Can nothing exist without the Universe? (Strange Universe Series)

The other side. Remember last weeks talk on multiverses! I like it there much better BTW!

I don’t know, but thinking about this makes me dizzy.

Perhaps, there will always be something, until there is nothing to perceive something, then there will be nothing.

My universe is contained in my cup of coffee right now.

The Universe is all we know and can picture but there is more out there. But to answer your question there has always been a Universe and there will always be one. So life has always existed and will always exist.

The nothing isn’t nothing. It is dark matter and dark energy.
There isn’t a spot anywhere that has nothing in it.

@Cruiser I would expect that if there is a multiverse, it sprang from nothing at some point as well. So the question would stand.

@erichw1504 Well said. :-)

@Coloma I heard that. nursing my own cup right now. And they are doing some plumbing work today so the water is off in the building. After this cup is gone, NOTHING.

@JustmeAman I find myself once more asking, do you have any evidence of that?

@MissPoovey And I ask you the same, any evidence? So far, my understanding is we don’t even know that dark matter and energy exist. They are conjectures dreamed up to make cover whjat otherwise would be a flaw in the Big Bang theory.

Maybe it’s the old ‘build it and they will come’ mantra.

Like building a pond and after a few months..POOF out of nowhere comes frogs, turtles, egrets, reeds, water striders, dragonflies…..:-?

@Coloma It seems to have worked that way in the Universe as well. Just a great big pond.

@ETpro

I agree, from primordial mud to an entire universe of life contained in one drop of water. ;-)

Here what Wiki says, and I watched a show about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

@ETpro I envision a big space bellybutton or a locked hatch with DARPA written on it!! XD

@MissPoovey Exactly. Dark Energy/mattert’s existence is theorized to account for discrepancies between observations and relativistic calculations of luminous matter. The problem is it could just as easily be that what’s wrong is the underlying Big Bang theory, and what’s accounting for the observed acceleration of expansion of the Universe is that the correct explanation varies wildly from Big Bang cosmology. It is also possible that the Universe is not expanding as we think it is, but that some other effect is fooling us into thinking it is by giving distant objects a greater red shift than they should exhibit given their speed of divergence from us. I am not saying dark matter and energy don’t exist, just that at the moment, they are nothing more than fudge factors to make equations come out in sync with observed behavior of the Universe.

@ETpro
‘fudge factors’....thanks heaps, considering my digestive universe is starving right now.

According to the show I watched, there is something, and for no other reason than lack of name the something is being called dark matter. Because it is dark and not visible to us, and because something is really there.
Not because it is dark in the evil or religious sense.
And that in itself negates it is ‘nothing’.

@MissPoovey

Sounds like psychology, the darkest matter does lie between our ears and is often not visible to us. lol

@MissPoovey Physicists used to think there is something called the ether because they knew that waves pass through something, ocean waves travel in water. Sound waves travel in air. So they speculated electromagnetic waves must travel in ether (or aether). They struggled for some time with proving that there was an undetectable ether. Then someone realized that light, gravity and electromagnetism are not waves like sound waves. They don’t travel in anything. THey behave partly like a massless particle and partly like a wave function.

Since we can’t know that either before it happens (if it ever does) or afterwards (since we won’t be around), not sure you’re going to get the definitive answer you seek. Now… go enjoy the sunshine.

@Austinlad The only way I see to go there is by thought experiment.

Mind over matter, eh, @ETpro? Well, good luck with your mysterious albeit mildly murky but always magnificent mind musings.

If we could travel within another dimension and be alert and know what we had seen and what we had experienced how then would we perceive this Universe we are trying to understand and define? We as a world have so many questions but we limit ourselves by trying to understand all things by our own limitations. It is very hard to try and explain things and get anyone to even listen. I was writing something about the Stealth Technology but had to remove it.

If, as cosmologists now believe, the universe will eventually die a heat death, with all the stars gradually losing their energy and dying out, the only thing left will be black holes. And even the black holes will eventually evaporate, leaving nothing but the burnt out husks of stars and planets in a lifeless, lightless, absolute zero universe. Depressing, yes?

@CaptainHarley

Yes, very uplifting!

On that note I am going out into the sunshine now with a heightened appriciation that my little universe will most likely not be swallowed by a black hole today. lol

LOL! You’re doing exactly the right thing. Live, love, and enjoy the gift of life while you may! : ))

The answer is yes. In fact, the answer has to be yes.

Nothing can exist without a universe. However, the universe can not exist without notihing!

@CaptainHarley

Why am I suddenly seeing the tornado scene from the wizard of oz and visualizing being sucked…PFFFT! , gone…right off my sunny hill right now? lol

@Coloma

LOL! It’s them black holes! RUN! : D

I fear this is much like the “If a tree falls in the woods” type of question. I, again, must admit that I have yet to read Hawking’s latest showing how the universe could come from nothing…but I think that we have to admit then that nothing can indeed exist without something (although it’s debatable therefore whether something can exist without nothing ;-)), but it doesn’t really matter whether it exists or not unless it can be perceived. Considering that absolute nothing mandates there’s nothing there to perceive it, it doesn’t really make a difference if it makes a sound in the woods. ;)

That’s silly, nothing can’t exist, definition.

@JustmeAman For a good deal of human history, people tried to explain things by deliberately not using observation. They were able to get pretty ridiculous results that way as well.

@CaptainHarley No, heat death isn’t depressing to me. First, I am not sure that’s what will happen. Second, in an open Universe which is what we appear to inhabit, it won’t happen for a very long time. And that’s very long as compared to its current age of 13.75 billion years.

@wundayatta Great answer. Yes, I believe you nailed it.

Other universes could exist without the necessity for our own university to exist.

No thing can exist outside of the universe.
Nothing can only exist within the universe.

Nothing is infinite
AllThings is also infinite
Nevertheless they are unlike each other.

The universe is all things.

If I am myself, then I am also the universe
Eternal time and infinite space are a point on each
And defined by all.

I will be as forever as the universe –
I end in an instant.

Two infinities coexisting and neither filling the other. Still plenty of room of other infinities to move in. That seems to fall short of a solid concept of infinity, @kess

You miss it cause it is nothing filling all things.

If the infinite is limited then it’s not infinite.

@kess – Things can exist outside our universe if this hypothesis is correct

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse

The universe is said to have just expanded out from a single point in space. For the universe to exist, there must have been something before the universe when there was no universe, and no life. So there must have been some matter in existance before it expanded into the universe.

Also every single thing is made from elementry particles (e.g. photons, quarks, electrons, nuetrinos, etc.). These make up matter, energy, everything, and they cant be divided into anything smaller; they also cant be destroyed or created; so all matter in the universe cant be destroyed, only broken down into these particles, so there will always be something out there.

For the universe to exist, there must have been something before the universe when there was no universe, and no life.

The only problem that I have with this statement, @NorbertFish4, is that it assumes a model of time that is biased – as it must be – in a linear fashion. We know time to proceed in one direction solely because we cannot experience it another way.

Even when we conceive of time travel, it is two-directional. We either go back in time, or forward to the future.

Time may very well work in a completely incomprehensible manner such that it is more like a circle or sphere or spiral, which would negate any assumption that there was a time before/beginning. Everything in the universe may have always-already existed so that we don’t have to worry about where it came from.

@NorbertFish4 Welcome to Fluther and thanks for some interesting thoughts. What @iamthemob says is very true, but I still worry about where it all came from anyway. :-)

I agree @iamthemob, we cannot assume that time is a straight line allong which events happen. And therefore we cant say that there was definitely a “before” our universe, or there will be an “after”.

Despite this we cannot know for certain what shape time is. It is possible that time was created allong with the universe so before it there was an inconcevable “stand still” of time that can’t be understood no matter what shape we say time is.

@NorbertFish4 That is certainly possible and almost inconceivable. It’s equally possible yet inconceivable that the Universe changes form before our eyes, but is eternal. It may have always existed in some form. It may be infinitely old, yet infinitely young. And still, I want to know.

Oh wow, science, I’m no good at it…not this kind anyways.

As far as my logic takes me, nothingness as we define it, even in scientific terms, (as opposed to emos and metaphors) cannot exist. You can’t have ’‘nothing’’. Yeah, an absence of something, but that’s something, and anyways, an empty glass has air in it. If you bring the glass into space and let it float away, it won’t have oxygen in it anymore…but whatever space is made out of, even if it’s something you can’t touch, it will be in the glass. Like, non gravity or…space air. Lol.
Before the universe existed, there was something else there. There must have been. The Big Bang must have had some components that were triggered in order to happen. You can’t have something just pop out of nowhere.That is, if the universe wasn’t always there, to begin with. Which also makes no sense to me. How could something have always just been there? Human logic may be faulty and not strong enough to know certain things, but to me, eternity is impossible. Yet, there can’t also be a beginning or an end, especially if those are nothingness. So it’s like, nothing can exist in the ways that I understand they do.
Gases, solar storms, space dust, molecules, all those things are just things that happen in the universe. But if they get altered or destroyed, then if affects something else. I suppose nothing can exist, if a gas dissipates and no longer is, or something. It is now ’‘nothing’’. But probably something really sciency happens to the gas…and even if not, and it really disappears, there’s other stuff there where the gas used to be at. So the nothing still isn’t there.
So if the universe disappears, well…there forcibly has to be something there, or all the stuff in space becomes something else. Does the universe have boundaries? If so, what’s beyond them? Or, if space is limitless, or acts like a mobius strip, there still has to be something that surrounds it…but then that something has to have a surrounding too and…since I don’t believe in infinity, nor do I believe in nothing, and that things have to stop but I don’t see how they actually can…man, this question is totally fuckin with me.

But no, I don’t think there will ever be ’‘nothing’’. Probably the universe will end, but true nothingness can’t occur, not from how I understand it in its definition. Other than something just not being there anymore…even if all that remains is a huge, infinite white space, it’s still something. It might have gasses and clouds and shit. Or maybe it will be a huge black space, you know, like space…but without anything in it.

@Symbeline You are faced with a choice of two imponderables. Either the Big Bang sprang from nothing, or something has existed forever without any beginning or end. Neither compute in our finite minds. And explaining it by saying God did it just substitutes another imponderable.