Where did the matter and energy come from?

When you think of "stuff" and fields as simply ideas of information/mathematical nature, the paradoxes disappear. It's just that it's mind-bending.

It's the task of physics to account for our observations and i don't see this purely platonic approach as a viable tool to explain these observations. There must, in principle, be more than a mere description. Agreed, I was actually trying to keep this discussion as simple as possible, while still making clear that it's not a settled issue what "matter" is. At least not until a local realist picture of matter emerges somehow(which seems pretty much impossibe at this time). Or there are new insights that confirm both experiments and at the same time explain observations. That's certainly a valid way of looking at it, but not the only one and not something that's generally agreed upon. Decoherence lacks the explanatory powers that some circles wish to attribute to it. And what the "environment" constitutes is anything but clear, in light of the EPR, the Delayed choice experiment, the murky correspondence between configuration and 3D space, etc. That was actually my question. Some yes. You sure have(or have seen) polarized sunglasses. The realist picture that's essential for someone claiming to know what "matter" is. That "stuff" might be fundamentally mathematics is not(yet) the mainstream view. So while there is circumstantial evidence that might support such a view, I maintain that it's simply a viewpoint that fits the evidence that comes out of experiemnts, not the de facto accepted fundamental description of matter. There is always the possibility that inductive reasoning is beginning to fail.Edited by MatterWave, : No reason given.Edited by MatterWave, : No reason given.

Our subjective experience. Yes, if you think there is something that resembles a world. The general definition - that which occupies volume and has mass. I agree that the interpretation of the EPR and Delayed Choice Experiment with
its retrocausality and action-at-a-distance is not murky.
It's completely missing, as far as the macro world is concerned(where matter
as defined above resides). You asked: and i replied: You can't know nature, reality and even what matter is without a proper interpretation of what the
results of experiments mean. What is this "matter" that gets manifested out of quantum fields that
permeat all of spacetime under
certain circumstances? If you can't answer this question, how could you know what matter is? Do you
claim to have knowledge that eigenvalues and eigenstates of a single wave function are not realized in
different universes? If you don't, how does this support your position that there is some form of
concensus on what matter is? Again, there is no consensus on what matter is, in terms of the
wave-particle duality. The OP was asking about the relationship between matter and energy and my position was that
what and how matter is(beyond a mere descrption of properties), is disputed and the debate is
ongoing. The largely missing ontologies of our best tested theories - GR and QM might be interpreted to suggest this.

Bell-Aspect and Wheeler delayed-choice experiments are easily understood only if the state vector is all that exists. At the level of treating matter to engineer new products and technologies, it is pretty well defined and understood, there is no question about it. However, questions like "What is matter?", "What is energy?", "What is spacetime?"(asked by Sasuke in post 65 in EvC Forum: How did round planets form from the explosion of the Big Bang?, that started this debate)
,... require a deeper understanding than the one we currently have.

The excitations of the fields that make up what we label "stuff/matter" in this orderly and comprehensible universe suggest that we and the whole universe are the thoughts of God. This is the nightmare of the atheist physicist. You have a chunk of matter, you split it apart till you get to the atoms, then on to the nucleus, you split the nucleus and you get the "bare" properties that we label "quarks", which are imposible to visualize. Then you realize you only have mathematical objects(virtual messanger particles - virtual gluons and virtual photons) - Numbers. Yep, matter is numbers according to our best understanding and to answer the OP, "matter" didn't come from anywhere. The problem of free will is only solvable if we accept that we are the thoughts of God. How could there be free will? Free from what? From te laws of the universe and your human body? How so? There is more than meets the eye, physicists are joining hands with philosophers on the future GUT. The question - "Where did the matter and energy come from?" will be answered, but not in the way the average Joe would expect.

Devil's Advocate, you are not even wrong. You live in the 19 or 18 century, the only thing i was able to see in your post was 'labels'. You say this because you know what quantum fields and matter are? Why didn't i see anything at all about what a quark or an electron is? Or an excitation of a field? Or what virtual particles are? If all you have is labels, i'll let you talk to yourself.

Local realism is pretty much dead, if inductive reasoning is to hold(for the sake of science and all of its previous successes, it's pretty much mandatory that we keep it no matter what turn our understanding of reality takes). The ontology of Non-local realism is not well-defined yet, and at least one of its iterations stands at odds with GR(and a large class of hidden variable theories were scrapped by Zeilinger in 2007). Nonlocal realism is also a very weak form of realism, if realism at all. Nonseparability is another possibility that is covered by my suggestion in post 89. All in all, if we are to make progress and further our understanding, there would be no coming back to the old billiard ball electrons and atoms in matter(still taught in high school textbooks).So, in a nutshell, yes, there is substantial circumstantial evidence that reality is relational. Only the perception of Now exists, the past, it never existed. Where the dinosaur bones and evidence of the Rome Empire come from, is too Big a question. If you were religious, you'd consider it an act of God and if you were an atheist, it seems a major revision would be due.Edited by MatterWave, : No reason given.

I can drag anything that i think makes sense. It's not falsifiable that the sun will rise tomorrow or that the Earth will not fall apart due to an unobserved yet phenomenon. So what?? Lots of things aren't falsifiable.
You seem to get too upset every time your eyes see the word "god". Is there an underlying reason for your animosity? Something that is not evident? The way you worded that sentence reveals that you are not following what we are discussing, but on a side note - in that sentence of yours, there are 3 things that i don't have an understanding of:1. Existence
2. God
3. The relationship between nonlocality and personal experienceIt's wonderful that you have figured it all out and came to your own conclusions on all those 3 points. I'd appreciate it if you keep them to yourself. ThanksEdited by MatterWave, : No reason given.

Actually, here in the science forums the way it works is you can "drag in anything" which is on-topic and for which you have scientific evidence and argumentation. If you have scientific evidence and argumentation for God creating matter and energy then this is the right thread for you.--Percy I cannot present "scientific evidence and argumentation" for the 'world' we observe . No one can. Nobel Prize winners cannot as well. It is not known if the macro world of objects can be derived from the likely mathematical constituents of matter. Before we can prove God exists, if we are to remain consistent and rational, we must first address what it is that actually exists and then move on to much higher, if not impossible, targets like supreme beings and such. So, there are really two ways in which we can discuss where matter originated:1. We stop here and say we don't know what matter really is or where it came from, and return to this topic in 100 or 500 years when we'll possibly have a more thorough and very likely different understanding of Matter,or2. We gather all the evidence at hand about what matter is and make a similar conclusion to that of Max Planck - There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force... We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.If we are to stop at number 1, why is a "Where did the matter and energy come from?" thread even allowed in the science forums, when it is very obviously NOT a scientific question?Edited by MatterWave, : No reason given.

It means that what appears to be spatially separated objects(in the modern view these would be treated 'events') are not truly separated. You may want to have a look at bohmian mechanics(rival theory to quantum mechanics), its founder managed to construct a deterministic model of the universe based on nonlocal realism that matches the predictions of quantum mechanics. His take on the matter in 'Wholeness and the Implicate Order' was that the world(the expicate order) was a manifestation of something implicit(consciousness) and that at a deeper level they are one and the same. If you don't have the book, skim throught this wikipedia article for the basics:Implicate and explicate order - WikipediaThere are other variations of nonlocal realism, but they seem to me to require a new definition of the word 'real'. No, this is one of the reasons for the tension between GR and QM. It would work fine only if you drop certain human intuitions and preconceived notions of the world. Or if you subscribe to the view that we live in a superdeterministic universe(Bell noted this possibility in his celebrated 1964 paper). There was a statement by cavediver earlier in the thread that we live in a static 4D universe. Did you miss it?
In the context of QM, the GR's General Covariance strongly implies that there is no distinction between past and future events and no time flow. Einstein was aware(though he didn't like it) that his own relativity suggests that the distinction lies in our heads. The circumstantial evidence implies that time does not flow and the puzzling question is why we remember the past and not the future. This cannot be answered without an understanding of the mechanism behind the arrow of time. Cavediver was certainly right that it's much easier to say what things are not than what they are. In the case of the bones out there - if i can borrow a legendary physicist's own expression - "there is no out there, out there". This position is much easier to maintain than the assumption of "out there"(which in most iterations is 1:1 with the hypothesis of local realism). "Nature" is just a label and i have no problem with attaching it to anything.Anyway, back to the topic - Where did the matter and energy come from?My point was that the question is much harder to answer than it seems at first glance. We will surely go through a few revolutions in our understanding of what you call 'nature' before we can give an answer that will not make us look like neanderthals in the eyes of the future generations.

You understand correctly but macro objects are composed of quanta and quanta aren't physical. The EPR paper on arxiv is a good start. You may want to see why Einstein was so opposed to nonlocal effects and what exactly they challenged. That of realism. That there exists a mind-independent outside world. If you say there is time flow at the quantum scale, you'll run into the problem of backward in time travel, backward in time causation, infinite propagation speed, etc. Nothing in the best theories of physics - GR and QM requires time to flow in any direction. No, it doesn't. There is no time flow in a 4-D static universe. In our universe, the year 1975 is just as Now as 2010. No year is more real or more Now than any other. They all exist as one, what we experience as time flow happens only within the human head. It stems from quantum theory but SR supports this notion as well. It's hardly worth the time, unless God spoke through a proxy .

This is certainly correct but reading onifre's reply, i have the impression that he implicitly made the realism assumption. How does QFT support realism(which was the point behind my statement)?Edited by MatterWave, : No reason given.

I see no reason to discard relativity(i have not lost my mind that much yet), but yes, now that i think about it, you could say that i am often overstepping into philosophical realism. How would i not? These are maddening questions to ponder - something exists out there(mathematics, qubits, something incomprehensible) or nothing but thoughts, dreams and consciousness exists. In general, physics has been blending with philosophy in the 20th century(as Smolin points out - physics has been continuously borrowing topics from philosophy).

You sure know by now from our discussion that this is something that NOBODY knows. If i knew the answer to the question,
i'd be 10 times as famous as Einstein and would be making the headlines across the globe for hundreds of years. My name would be there right beside that of Einstein and Newton. Decoherence doesn't restore the 'world' of our perceptions. Decoherence is just a mechanism that attempts to explain pure states transitioning to mixed states. It's also an appearance of classical objects(no collapse), not objects existing in space made of particles. I don't. This assumption proves exceeding hard to maintain. yep We have been misunderstanding "universal time flow" and "experienced time" as being one and the same. Now we know there is no universal time flow. As for the experienced time, it's subjective, there isn't really anything that resembles a flow of time in a relativistic universe. Time running faster in space means that the duration between two events as measured by a clock in space is a little greater than that measured by a clock on earth. It is the interval of time between the events that is the issue, not some mystical temporal motion by which the world travels from one event to the next. That was a misunaderstanding. Reativity is certainly still valid. We don't really die. Our observations(what you label a 'world' or 'universe') may cease to exist(for us) but in a sense we are eternal(as long as the universe is eternal). You could always find a frame of reference where your deceased relatives are alive or where dinosaurs are still not extinct or where the universe is just 5 seconds old. Don't do the mistake of thinking too much about this stuff or you'll go insane. Existence is, I think therefore i am, this is enough for most folks.