Written by: Anil Banjade - 21103, Grade XI
Posted on: 16 March, 2020
Why should you be aware of this question?
Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, “Those who don't wonder about the contingency of their existence, of the contingency of the world's existence, are mentally deficient.”
“Why there is something rather than nothing?” is one of the biggest unsolved “why” questions. It became more popular when Leibniz wondered “Why is there a Universe at all?” and the question was completely valid because there could have been nothing rather than stars, galaxies, and earth and it required a proper explanation. But many Physicists including Leibniz explained it by simply taking the proportionality constant GOD and he created the universe just because he wants to create and that’s what many people of the world believe. God is so powerful that he can create the universe from nothing but my question to the theist is “Why does God exist?” and even if god exists then “Why did he create the Universe?” and don’t god want to know how he came into existence? People often say that God created the Universe because he was so bored with the question of how he came into existence, so created the universe just to distract himself from the question.
In the last 70-80 years, Physics has evolved so much that now we know that the Universe can exit from sheer nothingness. There are theories like Big Bang theory, inflation theory, QUANTUM FIELD THEORY which are the best theory to explain how Universe came into existence and there are physicists like Lawrence Krauss who believes Universe came into existence from sheer nothingness and Legendary Wheeler (teacher of Richard Feynman) proposed an idea on the basis of quantum fluctuations that even an apparently perfect vacuum seethes with particles and antiparticles which can pop-out into existence.
Lawrence Krauss in his book "Universe from nothing" has written that virtual particles can pop to existence from nothing by quantum fluctuations of the field from the vacuum and in the same way our universe came into existence, but the question is “How this quantum fluctuations works?” If space-time began to exist with the universe how can these quantum fluctuations generate the universe?
We have the combination of Big Bang theory and Einstein’s Relativity and inflation theory to understand how the universe came into existence but to date we don’t know why does the universe exist and it makes sense to even ask “Why does this article exist?”
Being an agnostic person what I would like to say is, Mathematics is the language of the Universe and Science is the key to our future and if you don’t believe in it then you are taking yourself, society and your next generation backward.
“Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world that is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simply by picking sides.”
JACOB BROWNSKI
