Why There Is Something

Today I watched some old videos of Robert Lawrence Kuhn about existentialism and that brutally simple question behind : why is there something rather than nothing?

Honestly, none of the “clever” answers felt convincing. The closest thing to an answer, for me, isn’t in wordplay or in stories about “before the Big Bang,” or romantic trips into black holes. It’s in defining the through what we can actually observe and test: particles and forces. Not a speculative mythology of origins, and not a four-page Lagrangian of the Standard Model that mostly fits phenomena after the fact.

Everything above the level of particles and forces—Earth, the Sun, life, minds—looks emergent from that underlying layer. And if one can show that the particles themselves are emergent (I’ve argued this for the electron; if that’s right, it hints that all particles could be emergent), and if forces are emergent as well (e.g., showing an emergent origin for α-fine structure constant), then what exists becomes ; reality as the unavoidable outcome of mathematics operating within a minimal, contradiction-free structure.

Sure, you can imagine a universe where “magic” exists and laws are written by an invisible hand. But that kind of external, arbitrary rule-writing would eventually collide with the internal consistency of emergent laws—contradictions would appear somewhere. So to me, it’s the combination of emergent mathematics plus minimality (in the sense of avoiding contradictions) that what we call existence.

And this claim can stand even if my specific papers about emergent α, the electron mass, or forces turn out to be wrong—because the deeper point is the direction; if, one day, someone rigorously shows these constants are emergent, then “something” stops looking like an accident and starts looking like the only coherent option.

I’m not saying mathematics “creates” existence in a naive way. I’m saying what exists may be emergent from mathematics. The final question then is sharper: is mathematics itself self-sufficient? I have a strong intuition that the answer depends on the Riemann Hypothesis—because if there is any place where an “outside law” would have to enter, it would be hidden in the primes.