Creation out of Nothing

This quarter I'm taking a class called Physics and Society, and I have a feeling I'll be posting lots of stuff brought up in this class because it's amazing.

One thing we went over the other day in lecture is the mass of a bound system, I'll use the Earth and the moon as an example. Conventional thought would tell us that the mass of the bound Earth-Moon system would be the sum of their two masses (M(e) + M(m)). There is also binding energy in the system, in this case the gravitational force holding the Earth and the moon together. Because of the equation E=Mc^2, which says that energy and mass are two sides of the same coin, we know that this binding energy contributes to the total mass in some way. If we wanted to separate the moon and the Earth we would have to pull them apart from each other, or add energy to the system. So in order to get M(e) + M(m) you have to add energy. The bound system has less energy than the separated moon and earth, and because mass and energy are the same thing the bound system also has less mass than the separated objects. Here's the wiki on Binding Energy.

Right now you're saying ok that's fine, so what? Well, what if the binding energy were really big? Enough maybe that it equaled the sum of the masses inside the system? Then you would have a system with no mass. That would be pretty insane for a two particle system, but it would be really crazy if it reflected the total energy/mass of the universe, which is also a bound system. What if the total mass of the universe was zero? My professor then told us about a recent colloquium held at UW which was titled "Why is there something instead of nothing?" and apparently their conclusion was "Maybe there is nothing, cleverly disguised as something."

Far. Out.