Thread: If matter cant be created or destroyed, where did all this stuff come from?

Well people can see the universe is spreading outwards from a central point, and make an educated guess that everything started in the center then went outwards.

However, it is very difficult to know what happened at the creation of the universe and what was before. It may even be impossible, as we can never witness the creation of a new universe.

This is the problem i have with the "infinite causes theory" for lack of a better term. Yes, I agree that everything, in this universe, must have a cause. But, assuming that there was a creator that caused the universe into existence, the laws of the creation do not necessarily affect the actions of the creator. For the sake of argument i am going to assume that there is a creator of the universe. If he created everything around us, everything we see and do not see, and one of those foundational principles of the universe is that everything must have a cause, it still does not mean that the creator is affected by it. Creator > Creation. So therefore the creator does not necessarily need to have something that caused it to come into existence. He/She/It is not subject to the laws of his/her/its own creation

Sorry if that was a little vague, im not exactly the most articulate person

Matter cannot be created or destroyed inside our universe. Energy existed with our universe as it came into being, a part of the package deal. It wasn't created after the fact.

Originally Posted by PhilosopherStoned

The conventional wisdom is that quantum fluctuation was responsible for the event

Care to elaborate a bit about that? I thought the conventional wisdom was that there was nothing before the event at all, which begs the question: How does quantum fluctuation happen in nothing? I'll reserve my other questions until you respond.

Originally Posted by Invader

Care to elaborate a bit about that? I thought the conventional wisdom was that there was nothing before the event at all, which begs the question: How does quantum fluctuation happen in nothing? I'll reserve my other questions until you respond.

Sure. There is no way to say what was before the big bang or if it even makes sense to talk about a 'before' the big bang. So the best that we can say is that the universe as we know it began as a singularity and that guess is very well supported by observations. The quantum fluctuations would have been happening within the initial singularity. They answer the questions about what caused the singularity to not be a singularity anymore. This is possible because all the mass-energy of the universe, was compressed, along with the universe itself, to quantum scales so the whole thing was subject to quantum indeterminacy. So it could have found itself where the mass-energy was diffuse enough for some effect to cause further expansion. This is all happening 10^-12 seconds after the big bang and earlier. After that, known physics can pretty much handle it.

Confused? So am I. I was talking off the cuff when I called it common wisdom. That's just a phrase of speech. Common speculation would be better.

There are quantum fluctuations in "nothing" though. The closest that exists to a vacuum in nature is deep space and there QFT says that there are virtual particle pairs popping into existence and out of existence all the time. This is the basis of the unruh effect where an accelerating observer measures an increase in temperature. A non-accellerating observer wouldn't measure the virtual particles (this would contradict conservation of energy) but once you accelerate, enough energy is put into the system for them to be measured at the expense of whatever is accellerating the observer. That old saying that "nature abhors a vacuum" is more true than its originator could have imagined.