Did the universe form 'spontaneously' from nothing? is quantum fluctuation our Allah?

NASA Earth Observatory, NOAA
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A number of atheists have claimed that the universe really came from ‘nothing’. However, Luke Barnes, a non-creationist astrophysicist who is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy, University of Sydney, Australia, is scathing about Krauss and those who argue like him:

First and foremost, I’m getting really rather sick of cosmologists talking about universes being created out of nothing. Krauss repeatedly talked about universes coming out of nothing, particles coming out of nothing, different types of nothing, nothing being unstable. This is nonsense. The word nothing is often used loosely—I have nothing in my hand, there’s nothing in the fridge etc. But the proper definition of nothing is “not anything”. Nothing is not a type of something, not a kind of thing. It is the absence of anything.

Some of the best examples of the fallacy of equivocation involve treating the word nothing as if it were a type of something:

• Margarine is better than nothing.
• Nothing is better than butter.
• Thus, margarine is better than butter.

We can uncover the fallacy by simply rephrasing the premises, avoiding the word nothing:

• It is better to have margarine than to not have anything.
• There does not exist anything that is better than butter.

The conclusion (margarine is better than butter) does not follow from these premises. [ Barnes, L., Out of nothing, letterstonature.wordpress.com, 1 April 2011. ]

Some physicists assert that quantum mechanics violates this cause/effect principle and can produce something from nothing. Paul Davies himself admitted on the previous page that his scenario ‘should not be taken too seriously.’ [Davies, P., God and the New Physics, p. 214, Simon & Schuster, 1983. ] Also, theories that the universe is a quantum fluctuation must presuppose that there was something to fluctuate—their ‘quantum vacuum’ is a lot of matter-antimatter potential—not ‘nothing’. So this is another equivocation.

The quantum vacuum is a type of something. It has properties. It has energy, it fluctuates, it can cause the expansion of the universe to accelerate, it obeys the (highly non-trivial) equations of quantum field theory. We can describe it. We can calculate, predict and falsify its properties. The quantum vacuum is not nothing. This suggests a very simple test for those who wish to talk about nothing: if what you are talking about has properties, then it is not nothing.

philosopher David Albert, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, NY, who also has a doctorate in theoretical physics, says:

Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about not having a clue about that. He acknowledges (albeit in a parenthesis, and just a few pages before the end of the book) that everything he has been talking about simply takes the basic principles of quantum mechanics for granted. …

Krauss seems to be thinking that these vacuum states amount to the relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical version of there not being any physical stuff at all. And he has an argument—or thinks he does—that the laws of relativistic quantum field theories entail that vacuum states are unstable. And that, in a nutshell, is the account he proposes of why there should be something rather than nothing.

But that’s just not right. Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states—no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems—are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields—what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields!

The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings—if you look at them aright—amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.

" [Albert, D., On the Origin of Everything: review of A Universe From Nothing, by Lawrence M. Krauss, New York Times, 23 March 2012; nytimes.com. ]

“Spontaneous creation of the universe from nothing” [D. He, D. Gao, and Q-yu Cai, Spontaneous creation of the universe from nothing, Physical Review D, 89, 083510 (2014); arxiv.org/pdf/1404.1207v1.pdf.] is the title of a 2014 paper authored by He, Gao and Cai, published in the American Physical Society journal Physical Review D, one of America’s most prestigious journals dealing with physical theory. It purports to outline a so-called mathematical proof that the universe did indeed burst into something from nothing.

The authors write in their article (bold emphases added):
“…we present such a proof based on the analytic solutions of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation…once a small true vacuum bubble is created by quantum fluctuations of the metastable false vacuum, it can expand exponentially no matter whether the bubble is closed, flat or open.”

The proof they offer is a mathematical one. It is not the type of proof you might be expecting where a physical theory has been tested by development of a hypothesis which then is tested by an experiment through predictions the model makes. Not at all. In this case it relies totally on the unproven assumption that the mathematical model used somehow describes the universe an extremely short while after the big bang expansion was supposed to have begun. It also relies on the assumption that the real universe can be described by the mathematics and physical laws they assume in a putative past epoch where it is impossible to test anything.

The new approach extends the work of John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt who developed a mathematical formalism, combining general relativity and quantum mechanics, in an effort to develop a quantum gravity theory for the early universe. This resulted in the famous Wheeler-DeWitt equation (WDWE), Wheeler-DeWitt-equation.jpg

Here the parameter a is the scale factor for the universe in a minisuperspace model; k is the spatial curvature, chosen as 1, 0, or-1 for positive (closed and finite), flat (Euclidean and infinite) or negative (open and infinite) bubbles respectively; and ψ is the wave function for the bubble universe. There is an infinite number of potential solutions, and additional information is needed to solve it for a particular system.
This model assumes the total energy content of the universe is zero, i.e. sum up all the matter and all forms of energy in the universe and the total will be zero. So it has been famously said that the big bang is the ‘ultimate free lunch’.

Paul Davies wrote:

“So science has done away with the need for a button-pushing creator who lives for eternity before making a Universe at a certain moment in time. [ Davies, P., Is the Universe a free lunch?, 3 March 1996; independent.co.uk. ]

This new paper carries on the work of people like Hartle and Hawking⁸ who in 1983 mathematically showed that it is possible for time to be bounded in the past without there being a specific first moment. This comes from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. It indicates that there is a sort of fuzziness to the beginning of time and space. In this way time takes on an imaginary quality and becomes a spatial coordinate. And they claim that the universe had many possible histories and we sample some of them, but none is unique.

What He et al. have done is mathematically show that once a small true vacuum bubble is created, it has a chance to expand exponentially, creating the observed universe. Note the use of the word ‘chance’. So you must understand they are talking about an ensemble of probable universes that might result from their model. Quantum theory deals only with probabilities of realising a possible outcome and in this sense the probability of a universe like ours might be very small indeed.



This new claim of spontaneous creation from nothing described by the WDWE is only valid for a > 0. The fact that the scale factor is positive and non-zero means this approach is only valid in a metastable quantum vacuum, i.e. such a vacuum must already exist. And this formulation presupposes the existence of the laws of physics, which are used in the derivation of the equation in the first instance.

So, as elegant as it might seem, the He et al. approach has not done away with a first cause. It has only assumed, quite explicitly actually, a certain form of the Hamiltonian for a bubble universe Hamiltonian.jpg

A Hamiltonian is the operator that corresponds to the total (kinetic and potential) energy in the system. In their universe the Hamiltonian is assumed to equal zero, i.e. that there is no energy there in the beginning, nothing! Their approach makes the presumption to use the current laws of physics. Also the analysis only applies in an ‘existing’ state as the scale factor is assumed to be time dependent and always non-zero.
The appeal to existing physics does not end there. To get an understanding of how the bubble universe explodes into the real universe a guidance relation is added. This comes from Bohmian quantum theory, by analogy with nonrelativistic particle physics and quantum field theory in flat space-time, where quantum trajectories are obtained. This ultimately tells you how the quantum potential changes as the bubble exponentially expands.

But for a universe like ours to come into existence by itself, without a Creator, it must create its own laws of physics as well as generate space and time and matter and energy from nothing,

not from a pre-existing quantum vacuum, metastable or not. Even with their approach, the appearance of a universe would still require a pre-existing, intelligent agency/power.

No doubt their solution to this is to say that an infinite number of universes could probabilistically be created from the vacuum and it is only in this one that these laws of physics apply, etc. But that does not solve it because then you could not claim that all the laws used to explain this universe also explain the others of the multiverse coming into existence. How could you justify using our laws of physics to describe another universe where you have no knowledge of its physics? And you could not use our current laws to generate all those other universes which have different laws.

Paul Davies adds (bold emphases added):

“Yet the laws [of physics] that permit a Universe to create itself are even more impressive than a cosmic magician. If there is a meaning or purpose beneath physical existence, then it is to those laws rather than to the big bang that we should direct our attention.” [ Davies, P., Is the Universe a free lunch?, 3 March 1996; independent.co.uk. ]

‘Worship the creation’ is what comes across; the new religion of the scientific elite.

source: based on internet.