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 especially affected by advice that Bethe gave him: "Our intuition is based on our experiences in the macroscopic world.
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.
[10] And when Sciama paused for a moment in his speaking, Tryon suddenly said out loud: "Maybe the universe is a vacuum fluctuation?
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.
[19] 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.
[17] 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.
Tryon needed to assert that our universe could come from nothing without breaking this law of the conservation of energy.
Tryon gives credit for learning this idea from the general relativist Peter Bergmann.
At the quantum level, because of the uncertainty principle, the law of the conservation of energy can be broken for just a brief moment, causing virtual particles to pop in and out of existence.
[22] Tryon was not able to explain how one of these virtual particles grows to become a universe like ours, but he does say in his paper "that the laws of physics place no limit on the scale of vacuum fluctuations".
In the 1930s a number of physicists were looking at how to explain how matter arose if we lived in a continual, eternal, universe.
His paper mentions how there is this "larger space in which our Universe is embedded," but this idea is given only a very vague and short description.