Nothing from something?

Of all the restless minds in all the beds in all the world (and universe), it popped into mine. If "something" can spontaneously appear out of "nothing," can the reverse be true? Can a something also ad lib a disappearing act, surprise slipping back into nothing, or perhaps choosing to inhabit a new nothing when it tires of the other somethings around it.

What got this maybe nothing of an idea started was a something said by cosmologist and theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss while on the Colbert Report plugging his new book "A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing."

I highly recommend watching the full interview (the clip is here), but the kick that got my thought-ball rolling was his comment that the universe favors something over nothing because "nothing is unstable." In an apparently empty space, eventually particles will "burp" into existence. Where do the particles come from? Are they the product of a divine indigestion? That's too big a something for me to answer, but not too big for me to toy around with a little.

The nothing-to-something thought trip gets much trippier when you think about the possibility of entire universes big-banging their way into existence where nothing once was. Ours is still spreading out in the spacious nothing it decided to inhabit a long long time ago. Maybe it will reach a limit some day, and return to the void whence it came, starting a new cycle, giving it a second (and third, and fourth...) go to explore all its unexplored possibilities.

Xi-sub-b

Get up, quark!
It’s not so strange, quark,
for me to want you
to lift your heavy bottom, quark,
and carry on
the way young baryons do.

[Physicists Confirm Existence of New Particle]