Can a Universe Create Itself Out of Nothing?
“In Stephen Hawking’s new book The Grand Design, he says that because of the law of gravity, the universe can and will create itself out of nothing. But I thought that gravity was a function of mass, as per Einstein. How can you have gravity before mass and therefore how can gravity explain mass?” In Stephen’s new book, he says that the Theory of Everything that Einstein spent 30 years of his life chasing is string theory (or its latest incarnation, M-theory). In string theory, we have a multiverse of universes. Think of our universe as the surface of a soap bubble, which is expanding. We live on the skin of this bubble. But string theory predicts that there should be other bubbles out there, which can collide with other bubbles or even sprout or bud baby bubbles, as in a bubble bath. But how can an entire universe come out of nothing? This apparently violates the conservation of matter and energy. But there is a simple answer. Matter, of course, has positive energy. But gravit...