Cosmogony In STARFARERS

Poul Anderson, Starfarers (New York, October 1999), Prologue. 

See:

A Sea Of Virtual Particles

A Master Of Politics And Physics

In quantum mechanics, particles begin and cease to exist and this process generated the universe. In Hegelian philosophy, being and nothing are identical but antithetical and are synthesized as becoming. Do these quantum and Hegelian processes sound similar? 

Hegel thought that the most abstract concept was being because everything is but that being is identical with its opposite, nothing, because to say of anything only that it is is to say nothing about it. However, becoming synthesizes being and nothing. 

I think that possibility is more abstract than being. See:

Black Holes And Hegel

In discussing alternative histories and mutable timelines, we become familiar with the idea that what has happened is only a subset of what might have happened.

It is physicists, not philosophers, that have gained concrete empirically based knowledge of:

the identity of mass with energy;

the constituents of matter;

the periodic table;

etc.

Energy means many possibilities, some of them realized.