Physicist: That right there is one of the great unsolved questions. Every experiment that’s ever been done (on this subject) verifies the conservation of mass and energy. While the amount of mass or the amount of energy may change (they can be interchanged), the sum of the two is absolutely invariant.
This naturally leads to the question above. There are plenty of theories bouncing around, but without a couple more big bangs to do tests on, it’s unlikely we’ll ever know for sure. We’ll be more sure. As we learn, many of the theories will be ruled out, but we’ll probably never be for sure sure. Here are some examples that almost certainly won’t pan out:
Spectacular Uncertainty: Energy and time cannot both be exactly known. Over any time scale there is always a little energy error, but the larger the time scale the smaller the energy error. Generally, this takes the form of one or two extra particles that last effectively no time. For example; gluons (the carrier of the nuclear strong force) usually don’t even exist long enough to cross an atomic nucleus at the speed of light. But maybe, just maybe, the unimaginable amount of matter in the universe is some kind of amazing quantum clerical error. You could tie in the anthropic principle (if there weren’t lots of matter there would be no one around to see it, so since we can see it…) if you want, but still. That shouldn’t explain there being any more matter than the absolute minimum amount needed to have observers.
It is what it is: Maybe mass/energy conservation only works for T>0, but doesn’t mean bupkis for T=0. In other words, there’s an unexplainable asterisk on the law.
God/Goddess/Gods/Higher Power: Sure.
All this has happened before, and all this will happen again: Maybe the big bang wasn’t the beginning, but in fact the universe just goes through expansion, collapse, and re-expansion cycles. This has the advantage of explaining the big bang, and also eliminates the question about conservation of mass/energy, but it does leave lots of other questions. Maybe worse questions. Also, the universe gives every sign of wanting to expand forever, making it less likely that a previous iteration would have collapsed.
Bubbles: It could be that our universe “bubbled” off of an even larger universe, that had plenty of mass and energy to spare. This theory don’t answer the question, but it does push it back far enough that it’s hopeless to try and answer rigorously.
Keep in mind that none of these theories are technically scientific. Scientific knowledge is nothing more than what we can learn from observation, inference, and experiment. Beyond inference, we’ve got very little to work with as far as the big bang goes.
Radio check.
What’s been bouncing around my head on this one is:
for “something from nothing” to occur, don’t you need a point in time in which nothing exists? So maybe.. that was never the case. If matter\energy was already there at the start of time, something never came from nothing.
Or am I talking nonsense here?
Go check.
That’s a big part of the thinking behind several of the theories.
There is this Jain religion which explains very clearly that there are six substances which were neither created nor can they ever be destroyed: viz:- Matter (Atomic particles),
Space,
The two mediums which assist us for motion and non-motion,
Time and
Soul (Spirit etc how ever one would like to call it).
It describes that one which has qualities (attributes) and modifications is a substance. For instance, take matter. It has qualities of taste, color, smell, texture etc while today it might be in the form of an iron, then it might turn in to some other form of matter. (as we see in carbon cycle, how the food that we eat today might one day be absorbed as nutrient by the plant from the soil).
For more info please see the following site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_cosmology#The_Concept_of_reality_.E2.80.93_the_constituents_of_the_Universe
The idea is not to promote any faith but to put the view point which sounds so true to our logic, experience and reality.
Priyul
This is what happens when philosophy attempts to explain things science and math do better. We know that space and time are part of the same whole, and uniform motion and rest are also identical. That list of 6 substances should be more like 4.5.
Religion and philosophy used to attempt to explain the natural world, it’s history, and our place in it, because there was no better way to do it. There was no objective rigor, only thinking really hard. Because science requires measurable, repeatable, observable data to confirm a hypothesis, it is far better at explaining the natural world and it’s history than philosophy or religion. Soul’s are not observable repeatably, so they still belong to philosophy and religion.