“Is the Universe a Quantum Fluctuation?” According to the laws of quantum mechanics, virtual particles can arise out of the emptiness of space—and actually do, as experiments since the middle of the century had shown again and again. Tryon wondered if the universe might be the result of one such quantum pop. The argument became less sensational if you kept in mind that in quantum theory everything was a matter of probabilities. Therefore, anything was possible. Perhaps specific events were vanishingly unlikely—the creation of a universe from the nothingness of the vacuum, for instance. But
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