The Physics of Nothing

(Creation Ex Nihilo)

(or How The Universe Was Born)

Curtis B. Menning

This article will focus on a more intuitive, picture-analogy approach, to an otherwise difficult topic, in order to make the concepts easier to follow. The Internet has similar presentations with more philosophical and mathematical approaches. If you arrive here with little time for reading, at least scroll down the end of this page to watch an animation of the Universe being born.

Throughout recent history, theologians insisted that God is a magician in that he created the Universe out of nothing, or creation ex nihilo. Many resisted there being any process He might have gone through to produce the same result - a process that might have required more than a "snap of the magician's fingers" - a process that might even have required some time to complete, like maybe a billion years or so. Somehow He wouldn't be God if He somehow "had to work at it."

Philosopher's, on the other hand, tried to find logical reasons why creation ex nihilo could not be logical, and hence impossible. Consider Immanuel Kant's (1724-1804) Latin dictum, Igni de nihilo nihilo, in nihilum gemina posse reverti (nothing comes from nothing, nothing can revert to nothing).

Even the Greek philosophers had trouble understanding "what is" and "what is not" from a philosophical point of view. In the words of Democritus, "There are only atoms and the void." He defined the void (space) as nothing and then proceeded to prove it had to exist or atoms could not exist and failed to recognize the contradiction in "proving the existence of that which does not exist". Plato correctly reasoned that for the void to exist it has to be made of something (actually he's right). Beyond that, he could not draw any further conclusions. He could never have determined back then that matter might be made from one of the Greek's prize commodities - geometry - in modern terms, the geometry of space-time. (Herein lies a clue to the origin of the Universe.)

In order to explain how the Universe might be created "from nothing," we need to understand a few minimal observations about what the Universe is "currently doing" to better understand where it "came from."

To the right is shown an image that might represent the Universe if we somehow could see it "from the outside," although the "outside" is inherently a meaningless concept if one defines the Universe to be "everything that exists". Then, an existing "outside" would have to be "inside" the Universe. The first important observation is that the Universe is rapidly expanding - as suggested by the radially pointing arrows - and at an alarming rate. Edwin Hubble, for whom the Hubble Space Telescope is named (HST), was the first to discover and observe this expansion in the 1920s.

Figure 1.

Hubble took advantage of his position of project manager for the building of the 100-inch telescope on Mt. Wilson and catalogued much of the available time with the telescope, once it became operational. Compared to what the HST instrument named after him can now do, he was only able to measure the recessional velocities of comparatively near bodies but the results were quite clear - the farther an object is from us the faster it is moving away from us. His straight-line graph of the results indicated there was a direct proportion between the recessional velocity of a star and its distance from us, now known as Hubble's Law.
Starting with Hubble's initial results, and extrapolating the results to the very edge of the Universe along with measurements that the HST instrument can now make at very large distances, we find that the white arrows in Figure 1 above indicate the very far regions of the Universe are moving away from us at about 90% of the speed of light - that's more than 100,000 miles per second. And like Fourth of July fireworks, even when you "missed" seeing the "bang" go off, you know that the entire display emanated from a common central point. Similarly, the radial velocities of the objects in the Universe indicate all things started at a common central point - and a very tiny one at that.

You can tell from such an analogy why the term "Big Bang" was coined for a simple explanation of the expansion of the Universe into being. However, the phrase Big Bang was originally coined as a tongue-in-cheek "put down" for the very idea of a dynamic, expanding universe by the opponents of same such as Fred Hoyle, who believed in a static, or steady state, view of the Universe. However, news media loved the phrase and used it to describe what scientists call The Inflationary Model of the Universe.

In spite of the simplicity of Hubble's discovery, it is amazing how many great minds missed such a simple idea as they were biased by their previous thinking that the Universe somehow had to be "just sitting there" doing nothing. Part of this bias can come from simply looking at the night time sky, without being a serious, experimenting astronomer, as the night sky can look so quiet, peaceful and quite static.

Isaac Newton's Laws of Physics so thoroughly explained the motion of any moving object, including the planets around the Sun and the Moon around the Earth, motions that had no explanation in prior history, that his laws were quickly labeled "universal laws" of physics. Yet Newton was aware that some additional explanation would be required if his laws, especially his Law of Universal Gravitation, were to be applicable to the Universe as a whole.

Newton knew that if every object attracts every other object in the Universe with a force of gravitational attraction, he could easily explain how the Moon "orbits" the Earth. But that would not explain why all the objects in the Universe do not pull themselves together at one common central point - in other words, how come the Universe doesn't "fall together" like thrown objects eventually "fall to earth?" While he understood why the Moon doesn't fall, what keeps the stars from falling? They do not orbit around the earth, so the same explanation for the Moon doesn't apply here. That is especially problematic, as Newton believed in a static universe.

Newton concluded that could "only" mean (combined with his personal bias for a static Universe) that the Universe had to be infinite in size. Newton's reasoning is illustrated to the right. He argued that star A is being pulled downward by the gravitational attraction of star B, but for every such star A there is another one above it, star C, pulling it upward. While some stars may drift out of balance, on the average the stars in the Universe stay about where they are, producing a more-or-less static Universe. In his mind he had just proven that the Universe is static and there is no end to the stars. "Hey Isaac. Do the math first! You're guessing!"

Had Newton actually used the very math he invented, the math called calculus, which is specifically designed to handle problems with "infinite dimensions," his math would have shown that even with an infinite Universe, if the stars start out "just sitting there," all the stars would eventually move together and his static Universe would collapse in on itself. In other words, his Universal Law of Gravity does not permit a static Universe to exist and it must be dynamic to survive.

Shortly after his death, other mathematicians picked up his work in calculus and began extending it to areas Newton had not considered. Along the way, his reasoning for the above problem was noted. Using Newton's own calculus and applying it to an assumed infinite Universe, they showed that all the stars would ultimately collapse into the center even if the Universe were infinite in size. Thus, in the 1700's, someone should have drawn the conclusion that it is physically impossible to have a static Universe. There are only two possible Universes - one that continually expands or one that collapses and we should be done with the problem. Not yet. The whole mathematical blunder has to be repeated 200 years later by another genius.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the world was blessed with another deep thinker on the subjects of mathematics and physics - Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955). By now it was known that Newton's Laws do not explain every phenomenon that can occur in the Universe. While Newton's Laws correctly predict that the orbits of the planets are ellipses, rather than circles as medieval scholars believed, his laws do not explain why these elliptical orbits also advance and precess like a top precesses while spinning on a table. Later it would be shown that light rays travel in a curved trajectory near large objects like the Sun, but Newton expressly assumed light always travels in straight lines.

In the preceding sense, Newton's Laws are not universally valid. Einstein set out on a path that would take nearly 15 years of his life to find a more universally valid equation that describes gravity within the Universe. The equation must handle every situation you could encounter while studying the Universe, no matter how unusual. And the equations must take on the exact same form no matter what conditions you encounter and no matter how you set up your measuring coordinates - straight line coordinates, curved coordinates, etc. He believed it would be this method of generalization of the problem that would lead to a more universal (generalized) law for gravity. An equation of any kind that takes on the exact same expression no matter how you express the coordinates, such as x, y and z (Euclidean geometry) or R. φ, Θ (spherical geometry), are described by mathematicians as having "general covariance" – the form of the equations do not depend upon the coordinate system chosen. If the form of any equation should depend upon “your point of view” – i.e. the coordinate system you chose to use – then it can’t be a “law” as not everyone would “see” the same result. Einstein was then able to set a focus to his research - that he would find equations for gravity that satisfy "general covariance."

Finally, after many false starts, and many pages of equations during development, Einstein's General Relativity was published in 1915. While you are not expected to understand this equation, you can at least tell your friends you once saw a one inch equation that the entire Universe is constrained to follow. The summary of all of Einstein's labor to find a universally valid equation for gravity in the Universe can be embodied in the following equation:

R^{m a} - ½ g^{m a} R = -c T

When Einstein reached this final equation he knew it was correct. It should be. He spent nearly fifteen years getting it. Second, he thought the equation was so complicated that solutions for it would never be found. To date, no exact solutions exist but the first of many approximate solutions were published within a year. Starting with no known solutions to the equation, Einstein was able to show that (a) there exist an infinite number of solutions (infinitely different possible universes) and (b) they all fall into two classifications - those that represent the Universe expanding and those that represent the Universe when it is contracting.

None of the solutions represent a static Universe. But he wanted the Universe to be static. Oh, Oh! Here we go again. Einstein was not an astronomer. When he went outside to look at the stars, they all seem to just hang in the sky, so the Universe must be static. He felt this was a shortcoming of his equation. He reasoned that if he just added one extra term to the equation (known in college math courses as a "fudge factor") a static solution would exist as well as all the previous solutions not yet found. "Hey Albert! Stick to the math."

For the next several years, various mathematicians and cosmologists published papers essentially explaining to Einstein why that extra term should not be there. Eventually Einstein admitted his mistake and said it was the biggest blunder in his professional career.

The physics that Einstein and Newton were working with did not have to be that complicated, as an intuitive approach to physics can easily tell you there are no static universes. You cannot have a golf ball hovering continuously above the surface of the Earth without having another force opposite to gravity pushing on it. So if you want a "collection of golf balls" (analogous to a collection of stars) to always stay apart from each other, the simple solution is to send them "onward and outward" from the Earth at about 25,000 miles per hour (known as the escape velocity from Earth) and they will (a) never come back to Earth and, unless they hit something else, they will (b) always remain separate from each other. Hence, to make a universe in which the parts remain as parts, rarely mingling with each other, it is very simple - send all the parts flying at high speeds away from each other. They may come back together in several billion years, if their initial velocity is too small, but that is more than enough time to generate life and history on the resulting planets. But if their velocities are high enough, the Universe will forever expand until the stars are so far apart there will be no stars in anyone's nighttime sky (estimated as about 100 - 200 billion years for our Universe).

Equations of physics are always symmetric with regard to the variable T, for time. Allowing such an equation to run forward tells you where the object will be at any future time T. Allowing the time T to take on increasingly negative values is equivalent to running the equation backwards through time T and tells you where the object came from. In modern armies, these calculations are done with radar and computers. In desert warfare, fire a cannon shell at me that misses and my radar will instantly locate the position of your cannon and a blast from the turret of a tank will end the exchange once and for all.

In running Einstein's equations for the Universe backward we find that the Universe contracts to an ever-smaller size until it is about the size of my thumbnail. Running the equations forward means the Universe initially started expanding (inflating is the correct terminology) from just such a small size.
There is some uncertainty as to how small the embryonic Universe really was as Einstein's equations always contain terms such as 1/R, where R is the radial size we are dealing with and, as R tends toward zero, the terms approach infinity and the calculations become less reliable.

If, as some assert, the Universe actually started from a point-like singularity, say, smaller than an atom, then all of the classical equations of physics, both Einstein's and Newton's equations, have no meaning inside a point-like size and hence there are no classical laws of physics the Universe “must satisfy (determinism)” while it is a singularity - none of these equations exist or are valid when R equals zero.

Hence, with no deterministic laws governing the Universe at a point, the very start of the Universe is an act of creation, in the traditional sense, as it is an event that is not governed by determinism and hence does not "have to" happen, but did anyway. So much is understood about the Inflation of the Universe, once it starts, and almost nothing about why it started inflating in the first place, that even Alan H. Guth, who drew much attention, as well as a new job with promotion, by adding an "exponential" term to the inflation rate of the Universe, thereby solving several unexplained mysteries, was forced to draw the same conclusion. (The Inflationary Universe, Alan H. Guth, Addison-Wesley, 1997)

For a Brief History of the Principle of Determinism, click here ---------------->

We can calculate that 10 ^{- 40} seconds (that is a decimal point followed by 39 zeroes and then a "1") after the Universe starts inflating it has already reached a temperature of about 10⁺²⁵ degrees (that is a "1" followed by 25 zeroes and then a decimal point) Kelvin. That answers a question you may have already asked yourself. "How can our entire solar system and all the stars in the Universe fit into such a small space?" The answer is clearly "they weren't there yet." At a temperature of 10⁺²⁵ degrees Kelvin, atomic structure, atoms themselves, and even the protons, neutrons and electrons that make up those atoms cannot exist. At that stage the Universe is simply "pure energy" and contains none of the matter that will follow later as it inflates.

As the Universe rapidly expands, this same energy occupies an ever-increasing volume and a fixed amount of energy in a rapidly increasing volume means the energy density (energy per unit volume) decreases and that is precisely what we mean by temperature - the average energy density. So the temperature drops as the Universe expands and matter begins forming.

When a cosmologist speaks of "energy" it is usually of two types: (a) the energy E of an X-ray, gamma ray or light ray that is moving as a wave at the speed of light or (b) energy that is "just sitting there" as a particle of matter, or mass M, and their equivalence is given by Einstein's famous equation E=MC^2, where C is the velocity of light. We often oversimplify Einstein's Relativity by describing energy and matter as two forms of the same quantity with matter being described as "frozen energy." An even more simplistic picture is that energy either must (a) travel at the speed of light as a wave or (b) travel in circular and spherical waves in a rather fixed location - in the latter case it is called a particle of matter. When an atomic bomb explodes, the energies stored in the particles of matter are now free to travel as waves at the speed of light - often described as the "sudden release of this energy."

Eventually the Universe drops to a low enough temperature that it can no longer produce matter from the remaining energy but by then has produced 10 ⁸⁰ atoms (actually protons which form atoms later) At the present time the temperature of the Universe is about 3 degrees above absolute zero.

Initially it may seem that 10 ⁸⁰ protons is not enough to form all the stars in the Universe until you realize that 10 ⁸⁰ is a "1" followed by 80 zeroes (don't bother supplying commas). Since the main purpose of this article is the "physics of nothing," we might as well introduce a few minor "nothings" at the start. If those 10 ⁸⁰ atoms, essentially all the matter forming the 10²² stars in the Universe, were spread evenly throughout all of the current volume of the Universe, the resulting particle density would be about 5 atoms per cubic meter of space. That is a better vacuum than is possible with any equipment available in the finest research labs that employ vacuums. So from that perspective, the Universe is a "kind of nothing" in that there "isn't much there" compared to the emptiness of space. And if you were trained to think of space as nothing (that is not a correct concept) then the Universe itself is "mostly nothing" anyway.

The First Nothing

As the Universe begins expanding (Figure 2), the intense positive energy that accompanies the expansion is represented in red. In regions where the temperature drops, matter is formed (represented in white). If we consider a particle of matter, with mass m, located at the very edge of the Universe, its presence is represented by a positive energy E = mc^2. However, the mass m has all the rest of the Universe pulling back on it, like a spring suggested in blue. (Matter and energy are equivalent and they both produce a gravitational force or pull.) This is gravitational energy that the particle had to move "against" (sort of uphill) in order to be there. Gravitational energy that the particle had to oppose in order to arrive is a negative quantity and is a standard equation in any high school physics book. E g = - G m M u R u

Where G is Newton's Universal Gravitational Constant, m the mass of the particle, M _u is the total mass of the Universe and R_u is the radius of the Universe. Notice the important minus sign out in front of the equation. So whether we consider m to be a single particle or let m = M _u, the total mass of the Universe, the results come out the same. The energy involved to produce the single particle where it is, or the energy involved for the entire Universe, is of two types - the positive energy that represents the existence of mass/energy and the gravitational energy that had to be overcome to be where it is located.

And even with the exact radius of the Universe and the exact mass of the Universe still being slightly uncertain, when you insert the best-known values the results indicate that:

Energy (positive) plus Energy (negative) equals zero.

Or the Universe was created from energy during its expansion and the total energy in the Universe at the start of the expansion and currently has the net value zero. So in shorter terms, the Universe was created from energy and (pardon the tripping of phrases) zero energy is the most nothing you could have.

If you are interested in seeing these calculations being done click here -------->

The original objection that physicists had to creation ex nihilo was based on the assumption that creating matter out of nothing would violate the sacred Law of Conservation of Energy (known to be valid down to 22 decimal places), since creating matter out of nothing would seem to create energy out of nothing. However, the Universe has a simple scheme for satisfying all requirements - separate energy into two parts, positive and negative, create matter out of the positive energy while the total energy remains zero at all times.

There is a simple analogy that makes this process seem ordinary. Imagine a start-up family that has never had the luxury of new carpeting in their house. Today, new carpeting was installed in the family room. When Dad comes home from work, he notices Junior lounging in the family room, admiring the new carpeting and Dad cannot resist playing an age-old trick on Junior. When Dad enters the room, the net electrical charge in the room is zero. Dad crosses the room while dragging his leather shoes across the new carpeting, separating positive and negative charges until his body is carrying a large excess charge. Like the Universe, Dad makes a "Little Bang," rather than a Big Bang, by zapping Junior's nose with a bright, electrical spark. The Little Bang was achieved from a total charge of zero and the total charge in the room is again zero. So the Little Bang, ultimately, was created from nothing.

For these reasons, much early research in Astronomy focused on how fast the Universe was expanding and whether its expansion velocity was sufficient that the Universe would continue to expand for a long time. For if the matter in the Universe could collapse back into itself, the total energy being zero, with no separation of the positive and negative parts the Universe would then disappear.

The Second Nothing

What should be apparent in the preceding discussion is that we cannot have all the stars in the Universe already existing when the Universe first begins its inflation, when it starts from an object smaller than my thumbnail. The solution is simple - the stars are not there yet. The Universe creates the matter that will eventually coalesce into stars "on the fly" as it expands. That means there would have to be some sort of "structure" in the embryonic Universe that controls what will be created and when.

The need for some sort of existing structure in a Universe, that starts off as a virtual "nothing," is evident in the observation that stars and galaxies do not form like "raisins in an expanding bun," in that they are not evenly distributed throughout the resulting space. Galaxies are now known to form in layers, or sheets, through regions of the Universe with entire extending cones in space having almost no galaxies forming there at all. Computer plots for galaxy locations allows the Universe to be seen "from the outside" and what is immediately apparent in these plots is there is "something stringy" about the space itself as the geometry of the Universe expands and unwinds.

Quantum Mechanics gives us the first clue to where the structure might lie as its principles imply that the classical approach to geometry, where one typically considers a line in geometry to be a continuous collection of "points" as if every line contains an infinite (countless) number of points between any two selected points, is a concept that is inconsistent with experiments at the small, atomic level. A line of geometry, according to Quantum Mechanics, is "granular" or is a collection of "clumps" whose exact size is always uncertain. All this follows from an important principle, or law of Quantum Theory, known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

A classical view of a "line of geometry" (no breaks) _____________________________ A Quantum Mechanical view of a line of geometry 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 (What's in the "clumps" cannot be measured) Figure 3

The Uncertainty Principle says that, when things are extremely small, there is a limit to how accurately you can experimentally determine things (find the truth), and this limit is not imposed by the crudeness of your research equipment or your laboratory methods, but is inherent in the way the Universe functions. Certain variables are inherently "linked" via uncertainty - You cannot simultaneously know the position (X) and the velocity (V) of an atomic particle with 100% certainty and you cannot simultaneously determine the energy (E) of a particle and the time (T) at which this energy occurred. The uncertainty in the "linked" quantities satisfy an inverse relationship - when one gets smaller, the other gets larger by a similar value. The way it is stated in Heisenberg's Principle is "the product of the two uncertainties is always greater than a constant known as Planck's constant."

Much of modern research about the Universe is focused on obtaining information about the structure of the space-geometry of the Universe by finding out precisely what lies in between the geometry-grains for a line of geometry in Figure 3. But how can that information be obtained when the Uncertainty Principle says you cannot know things precisely at that level? Any "structure" you impose upon "space" could never be confirmed experimentally? It is estimated that nearly 1,000 mathematicians and physicists are working specifically on such problems, not because their "grains of geometry" will be demonstrated experimentally, but because their particular theory also gives mathematical solutions to problems on the large, or macro, scale that are consistent with experiments - including solving problems that have never had a solution by any other method.

The titles of these new theories have "vibrational" and "stringy" sounding names, like String Theory, Spinors, Membrane Theory and The Theory of Gravitational Knots and Loops. Not only solving prior, unsolvable problems, these theories also give "simple" solutions to problems that were "messy" when using methods of the last century. Certain problem solutions in Quantum Mechanics are "plagued with infinities" in that the solution generates an infinite number of "correct" solutions, most of which have to be thrown out, much like picking the "good raisins" from a bad box. That doesn't say much for your mathematical methods if you have to throw out an infinite number of bad answers in order to have a solution consistent with experiments. These new theories often solve the same problem with the infinities absent, which means they only produce the "good raisins" in the solution. And finally, some of these theories answer questions "you can't ask."

Every science has questions "you can't ask." These are questions that you know in advance have no logical or scientific answer and any answer you attempt merely comes out equivalent to "that's the way it is." Consider a biologist who is fascinated with ducks. There are all kinds of questions you can ask, and then answer, about ducks. How can they float on water without paddling? How do they navigate over long distances in the Fall and Spring? But the one question you cannot ask is "Why do we have ducks?" You might be able to prove that a very large bird with webbed feet got smaller over time and became a duck. But that merely says “it happened” by chance but did not have to come out that way. You could be naive and say "God likes ducks" but you can't prove that either. So it is a question you really cannot ask.

In cosmology we have similar questions such as "Why are there four, and only four, different kind of forces in the Universe?" Every force one might encounter is either a gravitational force, an electromagnetic force or one of two nuclear forces. Why four? Why not three? Why not five?

Like the study of ducks, physics in the past was constrained to start with the knowledge that there are four forces and, from there, learn as much about those four forces as you can without asking the question "Why four?"

Then the excitement begins when the new theories "drop out" four forces as a consequence of the theories themselves. No prior theories say there are four, only "here are the properties of those four." When the theories themselves say "you must have four," there is even a temptation to be arrogant and say the God made the Universe with four forces as he was stuck with four (assuming He wanted the Universe to turn out this way).

With much of the research on the Universe being mathematical, as opposed to experimental, it is probably not surprising that "aesthetics" becomes part of what used to be called The Scientific Method. If my theory explains everything that your theory does, in many cases does it more simply or more elegantly, and explains a few things that your theory does not, then my theory gets top attention even though it has not been completely verified by experiment. In other words, my theory gets all the attention, as it is more (aesthetically) "pleasing" than yours.

So with the current research emphasis on the structure of the space-geometry of the Universe itself, where the final answers as to why the Universe is the way it is, appear to lie in the knowledge of the structure of space itself, the Inflating Universe is starting to look more and more like a ball of "string" that is "unwinding." The "threads" are its very geometry, which starts out highly curved and flattens out as the Universe expands and the threads become straight.

In fact, this approach even suggests that Hubble's original observation was too intuitive and not totally correct - the far galaxies are not really moving at all, rather they are sitting still relative to the underlying geometry and it is the geometry of space that is actually expanding that fast. Paint several small dots on an uninflated balloon and tell them to "stay put" and then inflate the balloon. The dots stay just where you told them to but they are "moving" farther apart because the underlying geometry of the balloon is expanding - they remain "fixed" relative to the geometry of the balloon while the geometry, in turn, is expanding.

And by now you should have perceived the nothing in this section. Your grade school physical science teacher, Miss Jones, taught you to memorize that "space is nothing and matter is that which occupies space and...." and probably never noticed she was repeating the Greek contradiction of defining "that which is" in terms of "that which is not." So with the new emphasis on unlocking the structure of space-time itself as the primary factor that produces and controls the production of matter as the Universe unfolds, we have Miss Jones' nothing producing everything that we call real.

People of a certain religious persuasion are aware of a theological statement that seems to be describing the gods about to start the creation of the Universe and reads "We will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials ...." Most readers of same immediately assume that the word "space" means "room." That interpretation makes little sense, for if you are about to start a universe that will reach 10 ²⁵ degrees Kelvin and expand in size reaching billions of light years, you wouldn't want to set such a thing off if there are any other real things in the vicinity as those items would be vaporized at those temperatures. There had better be nothing else in existence at the time. Otherwise that would be comparable to looking for a vacant lot in downtown Chicago in which to set off a hydrogen bomb.

It could be a mere accident, but it is interesting that such an old statement, specifically mentioning "space" as the necessary first item in order to produce "materials" or matter, is consistent with the modern approach to the Universe where you start with space, or geometry, from which everything else follows.

More Nothings

Once you notice how the Universe takes advantage of the Laws of Physics to make the "nothings" into "somethings," you begin to notice the same technique elsewhere. In addition to the Law of Conservation of Energy, which does not allow energy to be created where there was none, The Law of Conservation of Momentum and The Law of Charge Conservation also disallow creation of their quantities in isolated systems. The Universe is certainly an isolated system for, if the Universe is all that there is, there is no other system for it to contact.

To counter these laws, rather, to be consistent with these laws, the Universe generates particles in pairs. Since most atomic particles such as electrons, protons and neutrons have spin, and hence angular momentum, and the first two also have charge, particles are created as left and right handed pairs so that one particle has positive spin and the other negative spin, or one with positive charge and the other with negative charge, so that these quantities remain as "nothing before" and "nothing after" except we have two particles having very "real" properties individually.

A high-energy gamma ray can be coaxed into converting itself into particles of matter in the laboratory, just as the Universe did during its expansion. Photographing the process in a bubble chamber, a magnetic field is placed perpendicular to the chamber so that positive and negative charged particles are forced to circle in opposite directions, revealing the symmetry to the action. We could generalize this by saying the Universe prefers symmetries as the lefts, rights, ups and downs in a symmetrical display add up to nothing.

Final Humorous Note From History

There is a well-known, humorous story in the world of physics about this creation ex nihilo concept. That the universe might have created matter from the expansion of its space-time geometry during The Big Bang was an idea that was emerging among nuclear scientists shortly after the creation of the atomic bomb (1945), where the bomb's energy comes from converting matter back to its original energy state. Physicist George Gamow was walking with Albert Einstein through the streets of Princeton, New Jersey and first proposed this idea to Einstein. Einstein was struck with the mere simplicity of it all and the fact that the concepts of a space-time geometry and the equivalence of mass and energy via the equation E=mc2, were all his ideas in the first place. He should have been the first person to think of it. Awestruck by its simplicity, Einstein stopped in the middle of a street to ponder that and several cars had to stop to avoid hitting him. So, while Einstein was first contemplating something being created from nothing, Einstein almost went from something to nothing if the cars hadn't stopped.

The following animation (no sound) is excerpted from the Naked Science Series, The Birth and Death of the Universe, which airs on The National Geographic Channel. To find out when it will air next go to:

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/ET/popup/200609110200.html

or go to The National Geographic home page at:

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/

and click on “TV Schedule.”

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