In his paper, Tryon first deals with the idea of how our universe could have come from nothing and stay within the laws of physics. The first law of thermodynamics says that energy can not be created or destroyed. Tryon needed to assert that our universe could come from nothing without breaking this law of the conservation of energy. He theorized that all the positive mass energy and all the negative gravitational energy cancel each other out, leaving us with a universe with zero energy. Tryon gives credit for learning this idea from the general relativist Peter Bergmann. The person who first proposed the idea that we might live in a universe equaling zero because mass positive energy is equal to gravitation negative energy was the physicist Richard C. Tolman. Because Tryon believed our universe was equal to zero energy, in his paper Tryon said: "If this be the case, then our Universe could have appeared from nowhere without violating any conservation laws."