Author: Don Nigroni

Last year the noted physicist and infamous mad scientist James Danti confided his secret aim in life to me, his skeptical brother.
According to him, there can’t always have been something in spacetime because then there would be an infinite amount of time in the past and it would have taken an infinite amount of time to get to yesterday so today could not have happened. But today did happen, hence, there wasn’t an infinite amount of time in the past. So once there was absolute nothingness.
But something can’t come from absolute nothingness. Something could come from God or from empty space but not from absolute nothingness. Therefore, somehow something just happened.
That something was uncreated and may have itself been creative. Regardless, if an uncreated something must have happened at least once then it could happen again. In fact, it could be happening everywhere all the time.
Then he said in no uncertain terms, “And I aim to prove it.”
I’m an economist, not a physicist, and I do a lot of nodding when James starts babbling about higher dimensions and parallel universes. But if he could detect things popping into existence uncreated then I thought that could mean obtaining energy from nothing and might be financially lucrative.
Yesterday, James claimed he finally detected something popping into existence spontaneously which was not caused by anything already existent, not matter, energy nor even space. In his special quirky lab using advanced nanotechnology and supercomputers to eliminate the effects of virtual particles, he said that he was able to detect the miniscule electromagnetic effect of an uncreated particle so small that it would take trillions of them to equal a trillionth of a quark.
Then he told me the bottom line, “For billions of dollars, I could generate a billionth of a cent worth of power.”
He seemed mighty pleased with himself. I wasn’t impressed.