Will We Ever Be Able to Know Why There is Something and Not Nothing?

by James Wallace Harris, 6/29/24

Is there one question you’d love to know the answer to before you die? For me, it’s always been “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Religious people want to believe God created everything, but there’s always that one smart kid who asks: What created God? We get into the problem of infinite regression. Of course, there’s the famous story by a scientist where the punchline is: “Turtles all the way down.”

Science has been trying to answer this question forever. At the small end, we have elementary particles in the Standard Model, with scientists and mathematicians speculating they came about because of strings or other concepts. At the large scale, cosmologists think the universe might be part of a multiverse. But don’t we have the same problem? What creates strings and multiverses? It’s something tinier or larger all the way down or up.

I must assume I will never know the answer to the question that gives me the most existential angst. I used to think as a kid, when we die, we’re finally told the answer to all our questions. But if I find myself in another dimension after death, I’m just going to ask: “What created this place?”

Maybe the answer that leads to happiness is to ask questions that can be answered. To focus on a smaller domain of existence. If I reduce the domain to planet Earth, I’d ask: “What happens to humans after runaway climate change?” It’s possible to speculate with some possibilities of getting the answer close to what might happen. But is such speculation useful?

If I reduce the domain to the United States. I guess the question right now that most people are asking: “Who will be elected president in November?” Until the debate Thursday night, we assumed it would be one of two possibilities. But have things changed? Don’t things always change?

I think I need to reduce the domain again. On a very personal level I’d like to know: “What is time.” And I don’t mean where in the Earth’s rotation, or orbit about the sun. No, I want to know: “What makes reality grow from one moment to the next?” Nothing stays the same. So, what is the smallest degree of change perceptible? Is it the vibration of subatomic particles? Is it the fields and forces that make up those particles? What is one tick of reality’s clock?

This is why I’m currently reading books like The Order of Time by Carlo Ravelli and On the Origin of Time by Thomas Hertog. I struggle to understand what these books are telling me. Is it possible to understand physics without understanding mathematics and science at the graduate level? I can vaguely sense what I think they’re talking about, but I might be deluding myself.

I do think time might be the key to why there’s something and not nothing, but I’m not sure we can ever grasp the reality of spacetime. I’m certainly no Einstein or Hawking. I don’t even understand science at an eighth-grade general science teaching level. To me, comprehending time is closer to being a meditating Buddhist.

What question would you love to know the answer to?

JWH