One of the biggest problems facing modern cosmology — and modern physics too for that matter (though most physicists tend to keep quiet about it) — is where the laws governing the Big Bang of creation came from.
For while it’s okay to believe that according to the laws of quantum mechanics something could have come out of nothing, the process of that coming into being would still have to follow those laws. So where the heck did those laws — which obviously predated the Big Bang — originate?
Early in 2012 Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, published A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing which attempted to answer the question, albeit obliquely.
In an interview to The Atlantic he said, “We don’t know how something can come from nothing, but we do know some plausible ways that it might” and went on to suggest that along with all the matter, energy, time and space that emerged from nothing at the moment of the Big Bang, so did the laws.
But that’s really reaching. For how can the rules that govern processes and the processes governed by those same rules come into existence simultaneously? Do we learn the rules of addition at the exact moment that we first add two and two? No; the rules have to precede the process.
In fact, the argument is so flaky that by extending it to its logical limit we could even bring about a specious marriage of science and religion. Like if we said for example, that along with everything else God too emerged from nothing at the Big Bang.
Meaning, the Big Bang and God created each other at the same time!
(Well, actually, why not?)
(This piece first appeared in The Economic Times)