Nothing is a concept but, is it a valuable quantity in our universe? According to whatever cosmological and theoretical physics models you subscribe to, do you ascribe any useful properties and or outcomes to nothingness?
I see nothing as meaning nothing, no space, no time, no matter, no energy...no nothing. It was what to the best of our knowledge, that existed before the BB. The following articles may help understand the concept better than I am able to describe....... https://einstein.stanford.edu/content/relativity/a11332.html Special & General Relativity Questions and Answers Can space exist by itself without matter or energy around? No. Experiments continue to show that there is no 'space' that stands apart from space-time itself...no arena in which matter, energy and gravity operate which is not affected by matter, energy and gravity. General relativity tells us that what we call space is just another feature of the gravitational field of the universe, so space and space-time can and do not exist apart from the matter and energy that creates the gravitational field. This is not speculation, but sound observation. and https://www.astrosociety.org/publications/a-universe-from-nothing/ A Universe from Nothing by Alexei V. Filippenko and Jay M. Pasachoff Insights from modern physics suggest that our wondrous universe may be the ultimate free lunch. In the inflationary theory, matter, antimatter, and photons were produced by the energy of the false vacuum, which was released following the phase transition. All of these particles consist of positive energy. This energy, however, is exactly balanced by the negative gravitational energy of everything pulling on everything else. In other words, the total energy of the universe is zero! It is remarkable that the universe consists of essentially nothing, but (fortunately for us) in positive and negative parts. You can easily see that gravity is associated with negative energy: If you drop a ball from rest (defined to be a state of zero energy), it gains energy of motion (kinetic energy) as it falls. But this gain is exactly balanced by a larger negative gravitational energy as it comes closer to Earth’s center, so the sum of the two energies remains zero. The idea of a zero-energy universe, together with inflation, suggests that all one needs is just a tiny bit of energy to get the whole thing started (that is, a tiny volume of energy in which inflation can begin). The universe then experiences inflationary expansion, but without creating net energy. What produced the energy before inflation? This is perhaps the ultimate question. As crazy as it might seem, the energy may have come out of nothing! The meaning of “nothing” is somewhat ambiguous here. It might be the vacuum in some pre-existing space and time, or it could be nothing at all – that is, all concepts of space and time were created with the universe itself. Quantum theory, and specifically Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, provide a natural explanation for how that energy may have come out of nothing. Throughout the universe, particles and antiparticles spontaneously form and quickly annihilate each other without violating the law of energy conservation. These spontaneous births and deaths of so-called “virtual particle” pairs are known as “quantum fluctuations.” Indeed, laboratory experiments have proven that quantum fluctuations occur everywhere, all the time. Virtual particle pairs (such as electrons and positrons) directly affect the energy levels of atoms, and the predicted energy levels disagree with the experimentally measured levels unless quantum fluctuations are taken into account. Perhaps many quantum fluctuations occurred before the birth of our universe. Most of them quickly disappeared. But one lived sufficiently long and had the right conditions for inflation to have been initiated. Thereafter, the original tiny volume inflated by an enormous factor, and our macroscopic universe was born. The original particle-antiparticle pair (or pairs) may have subsequently annihilated each other – but even if they didn’t, the violation of energy conservation would be minuscule, not large enough to be measurable. If this admittedly speculative hypothesis is correct, then the answer to the ultimate question is that the universe is the ultimate free lunch! It came from nothing, and its total energy is zero, but it nevertheless has incredible structure and complexity. There could even be many other such universes, spatially distinct from ours.
help me here , please: Fillipenko&Pasashof: "It is remarkable that the universe consists of essentially nothing, but (fortunately for us) in positive and negative parts. You can easily see that gravity is associated with negative energy:" so: if you take the positive energy (dynamics, is that not something? ) and if you take the negative part by itself, (gravity, the puller is that not something too?) so is the sum not 2 rather than O )? and although it balances, it annihilates, releasing the SUM of these 2 energy forms perhaps with a bang, big bang? and in an balanced-in -orbit body, take away gravity, it goes off at a tangent, take away the orbital velocity and it sinks into the center mass. so, nothing is not really nothing, it may be two opposing forces, energies each having quite some value. wrong?
Sometimes nothing simply means balanced. No electrical charge means charge that is either not present or else balanced between positive and negative charges. If most matter were not balanced (zero) in terms of electrical charge, except perhaps in the appliances we use, that would be bad. No quantum entanglement would likewise be catastrophic to matter. Breaking Pauli's exclusion principle for quantum states of inner paired electrons in atoms would be bad to the point of breaking atomic structure. No matter in the universe would mean that whatever energy was left would simply radiate away at the speed of light (without any of it being captured by matter to carry on life processes like photosynthesis. Life as we understand it could not exist. No energy in the universe would be one that was cold and dead, likewise undesirable (but perhaps not accelerating its expansion, if dark energy were taken out of the equation). The lack of a zero in mathematics means you can't calculate very well; there is no place holder for the radix exponential operator. Thank the Babylonians.
Then tell me where in this universe your definition of 'nothing', which would include the quantum field, exists? Before the Big Bang is excluded from consideration. Consider only the present for your answer. Nothing, like everything else, is a relative term in every sense of the word. You could say, for example, that there are no electrons in the nucleus of an atom. But those pesky neutrons contain them and occasionally release them when they decay. Or you could say there are no protons in the electron cloud surrounding an atom, and there aren't normally. Until something like the LHC fires up. Even a diffusion pump leaves stuff in an artificially produced vacuum. Do you even think (or else Google) before you answer a question, or are you an expert on the subject of nothing? There might be a good reason for that.
