“Why is there something rather than nothing?” Leibniz goes down in history as the first to ask a question like this, but every great physics genius since his day has pondered it. (Leibniz Selections, Wiener, 1951, p.527) Today, the question is asked more abstractly, “Why should existence of any kind be the normal state?” Maybe because nonexistence is an invalid state.Here’s an answer by physicist Frank Wilczyk, “The reason that there is something rather than nothing is that nothing is unstable.” Does that help clear things up? How would we test that? Round up some nothing and see how long it takes to decay? Perhaps Frank was speaking tongue-in-cheek.
Antitheist Lawrence Krause wrote a book called A Universe From Nothing in which he recycles the best attempts of past physicists to explain existence in purely scientific terms. After reading it, philosopher and quantum theory specialist David Albert challenged the book’s theme by asking, “Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from?”
The late great Stephen Hawking said, “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing... It is not necessary to invoke God.” (Hawking and Mlodinow, The Grand Design, 2010) Hawking couldn’t really have meant the universe created itself from nothing or he wouldn’t have mentioned the law of gravity, which everyone learns early in life is a very real something!
In March of 2013, physicists and philosophers convened. “It was all much ado about nothing… Empty space with nothing in it was quickly agreed not to be nothing. In our universe, even a dark, empty void of space, absent of all particles, is still something.” (What is Nothing? By Clara Moskowitz, Live Science, 22 Mar 2013)
Many physicists cling to the idea that at the level of the universe, the positive energy of mass and the negative energy of gravity exactly balance each other, allowing the entire universe to spontaneously self-create and expand forever, all while maintaining a constant net zero energy.Physicists are well known for their general support of time reversal symmetry in which physical laws hold whether an event is played forward or backward in time. So if, as Krause and others assert, the entire universe came from nothing, it should be theoretically possible for the universe to return to nothing. Yet physicists don't seem worried.