I’ll try to flip the question, but I don’t agree with a few points in your premise. The opposite of ‘nothing’ isn’t ‘everything’ or ‘infinite energy’, it’s ‘anything’, and it’s very easy to see that something exists. Even in the vacuum of space, we can still detect energy from particles and anti-particles spontaneously being created and destroyed. There’s something there, even when there’s “nothing” there. That’s one of the things that still blows my mind about our universe, and that’s also what I mean when I say that from what I can see, it’s impossible for nothing to exist, even in a square meter of empty space.
Your question of discreteness is a good one, but also something that science can never answer because science doesn’t answer ‘why’. It answers ‘how’. We can get closer to guessing the ‘why’ the more we test a subject, but any explanation to the ‘why’ is our just current best theory that makes the most sense and is always subject to change.
Now, if there was a universe with infinite energy, then it would have infinite mass. If it has infinite mass, then it would become a black hole. We can’t see inside black holes because their gravity won’t allow the fastest thing in the universe to escape, so if there were such a universe, we couldn’t tell what it was like unless we were already inside it. We might figure out something faster than light someday and be able to study black holes more, but until then, we know that we can’t know that.
And that’s one of the biggest frustrations with science that I hear from religious people. We have to get comfortable knowing that we can’t know something, and people have been too ingrained with the idea that if they CAN’T know something then it MUST be god. But to quote an annoying scientist I occasionally agree with, “Just because you don’t know how something works doesn’t mean you know how it works.” I.E. You can’t just substitute ‘god’ in anytime you don’t know the answer because I can always do the same with ‘The Flying Spaghetti Monster’.
I’ll try to flip the question, but I don’t agree with a few points in your premise. The opposite of ‘nothing’ isn’t ‘everything’ or ‘infinite energy’, it’s ‘anything’, and it’s very easy to see that something exists. Even in the vacuum of space, we can still detect energy from particles and anti-particles spontaneously being created and destroyed. There’s something there, even when there’s “nothing” there. That’s one of the things that still blows my mind about our universe, and that’s also what I mean when I say that from what I can see, it’s impossible for nothing to exist, even in a square meter of empty space.
Your question of discreteness is a good one, but also something that science can never answer because science doesn’t answer ‘why’. It answers ‘how’. We can get closer to guessing the ‘why’ the more we test a subject, but any explanation to the ‘why’ is our just current best theory that makes the most sense and is always subject to change.
Now, if there was a universe with infinite energy, then it would have infinite mass. If it has infinite mass, then it would become a black hole. We can’t see inside black holes because their gravity won’t allow the fastest thing in the universe to escape, so if there were such a universe, we couldn’t tell what it was like unless we were already inside it. We might figure out something faster than light someday and be able to study black holes more, but until then, we know that we can’t know that.
And that’s one of the biggest frustrations with science that I hear from religious people. We have to get comfortable knowing that we can’t know something, and people have been too ingrained with the idea that if they CAN’T know something then it MUST be god. But to quote an annoying scientist I occasionally agree with, “Just because you don’t know how something works doesn’t mean you know how it works.” I.E. You can’t just substitute ‘god’ in anytime you don’t know the answer because I can always do the same with ‘The Flying Spaghetti Monster’.