Edward Tryon

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In 1967, he began working at Columbia University as a research assistant. In 1968 he began working as an assistant professor and worked there until 1971.

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.

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.

Although Tryon was the first person to suggest that our universe developed from a quantum fluctuation of the vacuum, the German physicist Pascual Jordan was the first person to talk about how a star might be created from the vacuum by a quantum transition. In the 1930s a number of physicists were looking at how to explain how matter arose if we lived in a continual, eternal, universe. Jordan knew how a sun's mass positive 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.