Tink, maybe I understood about 25% of that article...nevertheless, smiling and enjoyed it very much...it's fun to read about, um, "metastable false vacuums" and such...
And hey, what's not to love about a theory that revives the Einstein cosmological constant? Didn't poor E call that his greatest mistake? And we're gonna go with probabilistic rather than deterministic now? Yay!
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As for coming out from nothing, one point I took from Hawking's most famous book, Brief History of Time, was that if you add all the anti-matter particles with the pro-matter particles of the universe, the sum is zero! Not sure Stephen actually intended it like that, but I jumped on the idea anyway!