From the Book corner: Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, and the rule that nothing comes from nothing
Its coordinates: 1.2 Cosmology (Philosophical) · 1.2.1 Origins and First Cause · 1.2.2 Fine-Tuning and Necessity +1 more
Lucretius wrote On the Nature of Things in the first century BCE: six books of Latin verse setting out the physics of Epicurus, so that readers might be freed from the fear of the gods and of death.
Book I lays down the first principle: nothing is ever created out of nothing by divine power. If things could come from nothing, Lucretius argues, anything could spring from anything. Fish could rise from the earth and men from the sea. Since everything in fact comes from fixed seeds, in fixed seasons, there must be lasting first bodies, atoms, moving in the void.
Later in the same book comes the famous argument that the universe has no edge. Suppose someone runs to the supposed boundary and throws a spear. Either it flies on, or something stops it. Either way, there is something beyond.
Yet in Book V Lucretius insists that our world did have a beginning and will have an end. The atoms are eternal. This particular arrangement of them is not.
The poem nearly vanished. It was rediscovered in a monastery library in 1417, and its influence on early modern science has been argued about ever since.
The book is in our Book corner: On the Nature of Things.
An opening question: is "nothing comes from nothing" a law of nature, a truth of reason, or only an expectation built from experience? And does it rule out a beginning, or only a beginning out of nothing?