Something Out of Nothing, Nothing Out of Something

Le Vide (The Void) by Yves Klein

Contrary to the belief of some cosmologists, something cannot come out of nothing. It’s hard to believe that at the time of the Big Bang an explosion of unimaginable enormity occurred that created the Boson, the elementary particle of matter that scientists have been trying to chase in the Large Hadron Collider. Explosions don’t just pop out of nowhere. Perhaps the Big Bang was actually the work of some ur-suicide jihadist and perhaps there’s even the hope that all the terror and uncertainly will result in another Big Bang, which would in essence be a Second Coming. But if the something cannot come out of nothing, what is the something out of which the early universe was born? We have a BC or BCE, to designate the era before Christ, but what kind of world existed before the beginning of time? Was it an ether, whose laws are simply out of the ken of human consciousness? However, the question of whether nothing can come out of something is even more complex. If matter is turned to energy, despite the law of the conservation of energy, energy is ultimately expendable, and all the matter (or energy) in the universe could, in theory, one day dissipate. It would simply be like a car running out of gas. The warning light would go on and then, if you didn’t do anything to replenish the tank, if there were no suns, emitting ultraviolet radiation, or black holes in which matter is secreted, then the universe could come to an end. The theory of Dark Energy posits the notion that the universe is always expanding. Hence galaxies at one point will be so far from each other and the interstitial spaces so dark, that there would be no possibility of one body rescuing another or finding refuge in the other's gravity. A shipwrecked sailor will eventually drown unless someone comes to his aid. Yes one day, like the gurgling that occurs when the final drop of bathwater is sucked out of a tub, the universe may lose its hard-on. Obviously there will be no eyes left to see it, but imagine ultimate nothingness, a void that is unknowable even to God.