The bridge from nowhere: can you get anything from nothing?

Original author: Amanda Gefter
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"The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy." So concluded William James , reflecting on the most basic of riddles: how did something arise out of nothing? This question is infuriating, decided James, because it requires an explanation, denying the very possibility of its presence. “There is no logical bridge to moving from nothing to being,” he wrote.

In science, explanations are based on causes and effects. But if nothing is really nothing, he has no opportunity to become a cause. The point is not that we cannot find the right explanation - just in the face of “nothing,” the explanation does not work.

This failure hits the sore spot. We are creatures that love narration. Our simplest notions come through stories, but as something came out of nothing - this is the main story, a prehistoric story, more fundamental than the “hero's journey” or “the guy meets a girl”. But this story undermines the essence of the story. This story is made of self-destruction and paradox.

And how can she not be like that? Its main character is Nothing. A word paradoxical due to its very existence in the form of a word. It is a noun, a thing, and yet it is not a thing. As soon as we imagine it or call it, we will destroy its emptiness, staining it with its meaning. It remains to be surprised: is this a problem with “nothing”, or is it our problem? Space or linguistic? Existential or psychological? The paradox of physics or thoughts?

However, it is worth remembering that the solution to the paradox is in the question, not in the answer. Somewhere there must be a failure, a wrong assumption, a wrong identity. In such a short question “how did something come out of nothing?” There is little where to hide. Perhaps because of this, we always return to the old ideas in the new shell, playing on the path of development of science of fugue, or variations of the topic. With each passage, we try to lay another stone to cross the river, extending the elusive James Bridge.

The oldest of stones: if you can't get something out of nothing, try to make nothing so empty. The ancient Greeks believed that empty space is filled with substance, ether. Aristotle considered ether to be the same fifth element, more perfect than earth, air, fire, and water. “Nothing” contradicts Aristotelian physics, who claimed that bodies fall or rise according to their right place in the natural course of things. Nothing should be perfectly symmetrical, look the same from any angle, eliminating the meaning of the absolute spatial directions "top" and "bottom". The aether, according to Aristotle, could serve as a cosmic compass, the main reference system against which all motion could be measured. For those who hated the vacuum, the ether banished him.

The ancient ether existed for thousands of years until it was rethought at the end of the 19th century by physicists, for example, James Clerk Maxwell, who discovered that light behaves like a wave, always moving at the same speed. And what worried and relative to what was measured speed? Ether was a convenient response, providing both the medium and the reference system. But when Albert Michelson and Edward Morley decided to measure the movement of the Earth through the “ether wind” in 1887, they did not find the latter. And soon Einstein with his special theory of relativity drove the last nail into the coffin of the ether.

For decades we considered the broadcast to be an historical wonder, a regress. But it was harder to kill him than we thought. Today it can be seen in a different form: the Higgs field, penetrating the vacuum of empty space, excited by the famous Higgs boson. This scalar field, the only representative of its kind, confirmed experimentally. This means that at every point in space it has a single meaning (as opposed to a field describing light, which has both size and direction at every point). This is important because it means that the field will look the same for any observer, no matter whether resting or accelerating.

Moreover, its quantum spin is zero, that is, it looks the same from any angle. Spin is a measure of how much a particle needs to be rotated to make it look the same as before the turn. At carriers of interactions (photons, gluons), the spin is whole — 360-degree turns will leave them unchanged. Particles of matter (electrons, quarks) spin half-integer, which means that they must be rotated twice, by 720 degrees, to return to the initial state. But the Higgs spin is zero. No matter how you spin it, it always looks the same. Just like empty space. Symmetry equals invisibility.

According to Aristotle's intuition, today's physicists consider nothing as the final state of symmetry — relentless self-similarity, prior to finding the differences necessary to define "things." If physicists are launching a space film in the opposite direction, tracing the history of the deep past, they see the union of disparate fragments of reality, turning them into a growing symmetry denoting the source — nothing.

Higgs became famous for supplying the elementary particles with their mass, but this hides its real value. To give particles mass is easy. Slow them down to speeds below the speed of light, and here's a mass. It is difficult to give them weight without breaking the prehistoric symmetry. The Higgs field achieves this by accepting a nonzero value even in the state of least energy. In every corner of the empty space, 246 GeV Higgs has shrunk — but we do not notice it, because it is the same everywhere. Only a scalar field can hide in plain sight. But he is noticed by elementary particles. Every time when the mass of a particle breaks the symmetry of the Universe, Higgs is right there, disguised as empty space, eliminates damage. Always working in the shadows, Higgs keeps the original symmetry of the universe intact.

All this means that the Higgs field is closer to nothing than the Maxwell concept of ether. This is the newest of our paint brushes in the void. With its unusual symmetry, Higgs works as a disguise for nothing - but in itself it is nothing. He has a structure, it interacts. The physical meaning of 246 GeV remains unknown. With the help of the Higgs, we are approaching the borders of nothing, but we can not overstep them.

If attempts to make nothing so empty do not answer the question “how something came out of nothing,” we must make the reason not such a reason. And these attempts have their own history. The sudden appearance of larvae on rotting meat during the time of Aristotle led to the common myth of the spontaneous origin of life; the breath of life can arise from emptiness. The boundary between nothing and something stood near the boundary between life and death, spirit and matter, divine and earthly. In turn, this brought with it a whole set of religions and faith, giving rise to a very complex decision of our paradox. We accepted this theory for 2,000 years, until in 1864 microbiologist Louis Pasteur dispelled it. Omne vivum ex vivo - the whole life from the life. In the following decades, we discovered the spontaneous emergence of another historical wonder. But, like the ether, she returned to us again,

Quantum fluctuations, decorated with uncertainty, are consequences without a cause, noise in the signal, pristine static, random in nature. The rules of quantum mechanics allow - even require - that energy (and, according to E = mc 2 , mass) appear “from nowhere”, from nothing. The creation of ex nihilo - so it looks.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a natural source of quantum larvae. [“Maggot” in English is not only a larva, but also a whim, a fad, a whim - comment.] He postulates that certain pairs of physical properties — location and momentum, energy and time — are linked together by fundamental uncertainty. The more precisely we set one of the parameters, the less clear the other becomes. Together they form connected pairs and prevent the existence of "nothing". Begin to specify the spatial position, and the impulse will begin to fluctuate wildly. Determine small and precise time intervals, and the energy will begin to oscillate in a wider range of unlikely values. In the shortest moments at the shortest distances, whole universes can suddenly appear and then disappear. Zoom into the world, and calm,

But these couples themselves are not accidental: they are pairs of properties that the observer cannot measure at the same time. Despite the fact that quantum fluctuations are usually described, there is no certain predetermined reality in the world that is fidgeting here and there. The experiment shows that what is, in fact, does not exist at all, but is waiting. Unborn. Quantum fluctuations are not existential, but conditional descriptions - they do not reflect what is, but only what becomes possible if the observer decides to carry out a certain measurement. It is as if the observer's ability to measure determines what should exist. Ontology sums up epistemology . The uncertainty of nature is the uncertainty of observation.

The fundamental impossibility of assigning certain values ​​to all properties of a physical system means that when an observer takes a measurement, the result will be truly random. On a tiny scale dominated by quantum effects, a chain of causes and effects flies off the coils. Quantum mechanics, as its founding father Niels Bohr said, "is irreconcilable with the very concept of causality." Einstein, as we know, ignored her. "God does not play dice," he said - to which Bor answered, "Einstein, stop advising God what to do."

But maybe it is worth blaming us in anticipation of the preservation of the principle of causality. Evolution has taught us to search for simple templates at any cost. For our ancestors, who were dissecting the African savannah, the ability to recognize the effects of the causes marked the boundary between life and death. She ate a spotted mushroom and fell ill. The tiger crouches before jumping. Stories mean survival. Natural selection does not need quantum physics - so, how would we have guessed its existence? But it exists. And causality is an approximation. This is our mind seeking history.

And so, that's all? The answer to the question “why do we exist” lies in the fact that there is no “why”, that existence is a random quantum fluctuation? Well, that means we can drop all explanations and make a quantum leap to overcome the James Bridge. How did something come out of nothing? Just because. Unfortunately, we will not advance further. Cosmologists believe that the laws of quantum mechanics can spontaneously create universes, this story simply shifts the responsibility. Where did these laws come from? Remember that we wanted to explain how something came out of nothing — not how something came out of the pre-existing laws of physics. It is not enough to remove causality from the equation - the paradox remains.

At first there was nothing, and then something appeared.

The main character in this story is Time, a carrier of change. Can the solution to a paradox be to negate time? If time, as Einstein said, is just a stubborn illusion, then we can immediately free ourselves not only from causality arising from the laws of nature, but also from the question of where these laws come from. They did not come from anywhere, because there is no evolution. The story disappears, there is no story, and there is no bridge either.

The concept of an eternal universe, or cyclical, ever-returning, appears in the earliest myths and stories, from the Bantu mythology from Africa to the Dreamtime of the Australian Aborigines, from the cosmology of Anaximander of Miletus to the ancient Indian Puranas. You can see the appeal of these theories. Eternity avoids "nothing."

Nowadays, this ancient idea returns as a theory of the stationary Universe, formulated by James Jeans in 1920, and then refined and popularized by Fred Goyle and others in the 1940s. The universe is expanding, but to fill the voids all the time there is a new matter, so on average, the universe does not change. The theory turned out to be wrong, it was replaced by the Big Bang theory and eternity decreased to some 13.8 billion years.

But in the 1960s, the stationary universe suddenly returned in a strange way - in the equation

H (x) | Ψ> = 0

Physicists John Archibald Wheeler [John Archibald Wheeler] and Bruce DeWitt [Bryce DeWitt] wrote it, now known as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, although DeWitt calls him "this damn equation" (no, no relationship with the "god-cursed particle"). They tried to apply the strange laws of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole, as described in Einstein’s general theory of relativity. It is worth paying attention to the right side of the equation - zero. The total energy of the system is nothing. No evolution over time. Nothing can happen. The problem is that the Einstein universe is a four-dimensional space-time, a combination of space and time. But quantum mechanics requires that the wave function of a physical system evolve over time. But how can space-time evolve in time, if it is time? This dilemma just infuriates - the universe described by quantum mechanics,freezes in time . The Wheeler-DeWitt equation is the theory of a stationary universe inside out. Instead of the always existing Universe, we have a Universe, which will never be.

In itself, the Wheeler-DeWitt equation elegantly solves our problem. How did something come out of nothing? It did not appear. But such a decision is puzzling - because we are here.

This is the essence. In quantum mechanics, nothing happens until an observer (person or other particle configuration) takes a measurement. But in the case of the whole universe, the observer does not exist. No one can stand outside the universe. The universe as a whole is stuck in an endless moment. But inside everything looks different.

From within, the observer cannot measure the entire universe, and therefore divides reality into two parts — the observer and the observed — thanks to the simple but strong fact that the observer cannot measure himself. As the physicist Raphael Bousso wrote, "Apparently, the instrument must have at least degrees of freedom than the system, whose quantum state it is trying to determine." Philosopher of science Thomas Brewer [Thomas Breuer] used the Gödel argument to express the same thought: "No observer can obtain or save information sufficient to distinguish all the states of the system in which he is located."

As observers, we are doomed to see forever only a piece of a big puzzle, of which we are a part. And this can be our salvation. When the universe falls into two parts, the zero on the right side of the equation changes to a different value. Everything changes, physics happens, time passes. You could even say that the universe is born.

If this sounds like retro-casuality (the future affects the past) - well, that's the way it is. Quantum theory requires this strange reversal of the arrow of time. Wheeler drew attention to this fact with the help of a well-known experiment with a deferred choice, which was first proposed as a mental one, and then demonstrated in the laboratory.. In the deferred selection, the observer dimension in the present determines the behavior of a particle in the past - the past, which can drag back millions, or even 13.8 billion years. The chain of causes and effects turns on itself, and its end is connected with the beginning: the bridge of James turns out to be a loop.

Could it be that something is what nothing looks like from the inside? If so, then our concern about “nothing” may hint at a deep thought: our human nature does not tolerate “nothing”, and at the same time it is our limited perspective that solves this paradox.

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