Why is there something rather than nothing at all?

[Elsa Delyth]

Also, relativity declares the universe to be finite, but boundless. Kant argued that infinity is not a well-defined concept, and just means any unquantifiable amount.

[Kylo]

There can't be nothing if there isn't something to contrast and define it as nothing. If there wasn't it wouldn't be nothing. It'd be something else.

At the atomic level, they say, it's all just positive and negative forces in balance. Matter and empty space. Although matter itself, when you get down to it appears to consist only of foci of energy and... lots of empty space.

[Cindi Jones]

There can't be nothing if there isn't something to contrast and define it as nothing. If there wasn't it wouldn't be nothing. It'd be something else.

At the atomic level, they say, it's all just positive and negative forces in balance. Matter and empty space. Although matter itself, when you get down to it appears to consist only of foci of energy and... lots of empty space.

I'm so glad you brought back this old thread. We need some good thoughtful playfulness here!

[stephaniec]

Why is there something rather than nothing at all?
enlighten me! >

because

[Kylo]

The problem is the scale of human experience is too small to even know what nothing actually is in terms of our reality.

Nothing and something are apparent opposites, but we know particles can pop out of one and into another on the subatomic scale - and on the quantum scale a thing isn't even absolutely there but potentially in infinite places and possibilities at once.

I couldn't even begin to try to answer why there is something rather than nothing knowing as little as we do about matter itself

[Just Me Here]

Why? It seems like a poor choice of phraseology, as if to assign some purpose to the existence of the universe. It depends on what you think of as "something". Is "something" a phase of matter? Yet matter - as far as it is a substance that occupies space and moves through time - does not exist on a planck scale, but merely as packets of energy which exist everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Yet the energy we usually think of is only one side of the coin, negative energy also exists (gravitational field energy, and spontaneously arising from quantum fluctuations - note the Casimir effect). The question that I always find myself asking is whether positive and negative energy therefore exist in perfect equilibrium, if so it means that everything is nothing and nothing is everything. It does not mean you can make two cakes annihilate eachother (all you get there is a mess - albeit a delicious one) but you can make a positive cake and a negative cake resolve into nothing. -1 + 1 = 0

[Sophia Sage]

Because existence exists, and the conservation of energy is irreducible, we have to confront a couple of entailments about nothingness. 

Either the Universe came from Nothing, in which case Nothing isn't Nothing as we understand it -- instead, the Void may as well be the Goddess, an infinitely powerful Creative force.  I'm not convinced.

Or, and this makes more sense, there never was a Nothing, and there never will be.

Which rather puts Death into a precarious position.

[Torchickens]

I think nothing may be a human construct and it doesn't have to exist, so it could also be that all matter in the universe was always a permutation of different things; and even the darkness of space contains something relative to matter.

I think the sense of something 'being there' is relative to our senses; it cannot be described or identified unless you can sense it. When you see into space, you see 'black', but blind people are said to see no colour, not even black (like describing what you see out of the back of your head).

Additionally, something cannot be identified unless the absence of it is also understood. (one apple cannot be understood without the knowledge of what an apple is and what it's like for there to be physically no apples; which would also require the existence of a reality in which apples exist).