Now that we've sorted out the acronyms, I'd appreciate a response to the points I made - see below.
Empty space *is *the same as nothing. > I would say far from it. Why should empty space exist? The questions "why is there something rather than nothing?" "Why does the universe go to the bother of existing?" "What breathes fire into the equations?" etc are asking why *anything* exists. That includes empty space. I don’t understand your comment, “It presupposes the laws of physics.” I > don’t think empty space presupposes the laws of physics and I don’t think > “nothing” presupposes the laws of physics. In my mind neither one > presupposes anything. > Maybe if the empty space does nothing, forever, that might be true. (At least we wouldn't exist to ask questions about whether it's true or not.) But if anything arises from the empty space, then the LOP must govern what appears. Why should tronnies appear rather than, say, quarks? The answer, by definition, is the laws of physics. Hence, if your description of the origin of the universe is correct, the question "why is there something rather than nothing?" can be amended to "why should empty space plus the laws of physics exist?" This leaves open the question of why the LOP are the way they are, rather than anything else they could logically have been. Generally, attempts to answer this have taken two forms. One is to show that the LOP are unique, and logically necessary - there is some underlying reason they could only be the way we observe them to be. The other is to admit that they could have been different, and perhaps are in other universes - in this view the required explanation is not an answer to "why do these particular laws of physics?" but "why do all these different laws of physics exist?" This assumes that some more general logical necessity needs to be invoked to explain all possible LOP, and then anthropic selection can be invoked to explain why we find them to be the way we do in our particular universe. PS TOE=Theory of Everything, IMO=In my opinion (be it ever so humble). I often type in a hurry, so having generally accepted acronyms available can come in handy. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
