Be advised that I am not a physicist /cosmologist and the the
cosmologists still have much work to do but much is understood after
Plank time (10**-43) sec after the BB. Before that the physics breaks
down (for now) and it is in the realm of philosophy.
I do find it curious however that creation on the quantum scale is just
nature being nature, or physics if you have it. As far back as 1947 it
was postulated that virtual matter/antimatter particles are continually
created and destroyed. Thus "vacuum" is a very very busy place. The
creation of virtual pairs of particles does not violate the law of
conservation of mass/energy because they only exist for times much less
than the Planck time. There is a temporary violation of the law of
conservation of mass/energy, though this violation occurs within the
timescale of the uncertainty principle and, thus, has no impact on
macroscopic laws. This is the Casimir effect and has predictable
measurable consequences.
Casimir imagined two metal plates so close together that the distance
between them was comparable with the wavelengths of the virtual
particles. (Another consequence of quantum theory is that all particles
are simultaneously waves.) In these circumstances, he realized, the
plates would be pushed together. That is because only particles with a
wavelength smaller than the gap between the plates could appear in that
gap, whereas particles of any wavelength could be present on the other
sides of the plates. Though this was in the late '40's by 1997 this
force could be rather precisely measured and in impressive agreement
with predictions---U. C. Riverside:
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/9805038
Thus there IS much ado about nothing, but makes me wonder if on the
macro scale that creation is all physics too.
Philosophical Mike
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