• Question: Were did the mass of the universe come from considering science does not believe in spontaneuos generation of mass?

    Asked by dumhead456 to Hermine, Katy, Laura, Nathalie, Paula on 23 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Nathalie Pettorelli

      Nathalie Pettorelli answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Hi there,

      You like to keep us busy with very good question, don’t you? 🙂 I don’t know – and I think it’s one of the questions most scientists would love to be able to answer! But then we’d be able to answer things like that we’d find science less challenging – kind of thing that keeps us busy 🙂

    • Photo: Paula Salgado

      Paula Salgado answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Another tough question for us, dumhead456! 😉

      All the mass at the beginning of the universe already existed in the form of energy, highly concentrated. What has happened since then is conversion from energy to mass and vice-versa. But the amount of total energy is still the same that existed then.

      Or so I understand it… 😉

    • Photo: Katy Mee

      Katy Mee answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Basically, the answer is that nobody really knows and although we have various theories, we’re still not that close to undersatnding the origins of mass. Some theorists think that before mass there was a lot of energy that existed in the form of light, but then we have to ask where did the light come from? And if we come up with anothe scenario to explain where the light came form, we would have to ask ‘but how did the thing that created the light come about’? And so on.

      The Super Hadron Collider was built to help try to resolve this fundamental question and scientists hope they will find evidence for or against the theoretical ‘Higg-Boson’ particle (the ‘God’ particle, which they believe to be the origin of mass…..but then the viscious circle does on – if we discover that the Higgs-Boson particle DOES exist, and is therefore an explanation to where mass came from, then we will want to know where the Higgs-Boson particale came from!!

      These sorts of questions make me fully appreciate why religion may originally have come about – as intelligent life forms, we feel the need to have an explanation for everything, and so before we had the technology to prove some of this stuff, we may have used religion as a way of explaining to unexplainable.

      This is a very philosophical question and i imagine you will be a good philosopher one day if you keep asking questions like this!

    • Photo: Laura Dixon

      Laura Dixon answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Noone is sure yet exactly where the mass of the universe comes from – there are a number of complex theories (which I would do a rubbish job trying to explain!) but really we don’t know

    • Photo: Hermine Schnetler

      Hermine Schnetler answered on 23 Jun 2010:

      This is a chicken and egg situation – so maybe there is a God.

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