Can something happen without anything else causing it?
What prompted you to ask this question? 🤔
Trying to sleep
I’m imagining a middle school student answering a homework question about Newton’s laws, and people are responding with, “Well what’s your reference frame? Consider Virtual Particles in Quantum Theory.”
This is a concept that has been discussed for a long time ; you are in good company contemplating this fundamental paradox.
That strongly depends on your reference frame. As in, what system are you looking at? Where are you drawing your box? If your box is around the entire universe, then yes, every action is a reaction stemming from the big bang, with very few notable exceptions pertaining to black holes that I wont go into.
However, if your reference frame is a hand and a ball, then the hand pushing the ball is an original action, the ball moving its reaction.
What do you mean about the black holes?
It’s also worth noting, I think, that the universe might be spatially infinite, which makes “box” a funny way of saying it.
Well, its kind of a matter of debate really on the black holes, and its in regard to the law of conservation of information. I’ll freely admit, we are getting to the edge of my understanding here, but essentially black holes very nature of being inescapable by anything means that information, once inside, is permanently lost.
The reason hawking radiation was such a big deal is that it found a way for this information to potentially be released into the universe once again. That radiation is actually a pair of “virtual particles” (which aren’t real particles, more a mathematical trick to describe complex interactions between different fields and their particles). One of the particles “pops in” to existence on the inside of the event horizon and one on the outside, thus separating the pair. One falls in, one escapes. But since they didn’t annihilate the energy that the now real particle has must come from the black hole, hence, the energy has escaped the black hole.
Now, is that “action” a reaction, or is it a brand new action with no inciting incident? I dont have an answer, and its up to speculation because hawking radiation may or may not even exist. But its our best guess.
What if the ball was talking shit?
Or if the ball was thrown at them…
The hand was guided by neurological impulse
Not if your chosen reference frame is a hand and a ball, as per the example
I mean aren’t you saying: “Something can happen without a cause if we just ignore the cause.”
I read ops question as about reality, not hypothetical universes that contain a hand that moves a without an arm or brain attached.
It appears that every action is a reaction (or to use the more customary terminology, every action is an effect of some number of causes, and is in turn a cause for some number of effects).
However, it must either be the case that there was a first action, which would necessarily be an uncaused effect, or that time is either a loop or is infinite in extent, such that there is no beginning and thus no need for an uncaused effect.
And none of those possibilities is really intellectually satisfying, so it’s an open question (which doesn’t stop people from insisting on the nominal truth of one or another of them).
And even with the loop or eternal universe, you can ask where it came from. Like why is it there, and not nothing?
Thanks for putting so much effort in your answer. If you think about it, it’s kinda scuffed and you either end with existence is not possible or there was an action that was not caused by one. Just like you said.
This is the kind of paradox that leads us (I mean humans more generally) to look for some fundamental assumption we’re making about time that will turn out to be wrong. I assume that’s true although I wonder whether it’s literally impossible for us to even imagine how time “truly” works, let alone measure it.
The only candidate for that ever being observed is the collapse of quantum wavefunctions, and there’s interpretations where that’s not really random either. Everything else we’ve ever measured is definitely totally deterministic.
Technically, yes.
Norton’s dome - Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton’s_dome
There are some good videos out there that can explain it a bit better than this
Wow, I’d never heard of that.
I wonder if there’s a quantum mechanical equivalent you could make. This has the loophole that we don’t live in a purely Newtonian universe.
Are we looking at the physical universe, or are looking at psychology, or philosophy contexts?
All of them
Only the second time is a re-action.
Though those aren’t really proven real: From that same Wikipedia article:
Although widely used, they are by no means a necessary feature of QFT, but rather are mathematical conveniences — as demonstrated by lattice field theory, which avoids using the concept altogether.[citation needed]
Getting back the the top question, if everything is a result of something, what started it all?
I am sitting still. Now I am reaching for garlic bread. Nothing acted upon me to prompt that. I am eating the garlic bread. Am I defying the very laws of physics? Yum yum.
The presence of delicious garlic bread prompted you to reach for it.
The network of neurons that has evolved to have specific taste preferences that allow us to eat food that isn’t bad for us caused him to eat it. The planning done by said network is what caused the bread to be there in the first place. We all know that we have to eat, and tend to be good at ensuring that we can eat whenever we feel like it.
It’s all pure physics and chemistry. When your stomach gets empty you feel hunger due to the stomach or related glands releasing mRNA that causes the brain to activate different circuits that cause you to seek food. Animals that don’t do this don’t live for very long.
What happened right before spacetime?!
Spacejam.
MJ dunked us into existence? Unorthodox belief!
