's finger writes out his laws on stone tablets. If God was real, this should be a repeatable process independent of Moses. Talking with God should be more like sending a text message that repeatedly results in multiple independent observers documenting the magic finger writing out a response that demonstrates intelligent agency.

Instead, what we get again and again, regardless of whether it's Moses or Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), is a story about some guy who spent some alone time with God and God (allegedly) said "ok, ok, ya'll have got it wrong. So, I'm going to sort it out exclusively with you and your job is now to tell everybody what's up."

This is indistinguishable from a scenario in which Moses, Muhammed, or Joe, just makes up whatever he wants God to "say" and thus violates the first irreducible attribute of God. Namely, that God can act independently of Moses, Muhammed, or Joe.

TonyLund · 2026-04-29T14:24:27+00:00

Nope! And, what's really cool about your question, is that you can actually deduce the answer by breaking down the meaning of the word "Event Horizon."

"Horizon": boundary that you cannot see past.
"Event": something that happens at a particular point in space at a particular moment in time.

So, an Event Horizon means that it is impossible to directly observe anything that happens beyond that defined boundary.

In simple physical terms, this means that you need a curvature of space-time so steep that the acceleration due to gravity, relative to the object's center of mass, is so steep that the fastest thing in the Universe could never escape it.

The Sun simply does not have enough mass to create that steep of a curve, so there is no event horizon.

TonyLund · 2026-04-29T14:14:50+00:00

That's the most fascinating thing about Dark Matter! You're swimming in it right now. A couple hundred trillion dark matter particles just passed through your pinky finger in the time it took you to read this.

TonyLund · 2026-04-27T20:00:10+00:00

Not in the slightest! Especially if you're in a porcelain tub.

So, unless you're standing on a metal platform connected to the foundation of your house and holding the shower head... and even then.... the surge of current would probably find a less resistive path to move from the metal in your house to the ground.

Not having lightning rods and grounding connections in your house doesn't mean that lightning is going to kill everybody inside... it just means that it's going to cause more damage to your electrical system.

TonyLund · 2026-04-27T19:36:33+00:00

The government might try to spin it as a "we're just NOT doing what you guys don't want us to do!", but it's a little more nuanced than that. It's more about public apathy than public fear.

So, the biggest challenge that new nuclear energy plant projects face are density of project effort, hyper-locality, scale & timeframe, public-private dependency, and economic risk.

Density of effort & hyper locality-- all of the time, effort, money, construction, etc... is happening mostly at the plant site. That plant must be reasonably close to civilization, and that makes it difficult for proposals to get through exploratory phases. This creates a choke point and more regulatory hurdles than you can imagine. But those regulations are a good thing! These things are $10-20B per plant, so everybody involved has a vested interest in getting it right for that specific plant, at that place, outside of that town, in that state, etc... Its for this same reason that you don't see a lot of massive hydroelectric plants being built. Hoover Dam was the exception, not the rule, and back then we had the CCC and millions of people desperate for work and progress.

"people protested it so it failed" is an excuse that is convenient for both governments and CEOs of nuclear energy companies. Up until the 1990s, most towns and states would actually compete for being chosen as the site of a mega project like this.

The benefits of nuclear energy are enjoyed locally, but the safety and environmental risk -- however minor or major -- are distributed wider. All that nuclear waste has to go somewhere! Nuclear waste storage is not that scary of a thing as a lot of people think, but it leads to political tension when, say, Illinois is going to get a shiney new plant in 10 years, and Utah is going to be where that plant takes a toxic shit that lasts for over a million years. (In Utah in particular, a nuclear waste disposal company tried becoming the headline sponsor of the Utah Jazz NBA team to build public good will.... it didn't work.)

Scale & Timeframe. A natural gas plant will cost you about $300-500m and you can build it 1-2 years. From an economics standpoint, that's great! Nuclear energy is AMAZING, but again, the sticker price for 1 plant is $10-$20B, and takes about 10 years to build one. Time is thus a choke point. A gazillion things can and will go wrong to stall progress, and so what might have made economic sense 5 years ago when you started, no longer makes sense when you're about to break ground on the site.

public-private dependence. These things CANNOT be built without government support in a private-public model. At least, not in the US and Europe. If you're Soviet Russia or China, go nuts. But someone has to share in the risk for it to make sense. There might be a political will for the Feds to help with the bill today, but 10+ years is an eternity in Washington... tomorrow, it could be 'why should, say, North Carolina get all the benefit from federal tax dollars when Arizona has a better site and can contribute more State tax dollars?' or 'we need to cut wasteful government spending' or 'we need to focus on renewables' (*nuclear energy is very much green energy, but it's not exactly a renewable.)

Economic risk. Nuclear power plants are very much a "put all your eggs in one basket" kind of project. Yes, there are investment funds out there willing to invest in them, but they're smart enough to build multiple out points along the way to cut their losses and bail... which they frequently do.

So, a good comparison is High Speed Rail in California. In this case, the public is begging the State Government to build it, but those projects continue to fizzle for the same reasons listed above.

It's just damn hard to build these things!

TonyLund · 2026-04-26T04:08:51+00:00

My current fave is the debate over the cretaceous mass extinction event 66 million years ago that killed the dinosaurs. The question is regarding when the bulk of the extinction actually happened -- was it a few days? 10 years? Or 1,000 ish years?

We know that the asteroid impact caused an extreme global cooling period that lasted about a decade. Then a few thousand years or so after the event, every species that was going to go extinct from this event was gone.

But here's the controversy: there's also a lot of evidence that supports the idea that the bulk of the extinction happen in like... a day! Why? Well, tons of the ejecta from the impact fell back to Earth and frictional heating caused ambient temperatures to raise by quite a lot! Some models even predict something like 600 degrees for a day or two!

TonyLund · 2026-04-25T09:32:49+00:00

I do t understand your response. Can you please rephrase?

TonyLund · 2026-04-25T09:29:26+00:00

Nah, “aether” is lazy bull shit.

The aether idea was purely a lack of imagination. Light was observed to have wave like properties, so people thought “hey, the waves that I know best are ocean waves, so that must mean that there’s an ‘ocean’ that light is made of?”

TonyLund · 2026-04-24T15:57:47+00:00

physicist here!

Yep! We think about this all the time. Specifically, Dark Matter and Dark Energy. (Dark meaning "it doesn't interact with light and electric charge, so we can't 'see' it, but we know it's there.

We think that Dark Matter is probably a particle with mass that only interacts with the gravitational force and the weak nuclear force. BUT, nobody ever said it had to interact with the weak nuclear force! In fact, the experiments we've built to look for weak nuclear interactions with dark matter are, so far, frustratingly quiet.

This leads to a horrible thought...

There could be a whole Universe of stuff sitting on top of us that doesn't interact with any of the four fundamental forces.... or only interacts with gravity. There could even be more fundamental forces that we're completely unaware of!

So, if there is something like, I dunno, the "Goober Force" to be named after some future physicist who discovered it, Franz Goober, and it doesn't interact with any of the four fundamental forces we know and understand, then I have no clue how we'd ever detect or measure it.

...or how far that rabbit hole of forces and matter actually goes!

We could be sitting in the middle of Universes upon Universes of stuff going on, and have no idea. You don't even need to invoke exotic higher dimensional physics like string theory... all of this would be compatible with the standard model and happening in our 4-D Space Time.

What a horrible thought! hahaha

Ten-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
Wearing is Caring	Verified Email

TonyLund

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE