Edward P. Tryon (September 4, 1940 – December 11, 2019) was an American scientist and a professor emeritus of physics at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY). He was the first physicist to propose that our universe originated as a quantum fluctuation of the vacuum. Early life Tryon was born and raised in Terre Haute, Indiana. He took his first physics course in his junior year at Wiley High School. Academia and intellectual influences Tryon entered Cornell University in 1958. He was influenced by Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe, who was one of his professors. He was especially affected by advice that Bethe gave him: "Our intuition is based on our experiences in the macroscopic world. There is no reason to expect our intuition to be valid for microscopic phenomena." He graduated from Cornell University in 1962, earning a bachelor's degree in physics. He would then go on to do his graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley. There he was very much influenced by Steven Weinberg. He took courses taught by Weinberg, who would later become a mentor to him. His doctoral thesis focused on the relationship between general relativity and quantum field theory and was titled: "Classical and Quantum Field-Theoretic Derivations of Gravitational Theory." He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a PhD in physics in 1967. Dennis Sciama and the idea that the universe is a vacuum fluctuation In 1969, (some versions of this story say 1970), Tryon was at a lecture taking place at Columbia University being given by British cosmologist Dennis Sciama. And when Sciama paused for a moment in his speaking, Tryon suddenly said out loud: "Maybe the universe is a vacuum fluctuation?" Everyone laughed, assuming it was a joke. Embarrassed, he did not explain to anyone that this was not the case. Tryon says he only remembered this incident after he was reminded of it when he published a paper about this subject matter. Career Tryon's specialization is in theoretical quark models, theoretical general relativity, and cosmology. In 1973, he proposed that the universe is a large-scale quantum fluctuation in vacuum energy. This is called vacuum genesis or the zero-energy universe hypothesis. He has been quoted as saying, "the universe is simply one of those things that happens from time to time." In 1967, he began working at Columbia University as a research assistant. In 1968 he