Absolute Nothingness and the Alpha-Point: Minimal Conditions for Boundary Talk in Cosmology

This preprint proposes a meta-logical framework for talking about the universe’s “beginning” without importing hidden physical assumptions. Instead of treating the Big Bang as an event within time, it starts from the notion of absolute nothingness and asks which minimal logical conditions must hold for meaningful boundary talk at all. The central idea is a minimal logical structure (L) and an alpha-point understood as an applicability limit: the boundary at which L first becomes applicable. At this boundary there is no physical or temporal “before”; rather, it marks the limit at which basic distinctions (e.g., truth/negation) and modal notions (possibility/actuality) become licensed. On this basis, the paper clarifies standard objections to “creation from nothing” and argues that familiar cosmological scenarios (hot Big Bang cosmology, vacuum-state proposals, and cyclic/eternal approaches) can be discussed in a disciplined way as model-internal descriptions compatible with the meta-level constraints. The outcome is a modest but explicit set of formal conditions that any adequate account of the universe’s beginning should satisfy.