began working as an assistant professor and worked there until 1971. Tryon left Columbia University in 1971 and began working at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where he spent the rest of his academic career teaching as a professor. Is the universe a vacuum fluctuation? In the early 1970s, most physicists believed that, within the boundaries of science, one could not speak about what came before the Big Bang. It was almost universally accepted that no scientist could explain why there is something and not nothing. This was the scientific climate as Tryon was settling into working at Hunter College. But soon after arriving he found himself in a writing project that he thought required him to do an exhaustive study of how modern science perceives our universe. In studying the many ways cosmologists see our universe, he thought he had discovered a totally new way that it might have come into existence. He then wrote his idea up as a scientific paper and tried to get it published. He submitted it to Physical Review Letters, but they rejected it. He then sent it to the British scientific journal Nature, hoping it might be accepted as a "letter to the editor". An editor from the journal did not just accept it, but decided to make it a feature article. The paper appeared in Nature in December, 1973, with the title: "Is the Universe a Vacuum Fluctuation?" It proposed the idea that our universe had originated from a quantum fluctuation of the vacuum. The cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin said of the paper: "Now, what Tryon was suggesting was that our entire universe, with its vast amount of matter, was a huge quantum fluctuation, which somehow failed to disappear for more than ten billion years." Physicist Alan Guth made this comment about the paper: "In his controversial two-page paper, Tryon advanced the startling proposal that on rare occasions, whole universes might materialize from the vacuum, and our universe may have begun this way." This was the first time any scientist had used science to try to explain how our universe may have originated from nothing. In his paper, Tryon first deals with the idea of how our universe could have come from nothing and yet respect the laws of physics. Following the first law of thermodynamics, energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Tryon needed to assert that our