Why I'm Not an Atheist: The Case for Agnosticism

[Jim__]

43. Can you cite the source for that Feynman quote and provide some context?

Lawrence Krauss who wrote a book in 2012 called A Universe from Nothing and based that claim on the fact that nothing is unstable has since admitted that this nothing means no particles and not really nothing. He also admits that physics has not shown how something can come from nothing. From Krauss' interview in April of 2012 (my bolding):

Krauss: I'm making a deeper claim, but at the same time I think you're overstating what I argued. I don't think I argued that physics has definitively shown how something could come from nothing; physics has shown how plausible physical mechanisms might cause this to happen. I try to be intellectually honest in everything that I write, especially about what we know and what we don't know. If you're writing for the public, the one thing you can't do is overstate your claim, because people are going to believe you. They see I'm a physicist and so if I say that protons are little pink elephants, people might believe me. And so I try to be very careful and responsible. We don't know how something can come from nothing, but we do know some plausible ways that it might.

But I am certainly claiming a lot more than just that. That it's possible to create particles from no particles is remarkable---that you can do that with impunity, without violating the conservation of energy and all that, is a remarkable thing. The fact that "nothing," namely empty space, is unstable is amazing. But I'll be the first to say that empty space as I'm describing it isn't necessarily nothing, although I will add that it was plenty good enough for Augustine and the people who wrote the Bible. For them an eternal empty void was the definition of nothing, and certainly I show that that kind of nothing ain't nothing anymore.

I'd be surprised if Feynman knew how something could come from nothing, that Krauss wouldn't know this too.