Quantum Mechanics Creating the Universe

In quantum mechanics, a quantum fluctuation is a temporary appearance of energetic particles out of empty space. These particle pairs come out of a vacuum and exist for a very short period of time. A quantum fluctuation is also known as a vacuum state fluctuation or vacuum fluctuation.

Quantum fluctuations only exist on a very small scale.  When the size of an object is large enough to be visible to the naked eye (macroscopic object) the effects of the quantum effect becomes very small.

The idea of quantum fluctuation applying to the universe came from physicist Edward Tryon.  He postulated that a very large quantum fluctuation could have caused the creation of the universe.  He published a paper in the journal Nature. When addressing the issue of why it happened he stated “…I offer the proposal that our universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time”.

Alexander Vilenkin, Director of the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University, when recalling reading the article stated “Now, what Tryon was suggesting was that our entire universe, with its vast amount of matter, was a huge quantum fluctuation, which somehow failed to disappear for more that 10 billion years. Everybody thought that was a very funny joke”.  

Scientists believe that before the universe existed, there was nothing. For a quantum fluctuation to work you need energy. In quantum theory these fluctuations happen in a vacuum. Some people assume that a vacuum is nothing, but that simply is not true.  There is a huge difference between a vacuum and nothing.

Phillip Yam in Scientific American stated, “Energy in the vacuum, though, is very much real.  According to modern physics, a vacuum isn’t a pocket of nothingness. It churns with unseen activity even at absolute zero, the temperature defined as the point at which all molecular motion ceases.

Astrophysicist Adam Reese said, “in quantum physics a vacuum is not nothing, rather it is teeming with a pair of virtual particles and antiparticles that spontaneously appear and annihilate one another within a tiny fraction of a second”.

Then there’s the whole issue of proof.

Victor Stenger, an evolutionary physicist who believe this theory admits “…much is still in the speculative stage, and I must admit that there are yet no empirical or observational test that can be used to test the idea of an accidental origin.

Not all physicists believe that that quantum fluctuation in a vacuum are real. Robert Jaffe, a particle theorist at M.I.T. said, “there is a flippant way people refer to the ….evidence for real vacuum fluctuations.  But there is no evidence that the vacuum fluctuations exist in the absence of matter.

There are a few experiments that have been done claiming to have verified quantum fluctuations be there’s still no consensus.

Quantum fluctuation requires that something exists before anything can be created.