Yes, Some Things Do Come From Nothing

You know how it goes:

"What church do you go to?"

(sigh) "I don't go to church."

"Why not?"

(gnashing teeth, rejects claim of Satanism) "I'm an atheist."

(thrilled to finally get a chance to use the "argument" he learned in Sunday school) "Oh, yeah? Well, then how did everything start without God? You can't get something from nothing!"

Makes you want to carry around an astrophysics textbook.

But don't despair! PZ Myers has found an excellent retort:

Nicely done: Ethan Siegel explains how we know that stuff is getting spontaneously created all the time. It's no miracle, it requires no magic man in the sky, particle/anti-particle pairs just pop into existence constantly.

One of the oldest adages in existence is you can't get something for nothing, as over a million websites will tell you, including not-so-subtly, cartoonstock.

And, most often when people bring this up to me, it's in an attempt to prove the existence of God -- and the insufficiency of the Big Bang -- by pointing to the Universe.

Well, let's take this question as seriously as our knowledge allows us to. (And by that, I mean physically, rather than philosophically or theologically.) In physics, can you get something for nothing? And if so, what can you and can't you get?

In many ways, yes, you can. In fact, in many ways, getting something when you have nothing is unavoidable! (Although you can't necessarily get anything you want.)

Read the whole thing. I'm no physicist and even I understand it.