The question that Larson answered for me a long time ago was debated recently by well known personalities in the LST community. They actually changed the question from “Why?” to “How?” but I can’t see much difference. To ask, “How is it that something can come from nothing?” may be clearer, than “Why is it there is something rather than nothing?” but, in either case, nothing has to be defined and that is the key.
They talk about virtual particles in a vacuum being nothing, because they can’t be measured, but becoming real, when, say, a positron and electron are produced, the energy and charges of this pair of particles balancing out to zero. This is a highly unlikely and unsatisfying manipulation of ad hoc definitions to my mind.
I agree, though, that the definition of nothing has to be modified to something that is nothing, because it can’t be measured, like the balance of a scale. It points to 0 when it’s balanced, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that nothing is on either side. It can also mean that two, equal quantities are on opposite sides of the scale, which can be changed, unbalancing the scale and therefore producing something.
Interestingly enough, the definition of nothing as something that cannot be measured, brings up the question of law. If we define nothing as something undetectable, which turns into something detectable, it has to do so as a matter of law. A law must govern nothing that transforms it into a lawful something.
However, in the LST community, an anthropomorphic set of infinite environs now sits opposed to this legalistic determinism of traditional thought. The 10^500 possibilities of the vacua facing string theory imply that there are that many possible sets of laws that can be observed by any observer who may be part of a given system, meaning nothing has meaning in an absolute sense, which has led to the idea of multiverses.
Unfortunately, Larson’s ideas cannot be brought to the LST table of discussion, but we can see their power and beauty, by imagining that they were permitted. Larson defines nothing as a perfect balance between the rates of changing quantities of space and changing quantities of time. Given a change of unit space, for each change of unit time, defines a unit motion that cannot be measured.
The law of this nothing that is something is the fundamental law of algebraic relations, the greater than, less than or equal to relations of these two changing quantities that define nothing, when they are in equilibrium. This law of algebraic relations governs the universe of motion, for by it something comes from nothing, when the equilibrium of the two rates of change is altered.
It is astounding to me that from this law all the elements of the standard model emerge. The less thans are connected to the more thans, and these become the equal tos, which are compounded into different equal tos, of greater and greater power, and these three are compoundable into combinations of balanced and unbalanced more thans, less thans and equal tos, which just happen to form the exact number of different kinds of particles and anti-particles found in the standard model of LST particle physics.
But then, if that were not enough, these fundamental combinations compound, still following the same algebraic law, into combinations identical to the protons and neutrons of the LST nuclear physics, which, along with the electron, compound into the 117 elements of the LST chemistry, forming the periodic table of elements.
It remains to learn more about how they combine and uncombine and otherwise relate to each other, but even this much would make for a much more interesting discussion at the LST table than the boring speculation about the multiverse that their current discussion inevitably devolves to.