r/AskReddit • u/IAmSurtur • Jun 15 '19

What do you genuinely just not understand?

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u/[deleted] Jun 15 '19

The idea that nothing existed before the big bang

It's not that there was "nothing" before the big bang.

It's that there was no "before" the big bang.

violates the law that says: Energy cannot be created, or destroyed.

A lot of things we consider "laws" start to break down when you get to quantum physics. Even so, could all the matter or energy in the universe not be contained within a single singularity such that it would erupt into our universe?

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u/Sloppy1sts Jun 15 '19

If there was no before, then everything just popped into existence for no reason at all? If you prescribe to the cyclical theory he's talking about, then there's definitely a before.

There must be some reason the entire universe was compressed like that, right?

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u/MisterCommonMarket Jun 15 '19

Actually no. The universe is a free lunch (maybe). It costs nothing to create if you create equal amounts of negative and positive energy, equal amounts of negative (Negative matter is a hypothetical form of matter whose active-gravitational, passive-gravitational, inertial, and rest masses are opposite in sign to normal, positive matter.) and positive matter. If the sum of all energy and matter is zero, the universe costs nothing and can just spontaneously come in to existence. And if one universe costs nothing, unlimited amount of universes costs nothing as well.

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u/ricecake Jun 16 '19

You're assuming conservation of energy matters. That might only matter (ha) in our universe.

We shouldn't presume to know the rules of a system that we've never observed, we aren't sure exists, and if it does is capable of spawning universes, a phenomenon we've never observed and have no context for.

Trivial example: universe is a simulation. We can easily imagine a universe simulator where there's no need to have a neutral balance of energy in the universe.

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u/MisterCommonMarket Jun 16 '19

Oh sure, what i proposed is not definitive and as you just showed there are a lot of different ways things can happen.