A Proposed Proof That The Origin of The Universe Cannot Be Scientifically Explained

"Absolutely nothing" in this sense is simply the (or a) vacuum state of the theory. It's a position (or set of positions) in the moudli space of gravitational instantons. I've always been rather distressed at how easily various members of our community have claimed that it is the "nothing" of the "something from nothing" conundrum. It has simply developed as way of "shutting up" those who ask the naive question. Exactly.

And as with the last time this came up, I would suggest that "nothing" is ill-defined, and so it cannot be claimed that it is consistent in any way.Empty universes, zero sized universes, and other such "nothings" are easily entertained, and may be consistent under what ever theories they arise. But they're still not really the real "nothing".

I don't really believe in the duality of "laws" and "material something": I only see the laws, and "material" being a facet.This goes back to when I first learnt string theory, coming at it from the GR/QG perspective. The classic particle physics (Green Schwarz Witten) approach is to embed the strings in the pre-existing target space (our space-time.) But the more fundemental way to picture this is to dismiss any notion of target-space and simply look at the 2d string world-sheet. The fields on the world sheet can be interpretted as coordinates on some "pseudo"space, and the coupling constants between the fields magically seem to form a metric on this pseudo-space. Push this far enough and you see that in low energy this pseudo-space seems to be the entire world of d=10 Supergravity.So if the "real world" doesn't really exist, only the 2d world-sheet, perhaps we push back another layer and the world-sheet isn't "real", and on we go.At this point, I lost all faith in there being anything material or "real" about the "real world" Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

In the context of mathematics, certainly. My empty universes are merely advanced versions of the empty set. But do we have the luxury of mathematcs to describe this "absolute nothing", in the absence of this "something" that enables the existence of the mathematics?

Your example of demonstrating this is to suggest a mathematical definition of the empty set. And I completely agree that this is logically consistent. And I would go as far as to say that this is pretty much as close to nothing as we can get. But i still see this as "something", and not "nothing". From the empty set we can build the whole vast structure of number. Such a building block hardly deserves the term "nothing".