Well, after being accused of misquoting Stephen Hawking, I thought that I would crack open my copy of "A Brief History of Time" and see what Hawking had to say about the "something" from "nothing".
In Chapter 8, "The Origin and Fate of the Universe", I found a paragraph that I thought addressed the question properly. Please note that the part in bold is the question that was posed to me, and the part in red was my answer. So it turns out that my answer was in complete agreement with Hawking. Lucky me! It's been several years since I've read this book.
Here's the paragraph from Hawking:
"The idea of inflation could also explain why there is so much matter in the universe. There are something like ten million million million million million million million million million million million million million million (1 with eighty zeroes after it) particles in the region of the universe that we can observe. Where did they all come from? The answer is that, in quantum theory, particles can be created out of energy in the form of particle/antiparticle pairs. But that just raises the question of where the energy came from. The answer is that the total energy of the universe is exactly zero. The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. However, the matter is all attracting itself by gravity. Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less energy than the same two pieces a long way apart, because you have to expend energy to separate them against the gravitational force that is pulling them together. Thus, in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero. "
In Chapter 8, "The Origin and Fate of the Universe", I found a paragraph that I thought addressed the question properly. Please note that the part in bold is the question that was posed to me, and the part in red was my answer. So it turns out that my answer was in complete agreement with Hawking. Lucky me! It's been several years since I've read this book.
Here's the paragraph from Hawking:
"The idea of inflation could also explain why there is so much matter in the universe. There are something like ten million million million million million million million million million million million million million million (1 with eighty zeroes after it) particles in the region of the universe that we can observe. Where did they all come from? The answer is that, in quantum theory, particles can be created out of energy in the form of particle/antiparticle pairs. But that just raises the question of where the energy came from. The answer is that the total energy of the universe is exactly zero. The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. However, the matter is all attracting itself by gravity. Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less energy than the same two pieces a long way apart, because you have to expend energy to separate them against the gravitational force that is pulling them together. Thus, in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero. "
