Just as sub-atomic particles are thought to emerge...

Just as sub-atomic particles are thought to emerge spontaneously in vacuums in laboratories, so the whole universe may be the result of a similar process.7 Professor Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University has developed a variation of an inflationary model of the expanding universe which accounts for the birth of the universe “by quantum tunneling from nothing.” “Nothing,” for Vilenkin, is a “state with no classical space-time .

the realm of unrestrained quantum gravity; it is a rather bizarre state in which all our basic notions of space, time, energy, entropy, etc., lose their meaning.”8 For those cosmologists unwilling to accept an unexplained Big Bang, or an explanation which seemed to them to require a supernatural agent, the variation of the Big Bang theory proposed by Vilenkin and Guth was welcome. Are we on the verge of a scientific explanation of the very origin of the universe?

The contention of several proponents of the new theories is that the laws of physics are themselves sufficient to account for the origin and existence of the universe. If this be true, then, in a sense, we live in a universe which needs no explanation beyond itself, a universe which has sprung into existence spontaneously from a cosmic nothingness.

Heinz Pagels, writing a few years ago, claimed that “When historians of science look back on the 1970s and 1980s they will report that for the first time scientists constructed rational mathematical models based on the laws of physics which described the creation of the universe out of nothing.