How can universe create itself from nothing

This article is more than 11 years old. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why we exist, says Stephen Hawking. Reuse this content. According to Hertog, Hawking seldom mentioned the path integral formulation of the no-boundary wave function in his later years, partly because of the ambiguity around the choice of contour. He regarded the normalizable expansion history, which the path integral had merely helped uncover, as the solution to a more fundamental equation about the universe posed in the s by the physicists John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt.

Wheeler and DeWitt — after mulling over the issue during a layover at Raleigh-Durham International — argued that the wave function of the universe, whatever it is, cannot depend on time, since there is no external clock by which to measure it. And thus the amount of energy in the universe, when you add up the positive and negative contributions of matter and gravity, must stay at zero forever. The no-boundary wave function satisfies the Wheeler-DeWitt equation for minisuperspace.

In the final years of his life, to better understand the wave function more generally, Hawking and his collaborators started applying holography — a blockbuster new approach that treats space-time as a hologram. Hawking sought a holographic description of a shuttlecock-shaped universe, in which the geometry of the entire past would project off of the present. But Turok sees this shift in emphasis as changing the rules.

In backing away from the path integral formulation, he says, proponents of the no-boundary idea have made it ill-defined. For the past year, Turok and his Perimeter Institute colleagues Latham Boyle and Kieran Finn have been developing a new cosmological model that has much in common with the no-boundary proposal.

But instead of one shuttlecock, it envisions two, arranged cork to cork in a sort of hourglass figure with time flowing in both directions. While the model is not yet developed enough to make predictions, its charm lies in the way its lobes realize CPT symmetry, a seemingly fundamental mirror in nature that simultaneously reflects matter and antimatter, left and right, and forward and backward in time. Boyle, Finn and Turok take a stab at the singularity, but such an attempt is inherently speculative.

Questions abound about how the various proposals intersect with anthropic reasoning and the infamous multiverse idea. The no-boundary wave function, for instance, favors empty universes, whereas significant matter and energy are needed to power hugeness and complexity. Hawking argued that the vast spread of possible universes permitted by the wave function must all be realized in some larger multiverse, within which only complex universes like ours will have inhabitants capable of making observations.

The recent debate concerns whether these complex, habitable universes will be smooth or wildly fluctuating. An advantage of the tunneling proposal is that it favors matter- and energy-filled universes like ours without resorting to anthropic reasoning — though universes that tunnel into existence may have other problems.

Or perhaps, instead of a South Pole-like non-beginning, the universe emerged from a singularity after all, demanding a different kind of wave function altogether. There's no need for even the laws of physics to be included in the input because eternal inflation and the multiverse of the string theory landscape leads to an ensemble of all possible laws.

Stephen Hawkings is a physicist and he needs to put any idea of God outside of the domain of physics. The sentence:. Is a circular reasoning as you say, even worst: create itself like god! From 'nothing' we can not get 'something'. I think that Spinosa's view is more adequate to a physicist: The Universe was, is and will be ALL with no start nor end. The event of matter creation, we use to call it BB, is a repeatable event. This way I do not need to call for any entity exterior to the universe.

In Physics we can not invoke any transcendental entity to be 'a cause'. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.

Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Stephen Hawking says universe can create itself from nothing, but how exactly? Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 3 months ago. Active 4 years, 5 months ago. Viewed 25k times. Improve this question. In fact, thermal radiation pops out of the vacuum not just in black holes, but in all systems that possess causal horizons. For example, an accelerating probe has a Rindler horizon from which it detects a thermal bath of radiation, providing the Unruh effect.

Similarly, the horizon of an exponentially accelerating universe exhibits a de Sitter temperature. During the accelerated cosmic inflation, related fluctuations of the vacuum were generated and potentially seeded the present-day structures of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. If this happened , we owe our existence to early quantum fluctuations. The vacuum seeded life. But we can consider even more foundational questions.

Since the atomists were wrong and emptiness is nowhere to be found, what was there before the big bang?

Did our universe emerge from a vacuum fluctuation? These questions can only be answered within the framework of a predictive theory of quantum gravity that combines quantum mechanics and gravity, which we do not have as of yet. Until it is developed, we will not figure out our cosmic roots. As in the Schwinger effect, it is conceivable that a violent irritation of the vacuum potentially could create a baby universe.