FROM NOTHING, NOTHING COMES
“What's up?” asks Perk, imagining Gram must be a little depressed, though certain as ever he remains unable to read the man.
Cocking his head and raising his eyebrows, Gram pauses a moment before responding, “I'm just thinking about a universe in which gravity has negative energy.”
“As one does.” Perk puffs.
“You know this but have you actually considered it?” Gram asks.
“I can't, really. I'm no physicist. I mean, yeah, I read Hawking, Smolin, Turok, and the rest. The universe is flat. Right? It makes sense, I suppose, but what are the implications? What does it mean, exactly?” Perk scrunches, furrows, and contorts his face to imitate cartoon thinking.
“I don't know, but if I had a happy place zero-energy would be it,” Gram says, smiling and closing his eyes. “Everything in the visible universe – all the light, matter, and antimatter – is energy-positive while our friend gravity is,” he opens his eyes, “energy-negative.” Gram's voice drops, slows, and gets quieter. “And gravity doesn't just cancel out some of that energy,” he pinches at the air, “here and there, but—”
Perk interjects with wide eyes and in a tone of pure excitement, “—neutralizes everything; making the total energy of all creation,” his hands explode outward before slamming together, “sum to cypher!”
“Right. And what, I ask you, could be nicer than that?”
“Nothing.”
“But, deeper still, the universe – the whole 13.8 billion year eruptive and expansive substance of a trillion visible galaxies, home to something like a sextillion stars (the plasma forge of nearly all complexity) – doesn't just amount, energetically, to nil, and it didn't merely arise out of nothing, but 'nothing' itself,” Gram pauses. “Well,” he says, batting at he air with the back of his right hand, “isn't.”
“Nothing isn't nothing?” asks Perk.
“Right. It should be of no surprise to us, at all, just as Lawrence Krauss argued, that the Ancient Greek or Indian, Catholic or Shakespearean concept of 'nothing', as void without any properties, as philosophically or poetically interesting as it may be, is not an accurate description of nature; instead, 'nothing' can be understood as a tempestuous ferment of particle and antiparticle pairs perpetually nullifying one another.”
“Sure. 'Nothing' is a kind of all-pervasive froth of instability,” Perk imagines, dancing his fingers across an invisible horizon before him.
“And all without violating any laws of known physics.”
“Right.”
“And it's from there, with this more accurate picture of 'nothing', that you can find yourself totally content with a self-contained universe born of and sustained upon an energy input of zero. God!”
“So, like Alan Guth suggested, it's 'all free lunches.'”
Gram, tickled and laughing, responds, “It's free lunches all the way down!”
Perk smiles and chuckles, half amused by the idea and half delighted by Gram's delight at himself.
“This is my next play. It's called Waiting for Guth. The stage is dark, set with only a single street lamp and a bus stop, at the intersection of Infinite and Regress. It opens with Guth, in a hat and coat, sitting upon the bench with a tablet in his lap. After twenty-five minutes of silence I enter, stage left, naked. I quickly alight on the bench. Six more minutes of silence follows before I ask Guth, seemingly out of the blue, 'Yes sir, but if everything comes from nothing, then upon what does your nothing rest?' There's a long pause. Then Guth replies, “Free lunches, of course.” Visibly confused and a little annoyed I would retort rudely, 'But don't your free lunches follow from the 'nothing', the nothing that is something?' Guth would look at me, noticing for the first time that I'm nude, and assure me, 'That would be logical, yes, but it just so happens to be the other way around. I could show you the maths if you like,' he says, holding up his tablet. Incapable of the math, I would come back with 'Alright, sir, but upon what then do your free lunches rest?' He would look at me with a sparkle in his eye and answer, 'You are very clever, but I see what you're about and am one step ahead of you. The universe, my friend, is free lunches all the way down!' Another twenty-five minutes elapse. Curtain.”
“Yes. No. The play should extend back to the start of our conversation here. With two people sitting at a table then, with 'it's free lunches all the way down' the whole scene zooms into a play within the play, Robert Lepage-like.”
“Yeah, and it will be called Waiting for Waiting for Guth. And it will end with Guth's nude interlocutor saying 'ex nihilo nihil fit.'”
“Yes!”
“And then a brown paper bag, containing a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich and apple sauce, slowly drops out of the sky, landing at their feet.”
“Curtain.”
