DID NATURE, LIKE MAGIC, CONJURE SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING?

There was the case of the three brothers, who conjured a bridge to get across a river. And another case, where a professor conjured a tea tray when he fancied a quick cup of tea. Or the young lady who, on separate occasions, conjured a flock of canaries to keep herself company and conjured a crystal flask to hold another professor’s memory.

Conjuration was to transfiguration what cosmology is to physics—the tricky bit. Transfiguration was that branch of magic whose aim was to change the form or appearance of an object by altering an object’s molecular structure in many cases. But Conjuration was the skill of transfiguring an object from thin air—from the very ether itself. This made Conjuration some of the most complex magic taught at Hogwarts, mostly to sixth year students and above. And there were limits to what could be conjured. According to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration, a law that governed the world of magic, there are some things that simply can’t be conjured out of nothing, one of those being food. Birds and snakes, on the other hand, are a piece of cake. More than any other creature, these two are the easiest to conjure.

But snapping your fingers, or waving your wand, can sometimes spell danger. Some Conjurations could go wrong. This was especially true when conjuring creatures. If the Conjuration does not get carried out to the letter, or the caster was simply being rather silly with their skills, dangerous mistakes such as frog-rabbit hybrids could occur. Apparently, such monstrosities could be explained by the principle of artificianimate quasi-dominance: a kind of elemental superposition of cellular reconstruction. Severed heads and indeterminate stumps were another possible consequence. But can nature itself also conjure something out of thin air? And why, in the cosmos, is there something, rather than nothing?

The Beginning of Space and Time

We live in an evolving cosmos, and few things are evolving faster than our understanding of it, it seems. The universe of our ancestors was small, static, and geocentric. Now, in the 21st century, we find ourselves adrift in an expanding universe so large that light from its outer reaches takes longer than twice the age of the Earth to reach our telescopes.

Today, cosmology is almost universally conducted within the confines of the big bang theory. And this theory holds that the cosmos began in a ‘singularity’—a state of infinite curvature of space-time itself. Now, in this singularity, all times and places were one. So, the big bang didn’t happen in an already established space. Space was enmeshed in the big bang. The same goes for place. The big bang didn’t happen in a specific place. It happened precisely where you are, and all other places at the same time. And finally, the big bang wasn’t an explosion in a pre-existing space. Not in the way we normally think about explosions. Stuff didn’t kaboom out into space, but stayed where it was, as the surrounding space expanded.

The evidence for this rather fantastic sounding big bang rests mainly on three main interpretations of physical evidence. Firstly, the redshift of whirling galaxies in space-time suggests the cosmos may be expanding. Run time backwards, and the expansion backs up into the singularity we spoke of above. Secondly, as the cosmos expanded it is believed to have left behind an afterglow, the Cosmic Microwave Background, a remnant radiation of the hot origin of the universe. And thirdly, the mixture of the very elements of the universe is taken as evidence. As the cosmos cooled down, the concoction of chemical elements began to be created, and evolved to give today’s observed proportions. Lots of hydrogen, a fair amount of helium, and hardly anything else—that kind of thing.

But what happened before the big bang? And was the entire universe seemingly conjured out of this singularity? Cosmologists claim so.

How a Cosmos Might Have Been Simply Conjured

Now, most sensible people know there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Most people, that is, apart from cosmologists. Many of the physicists whose job it is to explain the growing complexities of the big bang believe that the universe arose out of nothing. Nature, somehow, conjured up the cosmos.

When the scholars do the sums, they claim that our universe started out as a speck, which tunneled through an energy barrier to a larger radius, inflating into an expanding cosmos. The rest, as they say, is history. But this isn’t all they claim. The scholars also suggest that their mathematical models that support the tunneling hypothesis don’t vanish, even when the initial size of the universe is zero. In short, the cosmos could tunnel to some radius that permitted an inflation and expansion from literally nothing.

A word is needed here on the concept of nothing. By ‘nothing’, we don’t mean the vacuum of empty space. This physical vacuum is rich with energy, particles, and antiparticles, which forever appear and disappear within it. The vacuum of empty space is not just a neutral theater in which things happen. And Einstein also held that space can warp and stretch. So, the ‘nothing’ of the big bang was a true nothing, a point beyond which space-time did not exist. And yet the cosmos was created.

Steady State and the Mini Big Bangs

Not everyone agrees with the big bang scenario. Starting in the 1940s, British physicist, Sir Fred Hoyle, and others worked on an alternative model of the universe that didn’t start in an expansion. But this alternate theory, known as the Steady State Theory or C-Field theory, still believes in the creation of matter.

The Steady State holds that no big bang happened. Its proponents felt that the big bang’s aesthetic association with thermonuclear weapons made the theory ugly and rather abrupt. And it also implied a creationist and mystical beginning to the cosmos.

In his 1994 autobiography, Hoyle wrote about what most annoyed him in the big bang theory. And that was its violation of the idea that the laws of physics are good for all corners of the cosmos, in all of space-time. This idea is held firm in the Steady State, but not in the big bang, which holds that at the very beginning of time, the warp of space was infinite, and the normal laws of physics broke down. Hoyle called this, “the crude breaking of the physical laws that occurs in big bang cosmology”.

But the Steady State proponents still felt the universe could expand. And the creation of matter was key. Their theory was that the universe was infinitely old, and had no actual beginning. How could this be achieved? By the continuous creation of newborn matter, which compensated for the matter density lost by cosmic expansion. So, rather than having all matter created at the beginning of time, as in the big bang theory, the Steady State simply advocates a continuous creation of matter, a series of mini-big bangs, if you like.

Finally, why, in the cosmos, is there something, rather than nothing? Why did the universe, at least in the case of the big bang theory, simply appear? Because the laws of physics permitted it. In the theories of quantum physics, a process has a specific probability of occurring. No cause is necessary.