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Comment by kowdermeister | Hacker News Reader

Why? It sums up perfectly the article. The existence of the Universe IS a mystery. And the article is about neutrinos.

There are mysteries in the universe that may be solved through a discovery about neutrinos. But the mystery of the very existence of the universe itself cannot be solved by appealing to the existence of some other contingent object within the universe.

Let's go one step at time. Matter and antimatter should be created in equal way and they annihilate once they bump into each other. This very fact should raise an eyebrow that no matter should exists, but clearly does. If we solve this mystery then we can go further another step.

If they would simply be annihilated after being created, why be created at all?

I feel like somehow, we are way off in our understanding of the universe and how it works. There are so many unanswered questions, such as:

1) If the big bang created space and time as we know it, what was there before that?

2) Why did the big bang suddenly occur 14 billion or so years ago? Why not a couple billion years before or after that?

I know that the steady state theory of the universe has fallen out of favor, but I wonder if some appeal could be made to some kind of fundamental force that has always existed and always will, which behaves with fluid dynamics, and the "islands" of matter that we experience are actually some kind of fluctuations in that fluid.

1) It obviously did not create time, because if time didn't exist then no events could take place, and the big bang was an event. Hence time must necessarily have existed before the big bang.

2) We should expect to find ourselves in a time and place that accommodates observers, see o https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

1) The canonical answer is: there was no before, the singularity happened at delta_t=0. It is a mathematical construct resulting from extrapolating a physical model backwards in time which somehow converges. I'm not sure its not just convention. The big bang didn't create space time. It is space-time indeed and we know nothing (absolutely nothing, I believe!) about an object that has no spacial or temporal extend. All they are interested in is a few seconds after.

And the other big point is that our concept of time might be flawed. Maybe in relativistic terms, from our point of view it was a few seconds, but it actually took an eternity and you could keep observing closer and closer to the origin (in the diagrammatic sense) but never reach it, so who even cares, still? So, in a way more easily grasped by humans, it would be more apt to say, there is no after, because we will possibly never get behind it in our way forward. Does that seem sensible to you?

2) Because that's when the size of the universe in the calculation reaches plank scale? I'd like some correction because I have read before that plank scale is not actually a hard physical boundary, but I believe we just don't have the tools to say anything about that time with any certainty. And don't be mistaken, there are loads of competing theories and all have warts, paradoxes and open questions. Such is life, ironically, which I still think is a comfortable closure.

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