If energy can neither be created nor destroyed, where did the original energy for the Big Bang come from?

Question

If energy can neither be created nor destroyed, where did the original energy for the Big Bang come from?

Answer 1

It's true that BOTH energy and matter can't be created or destroyed so I would guess that the energy was out there somewhere and it all came together at once. BAM!

Answer 2

The amount of matter is finite- cannot be eliminated or created. Just think if it could? Would things ever stop creating??

And there is my reason for rebirth, too.

Answer 3

In physics, the law of conservation of energy states that the total amount of energy in any isolated system remains constant but cannot be recreated, although it may change forms (for example friction can turn kinetic energy into thermal energy).

Well, the universe is a closed system - the energy of the universe before the Big Bang was just there (where it came from is hotly debated).  The expansion of the universe has cooled that energy and it has changed form (to matter, to kinetic energy of rotation, etc.) but it still all exists.

Answer 4

god is creat the human being , i know god is created the origenal energy.

Answer 5

If you're questioned is designed to poke holes in the big bang theory, I can assure you that you have not discovered an oversight in the theory that the most brilliant astro-physicists have believed in for decades.  If you're point is the big bang still doesn't explain the origins of matter and energy, I'd agree you are right.

Answer 6

The correct answer is "we don't know"

The Big Bang theory explains what happens if you begin with a universe in a state of unbound energy density (a.k.a. temperature), which is allowed to expand and cool.

It does not explain why the universe was that way to begin with.

There are lots of speculative ideas (some more believable than others) but they are all still guesses.

When we go backwards in time towards the "beginning", we find that the universe gets hotter and hotter as we get close to time = zero.

We also find out that we cannot get exactly to zero.  At a moment called the Planck Time (very close to zero but NOT zero), the temperature of the universe would have been so high that every single point in the universe would have been a black hole.

What comes before that?  Not only does our knowledge not extend before that, the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle states that we cannot know (certainly not with our current methods).  

The portion of the universe we can see today was, at the Planck Time, smaller than the uncertainty in our calculations.

If we use Hawking's idea (that black hole can evaporate if they are small enough) then we can guess the following:

the universe was a bunch of single point black hole.  Them are very small black holes.  They would have evaporated very fast, liberating whatever energy they contained.  This could have driven the expansion.

That may explain how the energy was available at the Planck time.  It does not explain where it would have come from before that.

Stay tuned.  It could get exciting in the next decade.

Answer 7

noooooooooooope to one of the answers above.....i learned this in chemistry, biology, & anatomy & physiology........energy cant be created nor destroyed, only altered......so the original energy for the Big Bang came from God......=]  yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Answer 8

Scientists believe that our universes' energy originated from a previous universe collapsing in on itself (the big crunch). As matter expands, gravitational pulls from the stars, planets etc begin to cause a slow down on the expanditure of the universe then begin to reverse the process, causing all matter to meet at one point and eventually cause the big bang all over again. The initial origin of this energy is not really known or fully understood, its theorised that like life, the creation of energy was simply spontaneous.

There is a second theory which states the universe is in fact expanding at an increasing rate, making the first theory untrue.

There are only theories at this point, know one really knows for sure the origins of the energy in the universe.

Answer 9

The energy was already there. The big bang theory doesn't say the energy was created with the "bang". It states that at some point in the past, all the energy and space of the universe was contained in a single point. Our understanding of the laws of physics breaks down at certain energy density, so we can not currently state what happened "before" the big bang ... if the word "before" can really be applied.

The universe is actually getting more chaotic as time goes on. What appears to be order to you is not order as the laws of thermodynamics defines it.

As for why the laws of physics are the way they are, thousands of physicists spend their lives trying to explain it! Why do things have mass? Why are the up quark and down quark so close in mass? Why is gravity so much weaker than the other forces? Why was/is there more matter than anti-matter? A lot of things scientists and physicists don't have the answers to.

>>>>>They believe that matter and energy were created during the Big Bang, however, that raises for a lot more questions, the most obvious one being: How can matter and energy be created?

That's why i don't believe in the Big Bang- I believe in God. But that's only if you ask me.

Answer 10

You have to understand something. Matter/energy cannot be created or destroyed IN THE CURRENT UNIVERSE. In the early universe, when the big bang took place, the rules were not the same, not the same at all.

Answer 11

rob is wrong it's matter and energy with the law of conservation, and that is the ultimate question

Answer 12

energy can be made by destroying atoms.

Answer 13

That's a darned fair question and I don't think anybody can answer it.  Apparently it had to be created somehow because it exists.  Everything about the very beginning of the universe is a bottomless enigma.  Acausality, creation of energy from nothing, expansion, etc.  Some cosmologists propose routes around all this but there is no way to verify their claims and they only tend to put the question back a little farther.  One thing seems evident: the very beginning of the universe was under conditions that are very different from what we understand and probably impossible to determine.

Answer 14

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

"god is creat the human being , i know god is created the origenal energy."

love it, in the middle of one of the most intellectually stimulating and intelligent conversations I have ever read.

Tough stuff, and this all interests me very much... it's hard to imagine that anyone will EVER have any definitive answers... though h**l, a man on the moon was once deemed ludicrous.

Only time will tell...

Answer 15

it was stored in the singularity that was the big bang. How it originated is up for grabs

Answer 16

Your question is probably the most frustrating question in science today. It's also a question for which there's absolutely no definitive, etched-in-stone answer. There are all kinds of unproven conjectures about how our universe began, and many who hang around in this Yahoo forum try to present those as if they were scientifically valid. They aren't!

Modern physics can describe what's been going on in the universe quite well, all the way back to 10^ minus 43 seconds after the Big Bang (...that's 10 preceded by 43 zeros...), but earlier than that it's all a blank.

There are any number of concepts, but none of them can be scientifically verified, although some who post answers to this type of question present the concepts as though they're etched-in-stone facts.

When talking about either 'what' came before the Big Bang that created our universe, or 'what' lies beyond our universe there's no way that any of the myriad concepts can be invoked without either infinity, an absolute void, or some kind of metaphysical First Cause necessarily entering the picture.

One idea is that our universe has dimensions other than those we're familiar with. How many other dimensions? Six? Eleven? A billion? Assume that there are a hundred additional dimensions. That would leave us right back where we started -- what's beyond those hundred dimensions? The only answer is there must be an infinite number of dimensions.

Another notion is that our universe started when it collided with another universe. Okay, again the original question isn't answered because we're left still hung up on the original question -- what's beyond our universe and the one we collided with?

Then there's the idea that there's some 'mother' universe that spawns other universes. Back to the same question -- what's beyond this 'mother' universe? If there's nothing then it must be infinite.

By calling up Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle concepts have been developed stipulating that every time a decision is made, like you turn left instead of right at some crossroads, or an atom "decides" to decay, another universe branches off in which the opposite decision is made. Here again the question is 'where' or 'when' did such critical decisions begin? After the Big Bang? That puts us right back at square one -- what was before that?

Answer 17

Simply because it was already there but exploded at the right time in the right place with other chemical reactions. It just took time and the right chemicals with the right reactions to cause it.  The energy that preexisted before the big bang was the same energy but in a different form and combination. It is merely a matter of chemical reactions at the right times with the right chemicals.  Kind of hard to explain if you werent there to see it hehe but remember its still only a theory, nothing to argue about.

Answer 18

in response to the first answer, matter IS energy. Second, matter can be destroyed in matter/antimatter reactions. Third, the current theory is that the big bang was the result of the comming together of two universes. So all that was in those two universes would then be in ours. Only completely rearranged.

Answer 19

energy can be created...

its matter that cannot be created or destroyed....you got it wrong

Answer 20

Some believe that so much matter had concentrated into a single point that it exploded because it was so dense and unstable.  That's where the energy originated.

Some believe that it had to do with divine being, but that's a different story.