Turtles All The Way Down

"At first there was nothing, then nothing turned itself inside-out and became something." - Sun Ra

The Greek philosopher Lucretius wrote in the First Century that "Nothing can be created from nothing" and this assertion held a powerful influence over centuries of subsequent philosophy. For a long time, there was no good explanation for the creation of all the matter in the universe.  The assumption that the matter has simply always existed, a basic premise that we just had to accept, was hardly a satisfying answer.  But the theory that the energy required for a Big Bang just appeared out of nowhere seemed to violate the basic laws of thermodynamics.  

In his book A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking explains that the negative energy of gravity throughout the universe exactly cancels the positive energy represented by matter. So the total energy of the universe balances out at exactly zero.  So before the existence of the universe, there was zero energy and after the appearance of the universe there was zero energy.  Nothing changed - we have always had zero energy.

It was subsequently suggested that the universe may have begun as a quantum fluctuation of the vacuum. It used to be thought that the vacuum was truly nothing, simply inert space. But we now know that it is actually a hive of activity with particle-antiparticle pairs being repeatedly produced out of the vacuum and almost immediately annihilating themselves back into nothingness again. The creation of a particle-antiparticle pair out of the vacuum violates the law of conservation of energy, but the Heisenberg uncertainty principle allows such violations for a very short time. This phenomenon has reportedly been tested and confirmed. 

Edward Tryon, in his 1973 paper, Is the Universe a Vacuum Fluctuation?, wrote:

In any big bang model, one must deal with the problem of 'creation'. This problem has two aspects. One is that the conservation laws of physics forbid the creation of something from nothing. The other is that even if the conservation laws were inapplicable at the moment of creation, there is no apparent reason for such an event to occur. 

Contrary to widespread belief, such an event need not have violated any of the conventional laws of physics. The laws of physics merely imply that a Universe which appears from nowhere must have certain specific properties. In particular, such a Universe must have a zero net value for all conserved quantities.   

To indicate how such a creation might have come about, I refer to quantum field theory, in which every phenomenon that could happen in principle actually does happen occasionally in practice, on a statistically random basis. For example, quantum electrodynamics reveals that an electron, positron and photon occasionally emerge spontaneously from a perfect vacuum. When this happens, the three particles exist for a brief time, and then annihilate each other, leaving no trace behind.   

If it is true that our Universe has a zero net value for all conserved quantities, then it may simply be a fluctuation of the vacuum, the vacuum of some larger space in which our Universe is imbedded.  In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.

While I like the suggestion that the universe is just "one of those things which happen from time to time," I'm more interested in the implication that the universe is embedded in some larger space.  If so, then the so-called universe is not truly "universal," and what I consider the Universe is our cosmos plus whatever space it's embedded in, and whatever space that's embedded in, and so on. For all-mind theory, which holds that the entire phenomenal universe is simply a thought, a product of some mind, this multiverse theory provides a platform in which that mind can abide.

A monk once asked a great guru what the world rested upon, and the guru answered that the world and the rest of the entire universe was supported on the back of an enormous turtle.  "But what supports the turtle?" the monk asked, and the guru answered that it stood on the back of an even larger turtle.  "But what about that turtle?  What does it stand on?"

"Don't you see?" the guru replied.  "It's turtles all the way down."