
Why there is something rather than nothing – The finite, infinite and eternal [pdf] - 0xFFC
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1205.2720.pdf
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Steuard
First: it's nice to give arXiv links to the abstract/metadata page rather than
straight to the PDF:
[http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.2720](http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.2720)

Second, this paper is from 2012.

And third, who is this guy? A quick Google search suggests that he's a college
dropout who somehow made a big media splash in 2003 after announcing that he
had a radical new theory of time, but has had zero impact on the actual
physics community. Why is this paper worth our time?

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pervycreeper
>Why is this paper worth our time?

It's not, it's obvious crankery.

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delhanty
The paper must have been endorsed by an arXiv endorser:

[http://arxiv.org/help/endorsement](http://arxiv.org/help/endorsement)

Who the endorser is doesn't seem to be public though.

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samd
To summarize his arguments:

The universe is eternal, which means it has always and will always exist. If
there is something that always exists, then it is impossible for there to be
nothing. It is impossible for there to be nothing.

Not a very satisfactory answer. The interesting question just becomes: Why is
the universe eternal? or Why does there exist an eternal universe at all?

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a3n
> The universe is eternal

Is this proven?

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samd
No, he just asserts it. And it's probably impossible to prove.

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exodust
Numbers can go forever but the universe can't?

I think the universe would be quite annoyed at the idea of being out-ranked by
a bunch of numbers.

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0xFFC
>I think the universe would be quite annoyed at the idea of being out-ranked
by a bunch of numbers.

very amused by this analogy

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nyc_cyn
Replace "universe" with "God" and this starts to feel like a philosophical
argument for theism.

~~~
cleong
It is a rehash of Thomas Aquina's argument and every other cosmological
argument.

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hyperion2010
This debate has being going on for a very long time (our first record of it is
with the Greeks). I see no reason why why [0,inf) universes cannot have being
(an interesting question is whether [0,fin] universes exist, if they do they
probably don't have conservation of energy). The mathematics that defines a
universe is certainly eternal, but that doesn't mean that only systems that
work for time (-inf,inf) need have being. The logic in the article would also
seem to imply that the universe cannot have initial conditions in the way we
usually think about them, it can only have constants which hold everywhen
which, while certainly in line with scientific dogma, we have not sufficiently
show (consider searches for variation in the fine structure constant).

I think the author conflates the eternal nature of the mathematics that
defines a universe with the temporal nature of that universe, as if time was
not itself something that was defined by the mathematics. Our own universe
happens to be one of the mathematical entities that is reasonably stable and
doesn't wink back out of existence a microsecond after coming into existence
or remain a sea of hot quark-gluon plasma for all eternity. Hell, there are
probably universes out there without time.

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johndoe4589
Reminds me of this article published in in Nature in 2005: "The Mental
Universe", from Richard Conn Henry.. similar idea (The PDF is first result in
Google)

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/full/436029a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/full/436029a.html)

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cleong
Terrible paper, it's doesn't use any process of proof (proof by contradiction
etc.) It also leads to a logical inconsistencies e.g if the Universe is
eternal it must take an infinite amount of time for any being to exist (since
the time between the "beginning" and "now" is infinite).

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exodust
What "beginning"?

Your assumption is that beings exist now, but not ages ago. Perhaps they've
always existed in this cyclic universe he talks about.

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cleong
No this is a common argument against anything involving infinite universe/
universe being infinite. If the universe has always been here how many events
does it take for us to exist? Infinte. Saying beings always exist therefore
beings exists is not a proof.

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cpr
Trying to deny the possibility that the universe could not exist is a fool's
errand.

Clearly, existence is contingent. There is no logical requirement that matter
exist, and there's a clear logical possibility that nothing physical would
have ever come into being.

(It's hard to wrap one's mind around this because we do exist.)

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hsitz
I think the better response is that our minds aren't capable of answering the
question of whether the universe is eternal or had a beginning, is necessary
or contingent. We lack the conceptual apparatus for understanding and/or
answering the question. This position goes back at least to Kant's antinomies
(specifically the first and fourth):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kant's_antinomies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kant's_antinomies)

~~~
a3n
> It's hard to wrap one's mind around this because we do exist.

I confess that I get slightly dizzy when I contemplate the existence of
absolutely nothing. I have all kinds of inexpressible contradictions over the
observation of nothing, but skipping all that to the acceptance of "nothing"
... What doe that _mean_?

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qbit
I am one of those people who finds this question fascinating. I am neither a
philosopher nor a physicist, but it seems to me that one of two cases must be
true: Either the universe has existed for an infinite time in the past or the
universe came into existence from nothing. Either of those cases seems
extraordinary to me. But am I missing a third option? I realize that some
(like Lawrence Krauss) have shown that you can get a universe from nothing
plus the laws of physics, however, that seems like a rather unsatisfactory
answer. For one thing, it leaves me with the question of where the laws of
physics came from? And do the laws of physics exist independently the universe
or are they merely convenient models that humans use to describe the universe?

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calvins
A third option: existence is not a concept that can be used with the spatio-
temporal totality that is the universe. Just as there are syntactically
correct but meaningless sentences such as "colourless green ideas sleep
furiously", there are ideas such as "the universe came into existence" and
"the universe always existed" that are "syntactically correct" (according to
some unspecified syntax that governs concept formation) but don't pick out
meaningful concepts.

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gp7
If anyone is interested in some thoughts on this question that have been in
vogue in recent years in academic philosophy circles you might want to look
into speculative realism (and also look into the immediate disavowel of the
term the moment those involved felt pigeon-holed).

