Vacuum Energy and the Economical Universe

We revisit a suggestion, first made by Haas and Jordan but often attributed to Tryon and others, that the universe could have zero net energy since a test body's positive rest energy is approximately cancelled out by its negative gravitational binding energy with respect to the rest of the matter in the universe. If the universe is not matter- but vacuum-dominated, as observations now indicate, then the balance between rest and binding energies is substantially altered. We consider whether this may make the Newtonian case for a universe from nothing more plausible than before.