If you give me the time, then I will, John.
The idea that the prior state cannot be known is a scientific position that I do not agree with. We do not live in the original; we live in the result.
As such, we have a prior state that we cannot know in detail, but we can accept that it factually existed because it was capable of producing the result. That means we have a generic truth.
A friend once asked me how God did it, because he was really trying to figure it out, and it was rather obvious to me in just a few sentences that he did not take God inside the equation but always kept God out of it.
When I gave him that as feedback, he realized he had placed the unknown ingredient right on top of God and had not considered that as structurally incorrect. God must be put inside the equation to understand the whole and how it came about as we find it.
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I am not a believer, so I am simply using the religious format (of the monotheistic Western kind, not the Eastern religions) to quickly declare what is going on.
In science, the first mistake folks make is that they focus on the detailed facts. As soon as one does that, then the overall structure is no longer available.
The Theory of Everything, for instance, is not a scientific use of words. Everything is everything. There are no scientific details available when describing everything. As soon as we mention one single thing, we already tumbled from Everything to the detailed level. At the Everything level, there is one number only: 1. There are no other numbers than 1 with words like the Universe, God, Everything, the Whole, and to some extent we can see that again with words like Life, Nature, Mankind. They are singular all-inclusive name tags that exist at their own level, all by themselves. They are pure abstracts about reality. as soon as we mention one item in specifics, we tumbled from the abstract level into reality.
So, religious and scientific folks can fall into the same rabbit hole that obscures their vision because they can forget that they are using two levels inside their brains.
Of course, when telling a story, we do need handles, so within physics we can use QM and GR, and they are already telling us that there is a conflict between the detailed and the general level.
Or, when considering a nation of people, we will not and never say that the nation is a person. The larger overall level is of a different quality than the specific personal level, even when the leader in a nation is or can be a single individual. No person equals a nation (though some would love that of course).
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Bringing this back to the question how matter came to be. It is quite illogical to think that whatever it was that existed prior was fully transformed into matter. It is so beyond logic that I do not even have words to describe how weird it is that the smartest people on the planet do not recognize it as normal to accept that next to matter there is original energy. Dark energy, or however we want to call it, is a fact for me, though the term is up for debate. The abundance of original energy is not visible to us because we exist at the secondary, material level only.
If we use God instead of Original Energy, then we cannot end up with the same God after God created creation. There was nothing else laying around, so God could have only used (parts of) God godself.
The whole of Original Energy could not have remained the same when it produced matter.
But to declare that God or Original Energy was fully used up in the process makes no sense either, because had God used everything of God to create creation, then creation would have returned into being God after 1 second or ten hours, but not after 13.8 billion years. Full separation is a fact in our material universe, and the Milky Way is the largest setting in which we can still declare ourselves as part of a larger communal setting.
So we can only exist because we find ourselves in a reality that:
A/ had a disturbing beginning, and
B/ that took hold forever.
That means we must look for an event that established a separation within God, that established a separation among Original Energy.
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That is it for now, John. Note how this structure is truly distinct from either the religious (Western) ideal or the prevailing scientific model.
By declaring a singularity (of unknown mathematical proportions) in the center of the Big Bang model, physicists picked a model that makes no sense.
They incorporated the mystery spot, maybe because that's where they went on a vacation trip as a child, but it makes little scientific sense.
We do not have any data about the beginning of time, of space, or of energy. We only have data about the beginning of matter. So, what do the physicists do? They throw all of that in one bag and have their field trip to the Mystery Spot.
Then, when someone else says, I have a falsifiable proposal about the prior state predicting the outcome, they ignore that position because they consider it ridiculous. Scientists close doors like religious people close doors when the questions get to be too real and can undermine the status quo.
So, question back to you, John, in order for me to understand your thinking better: How did it all start up? I will not accept an eternal in-and-out as answer because it is like saying the chicken and the egg. Nothing much is said then. We live in a result, not the original, so how did it happen?
Don't worry if it is imperfect; I want to read your thinking so I can give better examples where you have a door or window that is not open, but that is naturally open, or where you have a door or window open that is naturally shut.
Thank you for having an open mind. You of all people should love this trip toward a different kind of thinking. I am sure it will blow your mind and at the same time I am pretty sure you can handle it and give it a place rather quickly.
