Absolute nothingness

You are falling into your own trap How can "nothing" go on indefinitely? The problem is "nothing" is the wrong word, as it is too easy to confuse (as above) with "emptyness". More appropriate terms might be "non-existence" or "lack-of-existence".Fortunately we do not have to deal with "non-existence" very much. There is no "frontier expansion wave" of the Universe. The Universe is either infinite or compact, which means in either case there is no edge. To say the Universe is expanding is to simply say that the distances between things (sufficiently separated things like super-clusters) are getting bigger. I guess our 4d Universe could have an edge where it adjoins some higher dimensional bulk space, which is a string/M-theory type concept, but even then it is not "nothing" beyond the edge - just the larger "true" Universe.The Universe exists. That which is not the Universe does not exist. If it did, it would be included in with the Universe. Simple really Actually, it can be more complex than this but that's for another day... Good

The naive concept of space between naive concepts of particles is not 'nothing', but instead a misunderstanding of what constitutes space and what constitutes particles. It certainly has 'nothing' to do with the bandying of the word 'nothing' in the context of 'outside' or 'before' the universe. Particles are merely ripples on the surface of an ocean of space. The ocean exists (and is certainly not nothing) even if it happens to be flat smooth upon occasion.Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

There is no 'space' outside the universe - there is no 'outside' the universe. The universe is existence. 'Outside' the Universe does not exist. Hence my original point that the words 'nothing' and 'emptyness' are completely inappropriate in this context.If I ask 'what is north of the North Pole' the answer is not 'nothing' but 'the question is ill-defined'. Same with 'what is outside the Universe?' or 'what came before the Universe/Big Bang?'The space between particles is exactly the same as the particles, just with lower localised 'energy' for want of a better word at this level of explanation. You could imagine space as a sheet, and particles as knots in the sheet - there are not two distinct entities: space and that which lives in space. All are part of the same whole. That whole is existence. I have no physical description of it other than poor analogies as it encompasses everything, so there is nothing with which to describe it. However, I can describe it mathematically and that is what we do - welcome to General Relativity and Qunatum Field Theory...

Yep, found it, we call it the vacuum energy. On the cosmological scale it is currently thrusting the Universe apart.

Ok, first off vacuum energy is an experiemental fact. Tests of the Casimir Effect are probably the most obvious examples.Einstein never had a theory of Vacuum Energy. He reasoned that a QM system will have a non-zero ground state. GR has a cosmological constant, but doesn't say anything about it - it is a free parameter and can take any value.The super-large vacuum energy calculation comes from Grand Unification and SuperGravity. It is still a mystery. SuperSymmetery doesn't actually help much.

So allow me to interject and point out that 'true nothingness' is no more infinite than it is brown...