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

tbh we don't really 'turn matter into energy' in nuclear reactions... all of the particles are still there. It's just that when they decrease their total potential energy (via rearrangement of the forces between particles, namely electromagnetic and strong), the particles weigh less.

You can make energy become matter too... you can fire two particles at each other and sometimes the kinetic energy is converted to the mass of new particles.

Originally Posted by Xei

You can make energy become matter too... you can fire two particles at each other and sometimes the kinetic energy is converted to the mass of new particles.

woa, seriously. cool

So mass is lost, but the particles are all still accounted for...?

Depends tbh. In something like U235 decay no particles are destroyed, the nucleons just end up weighing less.

However they're not always conserved... I can't remember the reaction but I know that if you give a collision enough energy totally new massive particles can be created.

That's what they're trying to do with the Higgs Boson I believe, but it's very massive.

There's a short article on wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_creation

Originally Posted by Xei

Depends tbh. In something like U235 decay no particles are destroyed, the nucleons just end up weighing less.

However they're not always conserved... I can't remember the reaction but I know that if you give a collision enough energy totally new massive particles can be created.

That's what they're trying to do with the Higgs Boson I believe, but it's very massive.

Yup, Xei makes a great point! If you actually think about it, there is no such thing as a dynamic physical vacuum when it comes to particles especially when you consider that the level of activity that coincides with filling the vacuum is set by energy in which the vacuum is "observed" This treads very closely if not right at Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. If we look within an atom, much of the activity is carried by what is called "virtual photons" these photons mediate electromagnetic force and by the occasional electron-positron pairs that appear and then in-turn vanish and re-appear.

Within an atom, much of the activity is carried by virtual photons that regulates the electromagnetic force, and by the occasional electron-positron pairs that seems to appear and then vanish. The voids only "Appear" to not contain matter nor energy but in the quantum world particles are extremely active as they come and go created out of quantum fluctuations.

another thing i would like to add:if we want ot find about the initial state or before the big bang let' stake it this way:blackholes.
all the matter sucked into them goes to a point where gravity is infinit and time unexistent or slowed down.
so we might supose that the universe has always passed threw these states but the main question is this how can pure energy be transformed into matter and i fit's possible where did that energy come from?

Returning to the original point of this thread for a moment, then yes, it certainly might be true what you're saying. There's no way for us to scientifically disprove something, that is beyond the laws of our science. However, at the same time, you can't scientifcally prove anything in regards to this theory either.

In the end, judging from some of your posts in here, you really just want a creator to exist, so that our existance doesn't become meaningless. The fact of the matter though, is that from everything we know now, from looking at how the universe is moving around, the Big Bang is most likely the start of how our universe is currently looking.

The universe in its current state has been around for about 14 billion years, supposedly. The Earth has been around for abound 4.5 billion years. From what we can see, life did not form before things settled down a bit on Earth, which took about 0.7 billion years. It took another 3.78 billion years before anything resembling current day humans emerged.
My point is that it is very unlikely, that humans were intelligently designed, it's very unlikely that the universe was created with humans in mind, it's very unlikely that the universe was created with anything in mind and it's very unlikely that the universe was created by anything that can have the human concept of consciousness or thought-process assigned to it.

If you have ever read the Watchmen comic or atleast seen the motioncomic/movie, you will maybe remember a very enlightening scene from Mars. Mr. Manhattan points out the fact, that the Martian landscapes are just as fascinating as humans. Do not forget this, because we really aren't more than Martian landscapes. Our concepts of knowing anything, changing anything, having power, they are all something that is made up by the human mind, and also limited to the human mind and other organisms that can think in the same way.

The universe doesn't care about us and it never will.

Originally Posted by Klaudyw3

another thing i would like to add:if we want ot find about the initial state or before the big bang let' stake it this way:blackholes.
all the matter sucked into them goes to a point where gravity is infinit and time unexistent or slowed down.
so we might supose that the universe has always passed threw these states but the main question is this how can pure energy be transformed into matter and i fit's possible where did that energy come from?

TWO BEAMS OF FUCKING PURE ENERGY COLLIDE AND GO FUCKING BOOM.
Excuse my state of drunkness.

Everything is where it always was, doing what it's always done. It just looks different from where you're standing.