Thread: Possibility of nothing.

Originally Posted by JCammon

Here is a question that may or may not seem stupid to you,but:

Was it possible for the Universe not to have happened?

For that, I mean if everything we speak of is that of coincidence, it was certainly possibly that the South won the war, as was there a possibility that humans never evolved. As such a possibility that our Earth and solar system never came into being.

If all that is true, was it possible for the big bang NOT to have happened and even further than that, was it possible that nothing in the universe exist at all.

Was there a possibility of nothing?

No...because absolute nothing would be an absolute and there's no such thing as absolutes in this universe according to physics. If physics laws didn't exist then absolutes may exist and then your question may stand. The term nothing can only stand shorter in length and below absolute. Another words..Nothing would have a limitation to it (borders around it) and being that nothing is only a piece rather than a whole, The universe must come into existance when the nothingness runs out of its shortenend length. Its a in and out condition between nothingness(non-existance) and somethingness(existance) which is a cycle.

Originally Posted by Coelacanth

Agreed, probabilities are conditional on an information set, and an information set can be related to the passage of time, but it can be related to other things also. In a relativistic universe, the set of things that have "already happened" is not even uniquely defined

We could imagine a group of people sitting around a table, playing a card game. Each one sees his own hand, but not the hands of the others. The different players have different probabilities of different outcomes, because they have different information - time playing no role here. Similarly, it makes perfect sense, after the hand is played and everyone sees all the cards, to discuss what the correct strategy for a particular player was, given the information available to that player when he had to formulate the strategy, even though we now know exactly which cards each player has. Does it make sense to say, the player to my left had the ace of hearts, therefore the correct strategy would have been (whatever)? Everyone knows now the player to my left had the ace of hearts, but at the time I had to decide which card to play, I didn't know that. It makes perfect sense to talk about the probabilities that different players had the ace of hearts, even though after the fact, we know who it was.

The important thing for probabilities is what you know, not what time it is. The two can be related, but they're not the same. As your example points out.

Well said! Another example of parallel processing would be fifty people flipping fifty pennies. The odds of any given penny landing on heads remains 50%.

Interestingly, with poke, whether or not a person discards subtly affects the probability of one's own hand, as that's veiled knowledge of the other person's hand. However, it's very subtle, and the other person might not be playing statistically correct poker, which would throw off the odds. Poker remains a game that's played largely on the statistics of one's own hand, but modified significantly based on the behavior of the other players.

Since that behavior changes after the cards are dealt, and does affect the way one should play, time does factor into poker. But time doesn't factor into flipping pennies, of course!

To the original question:

Was it possible for the Universe not to have happened?, I came across the following that would lead one to believe the answer to be "Yes":

'The early universe thus has only a one in 10^120 chance of ever evolving into our current universe unless some explicit dynamical mechanism could be found which would naturally fix these needed initial conditions with incredible precision.' This is taken from Philip D. Mannheim's article "Is Cosmic Acceleration Really Recent?" which can be found in the proceedings of ”Cosmology and Elementary Particle Physics”, Coral Gables Conference, December 2001, B. N. Kursunoglu (Ed.), American Institute of Physics, NY (2002).