Stephen Hawking and why is there something rather than nothing — Read More Philosophy!

From the Wall Street Journal book review of the new Stephen Hawking / Leonard Mlodinow book The Grand Design, in which he concludes that we don’t need the concept of God to answer the question, Why is there something rather than nothing?

“Mr. Hawking’s own major contributions have involved the spontaneous creation of the universe ‘from nothing.’ The basic idea comes straight from conventional quantum mechanics: A particle does not have some perfectly well-defined position but rather lives in a superposition of many possible positions. As for particles, the logic goes, so for the entire universe. It exists in a superposition of many possible states, and among those states is utter nothingness. The laws of quantum cosmology purport to show how nothingness can evolve into the universe we see today.”

I haven’t read the book, just the review, but I’ll take a crack at the issue anyway.

My understanding is that conventional quantum mechanics attempts to explain the behavior of existing matter at the atomic level (e.g., photons and electrons, etc.) that act both as particles and as waves. The “superposition” thing gets to this interaction – “to completely describe a particle one must include a description of every possible state and the probability of the particle being in that state,” (Wikipedia) which its wave characteristics define; the position of a photon or an electron while it’s being a particle is controlled by the wave characteristics of said photon or an electron.

But here’s the thing. Superposition is a characteristic of existing matter. These friendly little particles have to exist before they start popping into various positions in a defined way out of nothing; nothing is just one of the states of their existence.

The philosophical question of “why is there not nothing” has not been answered; superposition is a characteristic of “something” not “nothing.”

Tags: faith and reason, scientific proof