Yet another take on all this: youtu.be/c-QkJUxcGt8
1] the claim is made that physicists “know that virtual particles can come into existence from the nothingness of space”.
But [it seems] the physicists are observing this in the somethingness that they are a part of. The space around us would seem to be a manifestation of a somethingness that does exist. How could actual nothingness itself ever be encountered?
2] the “deeper questions”: “why is there quantum mechanics, why are there laws of physics instead of no laws of physics, no thing at all?”
Here he is left with this as an explanation: 'Why not?"
In other words, we still have no capacity to answer that question much beyond acknowledging that “I think, therefore I am”, in this particular “something”.
The point is that this is not likely to be a question in which an answer/the answer will ever be pinned down. At least not anytime soon. We just have to accept the “brute facticity” of the universe.
As for time itself it is argued here by some that given the big bang and the “inflation” that resulted in the universe as we think we understand it today, it all required a “beginning”. To which Carroll responds “they’re wrong.”
But the chuckle that follows indicates just how far he and all the rest of us are from actually knowing the answer. In other words, we have competing conjectures predicated [in the end] on certain assumptions that are made.
Not unlike what unfolds here.
Carroll’s own “bottom line” here and now: “My favorite cosmological model which is always subject to update when new ideas or data come in, the universe doesn’t have a beginning, it did not come into existence at a moment in time, it always existed. It looks different from moment to moment and we are only observing a tiny part of it so we don’t even know what the whole thing looks like.”
This guy I like becasue he comes back time and again to all the “unknown unknowns” that stand between the question and the answer.
And then this part: teleology.
In other words, is any of this necessary? The ultimate “why?” question.
Carroll doesn’t think so.
So, there could have been nothing but it just so happened [for reasons we do not understand] that there was something instead. Though, according to Carroll, it was probably not necessary that it be this something.