I wonder... if (energy/matter) can not be created or destroyed, where did the energy and matter come from anyway? Whether this universe has only existed once, is one of billions or has gone through who knows how many expansion/contraction cycles, it still doesn't explain to me where that (energy/matter) came from. Or does it, am I not looking hard enough? Does anyone have an explanation?
And by the way, we have had the concept of matter and energy being equivalent for almost a century, (and the ultimate proof for more then half) yet we don't have a word for them as a single entity. Enerter? Mattnergy? Something else entirely? Like say, the Einstein Composite?

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The rule is actually "in a closed system energy cannot be created or destroyed". If our universe is a closed system, then the energy didn't come from anywhere. If it was ever open, then it's possible we got our original energy from an outside source (although there's no conclusive evidence that it's open now).

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Maybe it's just a simulation.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

But if the universe is closed that is basically giving the God solution, that is explaining its existence by saying it always existed. And if it was ever open, that must mean there is something outside the universe, the energy cannot come from another universe, unless that universes laws allowed the creation of energy. Is that possible?
And sorry about the misspelled title. Any way I can change that?
{edit for new response}
I used to wonder that, that the universe is a simulation and God is some kid playing a video game. Heck, I still wonder that.

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I agree with ravens_cry's objection to this. Your two statements
directly contradict each other. If our universe is a closed system, then,
according to the conservation law you cite, the energy was not created.
So it must have come from somewhere else. Which it can't have done
if the universe is closed.

And of course if the energy did come from somewhere else we still have
the problem of where it came from in the first place.

Someone needs to explain how the problem can be solved by the fact
that gravitational potential energy is negative. Not me.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

lets start with themselves

But if they can't be created or destroyed, merely converted to one form or another. Again, that is just a God solution. Explaining its existence by saying it always existed. But if it can not created, then how come it exists at all? Why isn't the universe simply empty?

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Those are good questions, and for all we know they may be fundamentally unanswerable by means of science. If that is the case, so be it. The cosmos is what it is, and it does not care whether or not fallible human beings like ourselves think it makes sense.

Right-- I think the key point to note here is that the purpose of science is to find theories that work on the universe, not to figure out how the universe is constrained by our theories. A lot of questions on here seem to reverse that logic, you are not alone. But we don't assert that conservation of energy is something the universe has to do-- we simply try to find ways to make that principle useful for us, when it can be made so useful (like the invention of "potential energy", for example).

Great, my first question, and it turns out to be a "fundamentally unanswerable" one. Just, peachy.
Thanks Ken. At least it gives me somewhere to look. I am just going on the bare bones of what you said, but does that mean that the energy derivable from an object in free fall is slightly MORE then the theoretical amount of energy necessary to raise it up again?

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No, it's the same energy. The point of potential energy being negative is simply to explain where the positive kinetic energy comes from when you drop something. Nature didn't say "here's kinetic energy, and here's potential energy, and oh look, they add up to zero"-- we did all that. We made it add to zero on purpose, as a shortcut way to calculate various things, especially convenient when the contributions to the energy that we had to add in vary with position but not with time.

Okay, I am confused, but I know a bit more then I did before. Dang, and just when I was about to patent my perpetual motion machine. Anyway, thanks for taking the time to answer my questions, at least some of them anyway. Thanks again.

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Howdy Raven, welcome aboard!

I think I can paint a mental picture here that might help out.

I move furniture and sometimes I'll confuse my less educated brethren with some of the outcomes of the potential energy equation.

Take pianos for instance.

Two other movers and I were moving this piano up to the 3 floor of a building that didn't have an elevator big enough to hold it. (Big honking upright, looked like it was carved by dwarves. In a catholic monestary, so it was one of those big ol' church pianos.)

When we were almost where we had to be, I mention the fact that, if we were to continue all the way up to the roof and tip the piano over the side, it wouldn't hit the ground with any more force than it took to bring it up to the roof in the first place.

That big crash? That was all energy *we* gave the piano by bringing it up to the roof in the first place. That energy wasn't *for free*!

(That move rated pretty high on the Boo Hoo Meter. We needed at least two more big guys on that piece. There were a lot of stairs.)

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Gimme a minute to read through Jay's latest observations...

I think some people might be doing things the wrong way round. For peace of mind it's best to observe the universe and then come up with ideas that help you understand it. This is much more relaxing than coming up with first coming up with an idea and then freaking out out when the universe refuses to play along.

Well I am sorry, but it didn't.
That energy for the free fall, came from the chemical energy in the guys body, which came from chemical energy in plants which came from the nuclear fusion energy of the sun, which came from the energy that is matter itself, when squeezed real hard.(pardon for missing a few steps)
But where did the energy/matter in the entire universe come from? If it is a closed system, then it shouldn't exist, unless you can accept "it exists because it always existed" as a reason. Maybe it's a good reason, maybe it's not, but I personally never found it very acceptable. Of course, if the universe isn't or wasn't always a closed system, that begs the question, where did THAT energy come from? (and if it isn't now, why did it stop?) Outside the universe, another universe? And for that to be a complete answer, it must be a place where energy can be created for 'free'. Otherwise, we are just back where we started.
If I wanted peace of mind, I would sit in a rocking chair, responding "God did it"
to any question, and never, ever asking "Why?".
Sure, this question will likely rack my brains till the day I die, but I tell you, it's a lot of fun.

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Please note that the big bang theory (BBT) does not, can not, say anything about how the universe started. BBT is an explanation of what has happened since the universe started. Unsatisfying I know, but that's the way it is! Maybe, someday we will develop a TOE (theory of everything) or GUT (grand unification theory) that explains it all, but until then we just have to live with the limitations of our current knowledge.

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

We just don't know, that's the point. Science can only tell us so much-- I'm sorry if you were led to believe otherwise. Yes, some questions are only valuable once the answer is known-- while others are valuable precisely because the answer cannot be known.

I was hoping there was an answer to this, but it seems there isn't, oh well.
My own theory, okay I am not going to glorify it with the word 'theory', I am just going to call it an idea.
My idea was that outside the universe ( can you save the tomatoes till after I am done? Thank you) it is nigh-infinite (or maybe just infinite) energy, with energy being continuously been created and destroyed. And in such a random collection of noise, your going to have coincidental concentrations. Well, there is such a concentration in one spot, that it bends the metric to the point of breaking, a singularity. And energy flows out what could be best described as a white hole, expanding the non existence into existence, thus you have the big bang. But since the laws of the non existence don't allow the creation of energy, the energy that flowed in was all that ever flowed in.
Gentleman, you may commence firing...now!

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It might help to recognize that all of physics comes under the heading of understanding how a system gets from state A to state B, but it never tells you how it got to state A in the first place. There are always 'iniital conditions" in physics, and there's never a theory for those. The Big Bang is just that idea taken to its logical extreme for the whole universe.
But where did that infinite energy come from? Don't get me wrong, a lot of people like to picture our universe as appearing from the physics of some other, but then you have the question of where that universe came from and what its physics actually is. Science is always going to be better at asking questions than at answering them all, it's just a matter of where you stop and say "enough is enough".

That seems perfectly plausible, there's nothing to fire at-- and that's the problem, you make no predictions so there's no way to test it. No test, no science, but it's perfectly fine philosophy inspired by science.