Ah yes, these big questions never get laid to rest, do they? Man is indeed a metaphysical animal as Schopenhauer said. Here are some links courtesy of Alfred Centauri:
John Horton, Science Will Never Explain Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing. Horgan and Krauss have at it in the ComBox.
Victor Stenger contributes a meatier piece, Nuthin' to Explain in which he replies to David Albert's NYT review of Krauss. One of the questions Albert raises is where the laws of quantum mechanics come from. Strenger's thesis is that "the laws of physics arise naturally from the symmetries of the void." So the void has symmetries and these symmetries give rise to the laws of physics. I imagine Albert would simply reiterate his question: where do these symmetries come from? Symmetries are not nothing. And presumably they are symmetries in this respect or that, in which case one can ask what these respects are and where they come from. And what about the void itself? If it is nothing at all, then ex nihilo nihil fit. And if it is something, then it is not nothing and one can ask about its origin. Stenger opines:
Clearly, no academic consensus exists on how to define "nothing." It may be impossible. To define "nothing" you have to give it some defining property, but, then, if it has a property it is not nothing!
Maybe I can help Stenger out. Nothing is the absence of everything. Isn't that what everybody who understands English understands by 'nothing' is this context? Have I just done the impossible? Can one rationally debate the sense of 'nothing'? Is there need for an "academic consensus"? Does Stenger understand English? Stenger goes on:
The "nothing" that Krauss mainly talks about throughout the book is, in fact, precisely definable. It should perhaps be better termed as a "void," which is what you get when you apply quantum theory to space-time itself. It's about as nothing as nothing can be. This void can be described mathematically. It has an explicit wave function. This void is the quantum gravity equivalent of the quantum vacuum in quantum field theory.
Now Stenger is contradicting himself. He just got done telling us that 'nothing' cannot be defined, but now he is telling us that it is precisely definable. Which is it, my man? The problem of course is that Krauss and Stenger want to have it two ways at once. They want to use 'nothing' in the standard way to refer to the absence of everything while at the same time using it in violation of English usage to refer to something.
I have a suggestion. What these boys need to do is introduce a terminus technicus, 'Nuthin' or 'Nathin' or 'Nothing*' where these terms refer to a physical something and then give us their theory about that. But if they did this, then they wouldn't be able to play the silly-ass game they are playing, which is to waffle between 'nothing' as understood by everyone who is not a sophist and who understands the question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' and 'nothing' in their technical sense. If they stopped their waffling, however, they would not be able to extract any anti-theology out of their physics. But that is the whole purpose of this scientistic nonsense, and the reason why Richard Dawkins absurdly compares Krauss' book to The Origin of the Species.
The latest on this topic seems to be Ross Andersen, Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete? This includes an interview with Krauss in which he responds to Albert. Some quotations from Krauss (which I may comment on tomorrow):
The religious question "why is there something rather than nothing," has been around since people have been around, and now we're actually reaching a point where science is beginning to address that question. [. . .]
What's amazing to me is that we're now at a point where we can plausibly argue that a universe full of stuff came from a very simple beginning, the simplest of all beginnings: nothing. [. . .]
The fact that "nothing," namely empty space, is unstable is amazing. But I'll be the first to say that empty space as I'm describing it isn't necessarily nothing, although I will add that it was plenty good enough for Augustine and the people who wrote the Bible. For them an eternal empty void was the definition of nothing, and certainly I show that that kind of nothing ain't nothing anymore. [. . .]
What drove me to write this book was this discovery that the nature of "nothing" had changed, that we've discovered that "nothing" is almost everything and that it has properties. That to me is an amazing discovery. So how do I frame that? I frame it in terms of this question about something coming from nothing. And part of that is a reaction to these really pompous theologians who say, "out of nothing, nothing comes," because those are just empty words. [. . .]
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