People say the universe was created by the Big Bang, when a highly concentrated ball of matter exploded, but that doesn’t make any sense. I understand the universe is expanding outward, and there was an explosion at its core sometime in the past, but everything has to come from something. Where did the original building blocks for our universe come from? It seems as if quadrillions of tons of matter just spontaneously appeared from nothing.
For that matter, where did space itself come from? Even empty space is still something, and it seems impossible that it exists or can’t exist. Even if you believe God created the universe, I still ask the same question. He is made of something, and where did that something come from?
In Stephen Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time, he gave the “no-boundary” proposal which states that the universe simply had no beginning. Try as we might, we’ll never find a beginning of time. I don’t even pretend to understand the physics of this proposal, but that seems like kind of a cop out.
According to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, particles and antiparticles can spontaneously form, and destroy each other. This has been proven time and again in the lab, and some think that at the beginning of the universe, one of these quantum fluctuations occurred and kick started inflation, which led to the universe. Once again, I’m still faced with energy coming from nothing.
It appears that the instant of creation is going to remain a mystery for the foreseeable future. I think I’ll go see if Doctor Dawson can figure it out.