Universal beginnings
If you really want to open your mind, then let it rest for a few moments on the beginning of our universe. We refer to it as the Big Bang, that instant when matter came into existence. The mind-bending stuff happens when you ponder what caused the Big Bang to happen.
It becomes problematic because if the universe is everything, then what preceded it had to be nothing and, as the saying goes, nothing can come from nothing … or can it? Physicists suggest that the Big Bang might have been caused by our four-dimensional version of spacetime colliding with another universe that floats next to ours in a higher dimensional “bulk” space.
In an area of physics known as “brane cosmology”, the “bulk” is proposed to be a higher dimensional space in which our universe is embedded, potentially among other universes, or multiverses. There is a point though at which this just becomes an exercise in creating new words, but does it really get us any closer to the cause of the Big Bang?
Physics-based musing on the Big Bang brings us to something we know, which is that in the first one-ten-thousandth of a second after the Bang, the first longlived particles of any kind were protons and neutrons. These are the components of the atomic nucleus. Going back prior to the Big Bang, some physicists theorise that short-lived particles of matter and anti-matter existed, each destroying each other in a flash of energy when they met. Then the Big Bang came along and amounted to the creation of matter and energy. It is also possible, however, that the Big Bang was actually the origin of space-time itself.
A definitive answer as to what caused the Big Bang is highly unlikely, but that is OK, because what is more important is the willingness to ask the question.
Then the Big Bang came along and amounted to the creation of matter and energy.