Ask Ethan: Why does something exist instead of nothing? (Ethan Siegel, 12/28/25, Big Think)
We are certain that “something” exists. We are certain that if you take away the particles and antiparticles and photons and quanta in a region of space, that empty space will still exist. If you move far away from any sources of mass or energy and clear the space of all external electric, magnetic, and gravitational fields, and prevent any photons or gravitational waves from entering that space, that “physical nothingness” will still exist in that region. And in that region, certain things cannot be removed:
there will still be quantum fields in the vacuum of that empty space,
the fundamental constants and underlying laws of physics will still exist in that empty space,
and there will still be a “zero-point energy” inherent to that space, and it will still possess a finite, positive, and non-zero value.
As far as we can tell, that’s as close to nothing as we can get within our Universe.
You might be able to imagine, in your mind, a state of pure nothingness that’s even more “nothing-like” than this, but that doesn’t represent anything physically real. There’s no experiment you can design that can create such a condition. The best we can say — assuming that we’re sticking to science and not moving into the realm of theology, philosophy, or pure imagination — is that the reason there’s something rather than nothing is that “nothing” cannot exist compatibly within our Universe. Of course, that leads back to the original question: why? And for that, dissatisfying though it is, science has no answer. The Universe is the way it is, and though we strive to understand it as best we can, we are compelled to be humble before the great cosmic unknown.
Why Being Rather Than Nothingness? Part II: While scientific inquiry and advances have changed the world we live in, it does not have the power to penetrate even a centimeter into the primary question of God. (Regis Martin, 12/28/25, Crisis)
There once lived a rather tiresome New England transcendentalist by the name of Margaret Fuller, reputed to have been America’s first feminist, who had fallen early on into the irritating habit of announcing to all and sundry, “I accept the universe!” It was as if she were doing the universe a favor by allowing it to exist. This prompted the tart-tongued Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle to reply, “Gad, she’d better.”
So, yes, there is a universe; and, no, it is not negotiable whether or not we accept it. It’s actually been around for quite a while, by the way, and we’ve simply got to deal with that fact. Nor does it appear to be going away anytime soon, either. But does it do anything? I mean, what is it for? And, more importantly, who’s responsible for its creation?
“Why,” to ask the question posed by Stephen Hawking, who, until his death in 2018 was the world’s most celebrated cosmologist, “does the universe go through all the bother of existing?” And since it does exist, is there anything in the laws of physics to account for that fact? “What is it,” Hawking wants to know, “that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to govern?”
Now there’s a bit of sleight of hand for you. To go from nothing to something, how does that work? The sheer circularity of the thing reveals a fairly serious want of logic. To blithely insist, for example, as that most eminent thinker Bertrand Russell did in his one sentence summary of the world’s wisdom, “I should say that the universe is just there, and that’s all there is to it,” is really an astonishingly stupid thing to say.
