Age of the universe?

[WereKitten]

binary solo said:

WereKitten said:

binary solo said:

Jay520 said:

man-bear-pig said:

everything must come from something....

How do you know this?

All observed phenomena follow the principle of cause and effect. Nothing happens but that something preceeding it caused it to happen. If you are aware of anything to refute that basic axiom then please bring it to light.

That's not so cut-and-dry in the world of quantum mechanics. There's, to our current understanding, no cause that says that a given unstable atom must decay right now and not a second ago. There's probabilities distributions, but no actual dice.

That does not preclude there being a cause. The fact that the universe runs on probability distributions for certain events is still part of the chain of causation.

Might be, or might be not. You asked for an example of phenomena happening without a (previous) phenomenon we can call its cause in a classical sense.

There are several interpretations of quantum mechanics and ongoing work to untangle the mess at its root. Some great physicists (such as T'Hooft) are trying to find a deterministic simpler layer under the QM as we know it. Other schools posit that we should accept the logic as QM as we know it through experiments and not try to shoehorn it into our determinsitic, classical thinking.

Anyway, the current orthodox interpretation of QM has a very restricted definition of causality ( that has to do with transmission of information in a world relying on general relativity and is tied with locality ) and does not posit "a cause for every effect" as a basic axiom, whereas for example Newton's classical mechanics implies.