by Mr P wrote:Teuton wrote:robinhood wrote:
…So, the term "nothing" is really referring to the extreme chaos in the early universe which (might as well be) considered nothing meaningful seeing as no reliable laws can yet be applied to it. Is this correct?
A nothing is nothing, not even a chaos; for if there is a chaos, there exists something chaotic.
This is the semantic problem I was describing earlier, using "nothing" as an indefinite pronoun means you're using the word to both describe a concept and the absence of a concept. The contradiction is the fallacy of four terms as detailed in the link I provided above.
For all practical considerations a chaotic system is nothingness, we can never extract any information from such a system while it remains in this state which renders it both inherently meaningless and unstable.
This is an inherent problem with natural language. All of it is based on approximations that work pretty well most of the time, especially in a classical approximation that works pretty well when quantum numbers are large. Worse, most of these words were invented way before we had the sophistication to talk about this. To solve this problem, people have created new languages, such as mathematics. I'm pretty sure, however, that most of the audience here doesn't want to learn that language to the extent required to express concepts unambiguously, so people use natural language.
That having been said, it seems to me extremely discourteous to expect scientists to translate concepts into your language and then get pissed off at them for limitations of your language that they cannot control.
Back to the original question, as far as I can tell, what he's suggesting is that certain physical laws apply even in the absence of a universe. Even "before" the universe runs into problems, because the only thing we know from time is within this universe. As others have pointed out, a zero cosmological constant is unstable under the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. More precisely, the uncertainty principle suggests that it could not be both zero and unchanging, and if it changes, it isn't going to be zero any more. Fortunately, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle isn't really a statement about how things change in time in a classical sense, but a basic statement about uncertainty. This is hard to describe to an audience that does not know the math.
With the possibility that these basic laws exist even without a universe (possibly they are mathematical necessities, and there is some suggestive evidence that nothing would work without some), there are interesting possibilities. One is that the state, under these laws, of no universe is unstable, because there would either have to be a universe or a universe coming into being. Another is that a fluctuation in the cosmological constant (which would be required under the same laws) could involve a massive expansion of a small initial universe, with matter condensing out of the expanded spacetime to balance the negative energy of the fluctuation. Hence, a universe whose energy adds up to close enough to zero within the uncertainty principle but whose energy is distributed such that the positive-energy parts we care about are pretty big and enough to get, say, galaxies and solar systems and planets and life. Of course, it will be, literally, all for nothing, but in the mean time, we can have some fun.
It may seem that this universe is pretty damn big for that, but still, any size universe would have a finite amplitude. There may be other universes that don't, but basically, sucks to be them.
All of this requires the supposition that some laws apply even without a universe. This is, I think, what Hawking is trying to say. The idea has a certain elegance that is not provided by ideas about universes forming by colliding branes and such, which, not incidentally, require more suppositions about laws in the absence of a universe.
