Take the tour ×  In popular science books and articles, I keep
running into the claim that the total energy of the Universe is
zero, "because the positive energy of matter is cancelled out by
the negative energy of the gravitational field".  But I can't
find anything concrete to substantiate this claim. As a first
check, I did a calculation to compute the gravitational
potential energy of a sphere of uniform density of radius R
using Newton's Laws and threw in E=mc^2 for energy of the
sphere, and it was by no means obvious that the answer is zero !
So, my questions:  1) What is the basis for the claim - does one
require General Relativity, or can one get it from Newtonian
gravity ?  2) What conditions do you require in the model, in
order for this to work ?  3) Could someone please refer me to a
good paper about this ?  share|improve this question A good
question for astronomyoverflow.net, if it exists. –  Victor
Protsak Sep 14 '10 at 7:56 I've been searching the astronomy and
physics blogs, but they all see