thedotmaster wrote:ShijeFace wrote:How did the very first atom come into existence? There couldn't be a "big bang" without some sort of matter or gas somewhere that could cause something like that to happen.
Who says that the universe has to have a start and an end? Who says that matter has to have an origin? Energy cannot be created nor destroyed.
As long as time exists, a beginning is impossible. To explain: Time works in a sequential order that cannot be changed. For each point in time, there is a point before, and a point after, which means that Time must continue infinitely into the past, and the future. A beginning would defy the very Idea of time, because a Beginning has no continuing pattern into the past. For me, this idea is impossible to understand. There is something unsettling about not being able to know the thing that caused everything to be the way it is; a beginning.
I think this might in part be due to Newton's law of Inertia. Out of an infinite number of points in time, the probability ought to be fairly high that all matter in the universe would at least once become inert. According to Newton's law, inert matter requires active force (which does not exist without active matter) to discontinue the matter's inertia. So theoretically, the probability that all matter in the universe would be motionless should be infinitely close to definite. Why is it then, that the universe remains active? The only possible explanation is that Newton's law is not completely accurate. There are really only two possible inaccuracies that I can think of. Either A.) Newton's law is not credible, or B.) There was one moment in time (a beginning), that was not subject to Newton's law.
Infinity (or negative infinity) is a tricky concept. Given an infinite number of trials, any probability greater than 0% becomes a definite outcome.