Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning
Say we could break any physical rules of our current universe, is there a good theory that would explain how something might have been created out of nothing? i.e. imagine for a second that we&#x27;re in a simulation and that the current laws of physic are just arbitrary created by a &quot;host&quot;. This &quot;host&quot; could have <i>very</i> different physical laws. Could we think of any theory that would explain the creation of something out of nothing in this &quot;host&quot;?<p>I&#x27;m very puzzled as to why the universe even exist.. wouldn&#x27;t it have been much simpler not to have anything at all? I can only think of one answer: It couldn&#x27;t have been otherwise. I.e. physically speaking, it <i>had</i> to happen.<p>Maybe that&#x27;s how we should approach the problem? Let&#x27;s try to &quot;create nothing&quot;... maybe we&#x27;ll realize that it&#x27;s actually impossible to &quot;have nothing&quot; unless X happens, and maybe we&#x27;ll figure out that X happening would explain how our universe was created?<p>Or said in a different way, maybe the universe is actually &quot;nothing&quot;, like it always was and will always be. But &quot;nothing&quot; may just be physically impossible so you need &quot;positive&quot; and &quot;negative&quot; things to cancel each other out so that the end result is &quot;0&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m not too sure where I&#x27;m going with this, but it reminds me of the quote &quot;Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.&quot; So, whatever the theories about big bang, multi-verse, universe expanding&#x2F;collapsing indefinitely or even God-based theories, all of it comes back to &quot;how did the first thing come out out of nowhere?&quot; People talk about &quot;Singularity&quot;, but this is just &quot;kicking the can down the road&quot;. Still, by kicking the can I guess we keep learning new things, and maybe someday we will have the technology to answer these questions. Unfortunately, it seems like answering the next frontier seems to be an order of magnitude harder (time-wise and cost-wise) than answering the previous question.