a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by lil
lil  ·  4162 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why Does the World Exist?

I agree essentially with Weinberg who says "I think we're permanently doomed to that sense of mystery." - except that I would frame it more positively. We do not know how the world came to exist. We do not know how there came to be something instead of nothing. Consequently, for now, we are inspired to keep looking for answers and maybe through this exploration get closer to how and why.

By the time one gets through all the speculations and arguments, both scientific and philosophical, everyone interviewed by Holt arrives at the "brute fact" explanation - which some people call "god" or "love" and others call "turtles all the way down."

I enjoyed paragraph 4. He quotes Neil DeGrasse Tyson: "Nothing is not nothing. Nothing is something. That's how a cosmos can be spawned from the void." and this quote from Deutsch:

    The quantum vacuum is a highly structured thing that obeys deep and complex laws of physics.
Indeed.
    Scientists are, like all of us, tasked with pulling the rabbit of Being out of the hat of Nothing.