BIRTH OF THE UNIVERSE

 Physics of the early Universe is at the boundary of astronomy and philosophy since we do not currently have a complete theory that unifies all the fundamental forces of Nature at the moment of Creation.  Our physics can explain most of the evolution of the Universe after the Planck time (approximately 10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang). Events before the Planck time are undefined in our current science and, in particular, we have no solid understanding of the origin of the Universe (i.e. what started or ‘caused’ the Big Bang).

Cosmic Singularity: 

One thing is clear in our framing of questions such as ‘How did the Universe get started?’ is that the Universe was self-creating. This is not a statement on a ‘cause’ behind the origin of the Universe, nor is it a statement on a lack of purpose or destiny. It is simply a statement that the Universe was emergent, that it probably derived from an indeterminate sea of potentiality that we call the quantum vacuum, whose properties may always remain beyond our current understanding. Extrapolation from the present to the moment of Creation implies an origin of infinite density and infinite temperature (all the Universe's mass and energy pushed to a point of zero volume). Such a point is called the cosmic singularity. But the next level of inquiry is what is the origin of the emergent properties of the Universe, the properties that become the mass of the Universe, its age, its physical constants, etc. The answer appears to be that these properties have their origin as the fluctuations of the quantum vacuum. The properties of the Universe come from ‘nothing’, where nothing is the quantum vacuum, which is a very different kind of nothing. If we examine a piece of ‘empty’ space we see it is not truly empty, it is filled with spacetime, for example. Spacetime has curvature and structure, and obeys the laws of quantum physics. Thus, it is filled with potential particles, pairs of virtual matter and anti-matter units, and potential properties at the quantum level. The Universe is not filled by the quantum vacuum, rather it is ‘written on’ it, the substratum of all existence.

(also black holes are considered singularities)