Emergence from nothing?

 Quite naturally and logically, the idea that in terms of answering the question of what was before the Big Bang, one can, between scientists can be found as a group of materialistically oriented people who, by their postulate of eternity, uncreation, and indestructibility of matter, assume the existence of some form of matter before the Big Bang and a group of idealistically oriented ones who prefer the so-called “creation ex nihilo,” i.e., creation out of nothing. But it’s different. Some materialistically oriented scientists admit the possibility of the universe coming from nothing, and some idealistic-oriented scientists do not reject the possibility that God could have created our world out of something, provided, of course, that the “something” also came from him. As can a materialist reconcile himself to the notion that matter could come into existence by itself and out of nothing? The expert answer to this question is that it can and can do so by the so-called law of conservation with “zero right-hand sides.” Let us try to explain this further. We know that natural phenomena compensate each other so precisely that they add up to zero. A trivial example of this is, for example, the condition where we have a certain of money, but we have just as much debt. Our total financial situation is zero. That is precisely how it behaves in nature, like an electric charge. There is precisely as much positive in it as much negative electric charge, so the total electric charge in the universe is zero. If such a law were for energy or mass, there would be no problem imagining the creation of the universe out of nothing; it would just have to be arranged to start the simultaneous generation of positive and negative energy, respectively.

Positive and negative mass. This presupposes that, as in the case of
electric charge, there is a place in the universe for both positive and negative energy and positive and negative matter. What is the actual reality? Everyone will readily acknowledge that there is motion associated with matter and  positive energy. To set any body in motion requires exerting a specific (positive) effort, which measures the respective (motion) energy. But we also know situations in which  we do not have to exert effort, but on the contrary, we can gain. For example, when we (inadvertently) let fall on our head  a stone, we will feel convincingly that we have not expended any energy but, on the contrary, that we have received a certain amount of energy.

Where did it come from? It was produced by what, in physics, we call
the gravitational field. By its effect, all bodies fall towards the Earth. It follows from the above example that while matter itself needs to be assigned a positive energy, the gravitational field is given a negative energy. In nature, therefore, there are “deposits” of both positive and negative energy. But the question is whether their quantities are equal. So far, we don’t know exactly, so we can’t say that our universe
has the law of conservation of energy with a zero right-hand side. Even less clear is the situation with the matter. However, there is no shortage of attempts to work out specific “super-unified” theories that should be natural for both positive and negative matters.

In the case of the validity of the conservation mentioned above, laws with zero right-hand side, one could, therefore speak of a “creation ex nihilo,” but it is there is one open problem: it requires a stimulus that would to set in motion the separation of the “positive” from the “negative” and, thus, actually the process of the emergence of something tangible out of nothing. It must be said that such a “initiators” are known in contemporary physics. These are the so-called vacuum fluctuations,29) the chaotic eruptions of pairs of particles and antiparticles from the vacuum, in which these particles briefly “borrow” energy from the vacuum and, after a very a short time, they give it back without any residue. The physical vacuum behaves like as a source of packets of energy (vacuum fluctuations), which – if they are large enough – can materialize into a pair of particles and antiparticle, which, after its extinction, returns this energy to it.

The above mechanism could represent a model of generating real-world particles from a vacuum. Still, it doesn’t explain where these particles would get the energy that would allow them to exist in the real world.30) Even for this, some possible prescriptions. Such a source could be a sufficiently strong gravitational field. We can see that there is no lack of attempts in modern physics to explain the universe’s origin out of nothing, but the assumptions under which this could be done are only in the realm of hypothesis. If it were so easily feasible, we might ask why such a process has occurred only once and why we haven’t seen anything like it in the real world since we have not observed it. We can see that we “solve” one problem by making the mystery out the window, and another, perhaps even more significant, moves in through the door.