A few years back, renowned chemist Peter Atkins wrote a couple of rather silly books, in which he tried to give an account of how the universe could arise from absolutely nothing. The essence of his proposal is that "the incipience of the universe was an event in which absolutely nothing (not even spacetime) turned into a more interesting form of nothing, where opposites became distinguished." He explains as follows:
Take electric charge. There are obviously positive and negative electric charge (for instance, of protons and electrons, respectively), but the total charge of the universe is zero. [...] More contentiously, I think it possible to argue that there is no energy in the universe (with mass being another manifestation of energy, through E = mc2). Yes, there are positive and negative contributions to the total energy, but I suspect that the total is zero, just like the total charge.
The argument, then, is that there was once a state of absolute nothingness, an "absence of being" (Conjuring the Universe, p. 18), which then "split" or "separated" into opposites (i.e. positive and negative charge, energy, and so on).
By my lights, there are at least four serious problems with this proposal.
Firstly, there seem to be some aspects of the physical universe which cannot, even in principle, be explained on Atkins' model. To take one example, the existence of spacetime itself makes little sense if we view creation as a separation of opposites. After all, we don't have "space and anti-space," or "time and anti-time"; there is just spacetime, existing without an opposite. And there are other explanatory failures here; for instance, with regards to the fundamental physical constants, Atkins admits that "No one yet has a clue about why they have their current, and for us serendipitous, values" (CTU, p. 154). Certainly his own muddled proposal does nothing whatsoever the illuminate the matter.
Secondly, Atkins seems to be misunderstanding the fundamental question here, which is primarily ontological in nature. An illustration will help to make this point: in his book On Being, Atkins argues that if the total energy in the universe (TEU) sums to zero (which he thinks it probably does), then this would mean that "What we see around us is actually nothing" (p. 17). But even if Atkins is correct about the TEU (which is by-no-means certain; see here and here), his metaphysical claim is obviously false. To understand why, think of two particles, one of dark matter, and one of common matter.
These particles are, Atkins says, manifestations of negative and positive energy, respectively; one is the "cancellation" (his word) of the other. But of course, dark matter and common matter both exist; they both have a positive ontological status, that is to say, being. When you have these two particles side-by-side, you do not suddenly have zero particles; you have two particles, one positive, and one negative. A particle of dark matter and a particle of common matter may well "cancel each other out" in some sense, but surely they do not add up to non-being; rather, we know that dark matter and common matter exist alongside one another, even entering into causal relations via gravitation. And of course, such things as particles, positive or negative, would not have been present in "Nothing." As such, Atkins' account is utterly worthless when it comes to addressing (or even simplifying) the foundational question of how being can emerge from non-being.
Thirdly, Atkins seems to equivocate on the nature of "Nothing." For instance, when he speaks of "Nothing" as having been "split," one is immediately urged to ask whether or not "Nothing" is splitable; that is, whether it has the potential to be split. If so, then it has properties, in which case it is not nothing, but rather a very nebulously-defined something. If, instead, we agree that "Nothing" really is devoid of properties, then we must ask how it can be "split" or "separated." We see this confusion throughout Atkins' books; for instance, in On Being he writes that "Nothing has no properties" (p. 12), while in Conjuring the Universe he states that "Our current something has simply inherited the properties of its parent Nothing" (p. 38).
Fourthly, I suspect Atkins' account may simply be incoherent. For take the central idea of his proposal: that Nothing, the "absence of being" (CTU, p. 18), was somehow "separated" into distinct forms of being. When stripped of its pseudo-scientific veneer, it seems rather obvious that this is just a bad conjuring trick. It is not a serious hypothesis about the origins of the universe; it is a category error, of the sort which loses points on a freshman philosophy paper, being dressed up and sold as science, and deriving its credibility solely from the fact that it is the work of an author who once produced worthwhile textbooks on physical chemistry.
It is always depressing when a formerly productive mind turns its attention to the production of vacuous drivel; even still, perhaps the rest of us can derive some amusement from their folly.
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