AF. Nothing to Nothing

It’s worse than that. There’s nothing really there anyway. As Neils Bohr said, “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” Erwin Schroedinger described the “particles” that we are all made of like this: “At the most, it may be permissible to say that one can think of particles as more or less temporary entities within the wave field whose form and general behavior are nevertheless so clearly and sharply determined by the laws of waves that many processes take place as if these temporary entities were substantial permanent beings.”

And “A real particle is essentially a consistent ripple in an energy field, one that persists over time.” (NewScientist 2017)

And “Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or like anything that you have ever seen.” Richard Feynman

And according Werner Heisenberg, one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics, “The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.”

So not only did everything come from nothing, everything is still essentially nothing; nothing but physical interactions:

Wired Magazine: What is reality?

Sean Carroll: The best answer we can give is that reality is a vector in Hilbert space. This is the technical way of saying that reality is described by a single quantum mechanical wave function.

WM: OK, that’s abstract. Please conceptualize this?

SC: We see tables and chairs and people and planets moving through spacetime. Quantum mechanics says that there are no such things as tables and chairs—there’s just something we call a wave function.

SC: Our classical description of the world is a higher level, approximate way of talking about the wave function. The job of physicists and philosophers is to show how, if we live in a world that is just a wave function, then why does it look like there are people and planets and tables and chairs? We don’t have a definite consensus. (Oct 2020)

If it makes you feel better, everything didn’t come from nothing; nothing came from nothing, but that nothing, the nothing that is us and the apparent but delusory reality that is our universe, is very persistent in acting like it’s something. It’s not. It’s still nothing but physical laws, physical interactions that manifest as “particles”, but those particles are very convincing.