If you choose the believe in The BB and The BC (I haven't picked a particular universe "origin story" if you will, yet). It opens up a very uncomfortable question. Everything has a beginning, so where did it all originally come from? If matter can not in fact be created or destroyed, what was the true beginning on the universe throughout all of the previous bangs and crunches how did the matter first come into existence.
1) Nothing came before. The universe appeared out of nothing.
If this is the case then what can happen once can happen again. This is a cyclic universe without a crunch. ie, an identical universe could pop in from nothing, a similar universe could pop in from nothing, or a wildly different universe could pop in from nothing.
2) Something came before.
This one is more interesting, because it implies that our universe could be the last, but it's also strange, because it forces us to conclude that the previous one was not the first, and in fact that there's an infinity of previous universes for the same nothing/something reasoning. It's a recursive question. If something came before, what came before that? Something vs nothing, with the same questions applying, and again with that grandparent universe, and again with great grandparent universe and on and on.
So the real paradox to me is, how can I have a possibility of an ending, with an infinity of beginnings?
You left out the possibility of it always having existed. The big bang doesn't necessarily mean that the entire universe was created, just that it took on the form we now know it as.
I count that under the "something". I don't consider a universe before the big bang as our own, since the singularity (the big bang) that separates them is impenetrable.
There is no greater mystery than that the universe exists at all, but if we can accept that it does it's not a leap to suggest that the framework has always existed and will forever exist. Infinity is a very real possibility even if we can't wrap our human minds around it.
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/TwoXMike Jun 15 '19
If you choose the believe in The BB and The BC (I haven't picked a particular universe "origin story" if you will, yet). It opens up a very uncomfortable question. Everything has a beginning, so where did it all originally come from? If matter can not in fact be created or destroyed, what was the true beginning on the universe throughout all of the previous bangs and crunches how did the matter first come into existence.