• Question: Where does energy come from? We know that it can't be created or destroyed, only transferred, but energy has to have come from somewhere. If we go all the way back, where did it even start? Does it just exist? If it does, how? How can it exist without being created?

    Asked by anon-269046 on 11 Nov 2020. This question was also asked by anon-267461.
    • Photo: Bradley Young

      Bradley Young answered on 11 Nov 2020:

      This is a really good question. Although, it might spill in to the realms of philosophy. I think it’s quite widely accepted that all forms of energy were caused by ‘the big bang’. Although where the energy for the big bang came from is a question that physicists are still working on.

    • Photo: Liza Sazonova

      Liza Sazonova answered on 11 Nov 2020:

      To add to Bradley’s answer, the “energy cannot be created” is a rule that can be “broken”. It doesn’t happen in physics you learn at school and in the world around us (or even physics I do). So you don’t have to worry about it, unless you go on to university to do some cool and exotic physics!
      .
      In quantum physics, you could have very tiny particles appear out of… nothing. They collide with each other and get destroyed almost immediately so the overall energy is conserved. These things are basically impossible to measure, but in the past 20 years we actually did!
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      One theory that tries to explain the Big Bang is that it’s also a quantum fluctuation, i.e. a burst of energy that appeared out of nowhere. But I think it has since been disproven…

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