energy could cancel out its gravitational negative energy, leaving a sun with zero energy. This led him to speculate what would prevent a quantum transition from the vacuum from creating a new sun. Jordan did not suggest that our universe could have come about by a quantum fluctuation of the vacuum, but rather how matter might be generated within an eternal universe. In the early 1970s, the Ukrainian from Soviet Russia P. I. Fomin (Peter Ivanovych Fomin), seems to have independently come up with the idea that our universe could have arisen by a quantum process. However, he did not publish until 1975, almost two years after Tryon, so the scientific community gave Tryon credit for coming up with this idea first. Tryon also believed that this quantum event had no purpose or cause. In essence, he was saying "that our universe could have originated in this way and emphasized such a creation event would not require a cause". This is why Tryon wrote: "In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time". Although Tryon's paper gives the impression that the mystery of where our universe originated is solved, it is not. His paper mentions how there is this "larger space in which our Universe is embedded," but this idea is given only a very vague and short description. Further, although Tryon proposed that our universe came into being from an accident allowed by the laws of physics, he does not indicate what created the laws of physics, leaving the mystery of the creation of the universe incompletely resolved. Works Tryon, Edward P. "Is the Universe a Vacuum Fluctuation?", in Nature, 246(1973), pp. 396–397. See also Zero-energy universe References Primary sources 1940 births 2019 deaths 20th-century American physicists Cornell University alumni Hunter College faculty University of California, Berkeley alumni People from Terre Haute, Indiana