Over at Starts with a Bang, one of my favorite science bloggers Ethan Siegel posted a great article that PZ Myers picked up last week. I kept thinking I already reposted it here, but a quick search seems to show me that I didn’t.
So here’s the link for a great explanation from a ginormous-brained theoretical astrophysicist how science shows that something came from nothing.
And by something, I mean the universe, and by nothing, I mean the space between your ears.
Here’s a little excerpt to whet your whistle:
For example, take a box and empty it, so that all you’ve got is some totally empty space, like above. An ideal, perfect, empty vacuum. Now, what’s in that box?
Did you guess nothing? Well, it turns out that empty space isn’t so empty.
One of the consequences of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle — that you can’t know a quantum state’s energy exactly for a finite duration of time — means that when you’re talking about very short time intervals, there are large uncertainties in the energy of a system. Over short enough timescales, the energies are large enough that particle-antiparticle pairs wink in-and-out of existence all the time!
HONK!
Posted by Jeremy 
