Letter: Vacuum's origin

From Ernest Lucas

Twice in his interesting article on the limits of knowledge (7 May, p 34), Michael Brooks stated that quantum uncertainty means the universe could have appeared from nothing – meaning that it could have arisen from a quantum vacuum.

But a quantum vacuum is not nothing; it is a particular kind of fluctuating energy field governed by quantum laws. Even if its average energy is zero, this is not nothing. Where did such an energy field and the laws which govern it come from?

This is a question which the UK’s Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, with whose views the article began, recognises cannot be answered by science. As he put it in his 2002 book Our Cosmic Habitat: “The pre-eminent mystery is why anything exists at all. What breathes life into the equations of physics, and actualised them in a real cosmos? Such questions lie beyond science, however: they are the province of philosophers and theologians.”

Just because science cannot answer some questions does not mean that they cannot be tackled fruitfully by other intellectual disciplines.

Caldicot, Monmouthshire, UK