Many of you, I am certain, have heard what would seem to be (and was for a while) the most "profound" question for philosophy and science, particularly physics, of all: Why is there something rather than nothing? It is also a question religious people often ask, contradictorily, as their ironic proof of the particular deity's existence.
And yet the answer is easy. Something exists because nothing logically cannot.
I am not speaking about recent developments in quantum mechanics (QM) and virtual particles, but I should sum some things up. QM is physically founded on the so-called Uncertainty Principle. This principle declares that non-commutative variables of particles -- the typical example being location and momentum -- can never be simultaneously measured with no uncertainty. If you need perfect certainty in one variable, you must sacrifice all knowledge of the other.
Another pair of non-commutative properties are time and energy. If we measure time in shorter and shorter intervals, an uncertainty builds up in energy (or mass) as a result of the Uncertainty Principle. This means that if we sample a reason of space over exceedingly short intervals (like a trillionth of a trillionth of a second and smaller), we will find filled with so-called "virtual particles" popping into and out of existence at all times. Nor are they trivial, not at all. The total mass/energy of these particles can be enormous; we are fortunate they exist, or all known physical forces (possibly excepting gravity) require them to carry them to exist, and if they didn't exist -- well, we wouldn't either.
Thus, from a QM (and experimental) point of view, nothing isn't nothing, and can't be, as long as the laws of physics are still in our otherwise empty space. But what if we press further (assuming we can), and remove all physical laws, and perhaps even logic, from the space? Would it then be empty. My answer is still NO. For example, without the First Law of Thermodynamics (the ordinary law of conservation of mass/energy), what would there be preventing not just virtual but permanent particles, or all kinds, coming into existence? And without the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which govern order and the inexorable evolution toward disorder (entropy), what would prevent all this mass/energy from assuming the most possibly ordered form possible? Nothing.
Add to that all the other physical laws and logical and -- is it possible? We might find ourselves right at the very beginning of the Big Bang. Of course, many other arrangements are possible too, so multiverses of all kinds are possible. We may be living in an infinite reality containing an infinite number of universes, infinitely creating more all the time. But I leave here to let the theoreticians and philosophers to seek truth, and conclude my essay with my conclusion: nothing cannot exists, any time, anywhere. Oh, and no deities needed at all.
