Sorry, but it's silly to refer to "religious-like faith some people have in chance and probabilities" given that the consideration of probabilities requires a lack of faith. If you believe then you have decided that you want the probability to be 1:1 and that's the end of the inquiry. If you don't believe, then you can consider probabilities.Dark Matter wrote: ↑March 22nd, 2018, 3:43 am On a more familiar level than via negativa, physics is largely the study of symmetries, and “pregnant with possibilities” is an old expression, a good one. I like it. But notwithing the religious-like faith some people have in chance and probabilities, science hasn’t a clue about the impetus that broke (or breaks) the symmetry of nothingness. It cannot be ignored that recent experiments looking for some imbalance between matter and anti-matter that could account for the universe came up with nothing: the universe shouldn’t exist.
Actually, science doesn't even know if there was a "symmetry of nothingness" before the Big Bang. Learning what came before is a work in progress so science's answer is "We don't yet know", along with a range of hypotheses with some degree of valid theoretical underpinning.
The imbalance of matter and antimatter makes sense to me. Not much in nature is exactly even so why should the amounts of matter and antimatter be exactly equal? As it turns out, they are very close to equal - just one part in a billion difference, and that was enough for all of this.
Remember, science cannot be correct unless humans know everything there is to know, and that is impossible. So it's always a work in progress, and must always posit the very most conservative and unexciting models possible with the facts at hand.
Fortunately, our private lives need not be so rigorously confined and we are mentally free to roam wherever, and if they happen to be "spiritual pastures", why not? However, science must retain rigour or it will lose its predictive power.