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Is the “Something from nothing hypothesis really valid?” An article titled “70-year-old quantum prediction comes true, as something is created from nothing” claims it is possible. This article, written by Dr. Ethan Siegel for Big Think, can be found at:
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/something-from-nothing/
The problem is, the “nothing” as it is described in this article is most definitely “something”. The article readily admits this.
Everything that exists, down at a fundamental level, can be decomposed into individual entities — quanta — that cannot be broken down further. These elementary particles include quarks, electrons, the electron’s heavier cousins (muons and taus), neutrinos, as well as all of their antimatter counterparts, plus photons, gluons, and the heavy bosons: the W+, W-, Z0, and the Higgs. If you take all of them away, however, the “empty space” that remains isn’t quite empty in many physical senses.
Further in the article, they state, bold mine:
But even for the electromagnetic force — even if you completely zero out the electric and magnetic fields within a region of space — there’s an experiment you can perform to demonstrate that empty space isn’t truly empty. Even if you create a perfect vacuum, devoid of all particles and antiparticles of all types, where the electric and magnetic fields are zero, there’s clearly something that’s present in this region of what a physicist might call, from a physical perspective, “maximum nothingness.”
Okay, lets continue with the understanding that what some physicists call “maximum nothingness” contains a “little somethingness”. This “somethingness” is called “quantum fields.”
For one, even in the absence of particles, quantum fields remain. Just as we cannot take the laws of physics away from the Universe, we cannot take the quantum fields that permeate the Universe away from it.
This “maximum nothingness” not only contains something called quantum fields, but it also contains laws.
Dr. Siegel goes on to explain how, with very strong electric field, particles and antiparticles can be created. And if the field is strong enough, the particle-antiparticle pair can be separated and not reannihilate and destroy each other.