Gentlemen,
Thanks for the opinions. You have convinced me that at least the empty set MUST exist, and "The whole of mathematics can, in principle, be derived from the properties of the empty set, Ø." (From
http://www.hedweb.com/nihilism/nihilf01.htm .)
"In the Universe as a whole, the conserved constants (electric charge, angular momentum, mass-energy) add up to/cancel out to exactly zero. There isn't any net electric charge or angular momentum. The world's positive mass-energy is exactly cancelled out by its negative gravitational potential energy. Provocatively, cryptically, elliptically, "nothing" exists."
Norman
----- Original Message -----
From: "Colin" <chales1.domain.name.hidden>
To: <everything-list.domain.name.hidden>
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2003 1:28 AM
Subject: RE: Why is there something instead of nothing?
> > From: Stephen Paul King [mailto:stephenk1.domain.name.hidden]
> >
> > Dear Norman,
> >
> > Perhaps because "Nothingness" can not non-exist.
> >
> > Stephen
> >
>
> I'm not sure of the double negative, Stephen, but I think I am in
> agreement. Nothing (noun) cannot exist.
>
> Think about it. Maintaining an absolutely perfect Nothing would require
> infinite energy to control and perfectly balance all the +Nothings and
> -Nothings (or any other componentry you would care to dream up of which
> a Nothing is made) to an infinite number of decimal places.
>
> Any slight imperfection in this balance would immediately create "Thing"
> and that "Thing" would have magnitude, place and a past and a future
> (albeit possibly small, local and brief resp). Do a thought experiment:
> imagine you had to cut up chunks of +Nothing and -Nothing to make a
> perfect Nothing. How good is your cutting going to have to be? Nothing =
> 0 or 0.0 or 0.00 or 0.000 or 0.0000 or.......?
>
> Pretty kludgy analogy but you get the idea. It doesn't matter whther you
> Nothing is modelled as an infinite dimensional vector with every element
> = 0.0000... Or a simply scalar 0.0000.....
>
> Nothing is therefore spontaneously likely to be noisy and that noise is
> likely to be able to create emergent anyThing (including monkeys with
> scripts for Hamlet etc) commensurate with any statistical coherence
> accidentally and spontaneously configured in this randomness. Based on
> this idea we would expect to find coherent "Thing" that has an overall
> tendency to vanish that any observer constructed of it would identify
> and measure as something like a second law of thermodynamics.
>
> Nothing (noun) simply cannot exist. Well it's just too hard. That's my
> slant on it, anyway. This is the stuff the 'Turtles all the way down'
> are made of.... IMHO....
>
> :-) I like this stuff.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Colin Hales
Received on Tue Nov 18 2003 - 22:38:45 PST