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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.

Strong polarization means a strong separation between positive and negative charges. If your electric field in a region of space is strong enough, then when you create a virtual particle-antiparticle pair of the lightest charged particle of all (electrons and positrons), you have a finite probability of those pairs being separated by large enough amounts due to the force from the field that they can no longer reannihilate one another. Instead, they become real particles, stealing energy from the underlying electric field in order to keep energy conserved.

There you have it. An electron and a positron are created out of nothing. The positron is what we call “antimatter” and would annihilate any electron it ever comes into contact with. And for every electron in existence, there would also be a positron. But that positron is now nowhere to be found. Perhaps it escaped into an anti-universe.

This “something from nothing” scenario is also described by Dr. Lawrence Krauss in his best-selling book “A Universe From Nothing.” Dr. Krauss spins this story into an entire universe by explaining how this “nothing” is a very “unstable nothing” out of which the universe is created.

Nevertheless, there is something missing from this “something from nothing” scenario. Of course, it is obvious that this “nothing” is obviously “something’, something that not only contains quantum fields but also all the laws of physics. These laws of physics are assumed to have always existed; no lawgiver is even considered. What is missing is all the other particles other than the electron, as well as all the fine-tuned constants that accompany them.

There is the up quark, down quark, photon, neutrino, gluon, and the Higgs boson. And every one of these particles contain either charge, spin, or mass or some combination of the three. And they all fit together like the pieces of jigsaw puzzle. Two up quarks and one down quark form the proton. And gluons hold them together and with the strong nuclear force. The neutron is made up of two down quarks and one up quark and they are also held together by gluons. The Higgs boson give them mass. These particles, many millions of years after their creation, form stars that create energy when the elements created by these protons, neutrons are fused together in stars. And I could go on for many pages explaining how this process would eventually create every element in the periodic table and eventually rocky planets with liquid water.

The main problem with this “Something from Nothing” scenario is not just the fact that their “nothing” is definitely “something”, but the fact that they never get from this one tiny particle and antiparticle to all the other very complex and finely tuned other particles and all those fine-tuned constants. They just assume, without any explanation, that we can just jump from one tiny particle to all the other fine-tuned particles and constants. Of course, they think the laws need no explanation, they believe they always existed.

Most physicists, though not all, want us to believe it all popped out nothing but this nothing contained preexisting fields and laws which they, nevertheless, still call nothing.