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I was reading Stephen Hawking's 'The theory of everything' when I came across a very interesting type of universe, the 'zero energy universe' since then, I've read some websites but all they used to prove the hypothesis's authenticity were observations(which was found to be very close to zero, and there would anyways be an unexplained curvature if the energies were not close to zero)

What I am interested in knowing is that in the book, Stephen hawking said, and I am paraphrasing that we can add as much mass as we want to the universe because subsequent negative gravitational potential energy will get added.

Now the boldness with which the line was written, I am convinced that there must be some mathematical proof of this relation between the mass and negative energy being exactly equal to each other, at least in a universe without complications like quantum effects. However, I was not able to find any such proof. Can the universe cook books?

Qmechanic
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Aayush Mahajan
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  • What do you mean by the last line? – HDE 226868 Aug 22 '14 at 17:53
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    @HDE226868 'to cook the books' is an expression that is often applied to bookkeeping. It means 'to tamper with the numbers', and it is a (effective but illegal) way to hide bad economic trends etc. in companies :) – Danu Aug 22 '14 at 18:03
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    sure it can, it can cook us as well :) – Nikos M. Aug 22 '14 at 19:33
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    I always find these questions awkward. It doesn't matter. In fact, it matters less than not at all because ground fact trumps math no matter how beautiful it may be. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Aug 22 '14 at 19:48
  • Until Hawking finds a team of experimentalists who can verify his statements, they are all in the "It's not even false!" category. That's the tragedy of modern theoretical physics. These guys are enormously gifted, incredibly driven and have produced an enormous volume of beautiful work, and, yet, none of that means anything in physics, until the experiment catches up with their predictions. That time will come, but probably not until long after their deaths. To me that's a real tragedy. – CuriousOne Aug 22 '14 at 23:33
  • @dmckee, I must beg to differ, we do make theories based on observations, but you have to keep in mind that observations can be sheer coincidence, I am not talking about this particular case, you must be knowing more about it than I am, but we can't say something with absolute trust if we don't know the underlying theory. And the question wasn't even about the zero energy hypothesis, it was about how we can add as much mass to the universe wbecause subsequent negative energy gets added, you can't make tha bold a statement without a theory. – Aayush Mahajan Aug 23 '14 at 10:41

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