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Before there was matter, there was dark energy.
What came first? The chicken or the egg?
Scientists figured out that the answer is the chicken. They placed one hundred chickens in a room and one hundred eggs in another room. When they returned the next day to both rooms, each kept at room temperature, the one hundred eggs were still one hundred eggs. But the room with one hundred chickens contained a couple of eggs as well.
Without any scientific doubt, the chicken came first and not the egg.
This is just a joke of course, but the larger question unanswered is what came before the chicken or the egg? Somehow, we have a material outcome and it must have come from somewhere. Scientists do not know the answer. Before there was matter, what was there?
The problem is that, without data, scientists cannot factually consider a different reality from which matter subsequently derived. As such, the joke about the chicken and the egg points us to the limits of science itself.
Once scientists have data, they can construct theories and establish hypotheses related to the data, whichever way they can think of. But they cannot think about energy before there was matter because they must link whatever they come up with their data, which is by default matter-based. Scientifically, the…