[...]A Q&A with Physicist and Author Lawrence Krauss | Around The Mall[...]…

“How to get a cosmos from nothing”
Physicist Lawrence Krauss discusses how the universe could have naturally arisen from nothing (2009)

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/09/10076985-how-to-get-a-cosmos-from-nothing

I would also correct Dr. Krauss when he says, “We don’t educate them well enough about biology or physics”– children aren’t educated well enough about mathematics or physics. Biology, outside of medicine, isn’t all that important. It cannot build computers, bridges, or rocket ships. Those are the applications of maths and physics.

@ John C. Field,

It’s suppose to make your head hurt! That means you’ve stumbled on a problem that you cannot properly answer, and that is where the truly revolutionary separate themselves. The greatest scientists in history (and thinkers, even) are so because they can mentally transcend the mainstream ‘shell’ that envelopes most popular science. It brought us Relativity, it brought us quantum theory, electrodynamics, etc.,

But I agree with your opinion that ‘current explanations of something out of nothing are unclear or insufficient’. I think an explanation like Dr. Krauss suggests, ‘Quantum mechanics says that out of empty space, because of quantum mechanical fluctuations, things appear all the time’ is sketchy– quantum mechanics doesn’t say that, the mathematics of quantum mechanics say that and the mathematics of quantum mechanics is where questions like ‘what is nothing?’ will be answered, or at least described. Mathematics, by it’s very definition, is metaphysical [you can't 'meta' anything unless you first possess the symmetry necessary to produce physics, which is mathematics], it provides the ‘shell’ as Dr. Susskind put it for the manifestation of our physics and without mathematical metaphysicism physics is unintelligible.

Children [AND certain popular physicists] need to be exposed more to D’Arcy Thompson and less Richard Dawkins [that's not meant as a disrespect to Dr. Dawkins' genius], or more Feynman, Tegmark, Turing, Godel, Susskind, Penrose, Euler, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Planck, etc.,

Our knowledge of what is beyond the universe, higher dimensions, or empty space is itself limiting and conceptually not understandable us. We may mathematically try to explain our reality via quantum mechanics, String theory, multiverse, etc., but conceptually understanding higher dimensions would be like explaining calculus to your dog; also Godel’s incompleteness theorem kicks in mathematically limiting our understanding of our reality however small it is. We are trapped by our 3D existence limiting our understanding of our reality and beyond higher dimensions.

So when will we hit the lid of understanding our reality? Maybe soon or another million years, we will not know until its hit. Ask Fluffy

And of course, if physics cannot convincingly deal with the big null, we move into the realm of metaphysics and the mess of infinite regress, prime causation, intelligent design, etc.. Help! I’m starting to get a headache.