How Did Matter Come into Being?

What say you?
Let's start with the fact that the universe we see now has matter, energy, space and time. We experience each in somewhat a separate way, for example eating food, lighting a match, traveling down the highway, and experiencing how each word you are reading in this sentence keeps slipping into your past.

Physics experiments and observations give a different view not obvious to our separations above. Space-time and matter as energy "tied in knots" are new ways of better understanding the underlying reality in combining our common sense (a problematic sense, in various ways) notions to gain deeper understanding of what is actually going on. We next need to get to the idea that if matter is a complex, trapped form of energy, that so called "empty space" is demonstrated as not empty, but seething with energy on a subatomic scale. In fact space-time is energy as well.

There is an old joke answer to the question, framed as a sort of Big Question, by Douglas Adams, of "Life, the universe, and everything," which is facetiously revealed as not even a question at all, in the final analysis, so then the question needs to be found. That old joke answer was, "it's turtles all the way down." This was in response to the fake answer of what is under it all ("it all"), as being a giant turtle, and then, well what is under the giant turtle?

So taking this into the modern knowledge of physics and cosmology so far, the answer to what is matter, is, it's energy all the way down. People are often after something more at this point, and The Big Question at is really at root when they ask what is matter, or similar questions. If that is what you're after, let me know and I will have a bit of fun digressing on that.
 
It just "is". And it's simple as that. Matter didn't just "come into being". It's always been there and always well be. This idea that "matter" has to have a "beginning" - a point in time... or a "how did it get here" - a physical way of entering into space and time... is basically tilting at windmills.

The How, Why, When and Where questions are just man-made constructs to try and establish a "reason" for being. The reason - and the answer to all those questions - is all the same. It is what it is. It just "is". I know that phrase is used all the time to explain the unexplainable (especially by football coaches at the presser) but "it is what it is".
 
Let's start with the fact that the universe we see now has matter, energy, space and time. We experience each in somewhat a separate way, for example eating food, lighting a match, traveling down the highway, and experiencing how each word you are reading in this sentence keeps slipping into your past.

Physics experiments and observations give a different view not obvious to our separations above. Space-time and matter as energy "tied in knots" are new ways of better understanding the underlying reality in combining our common sense (a problematic sense, in various ways) notions to gain deeper understanding of what is actually going on. We next need to get to the idea that if matter is a complex, trapped form of energy, that so called "empty space" is demonstrated as not empty, but seething with energy on a subatomic scale. In fact space-time is energy as well.

There is an old joke answer to the question, framed as a sort of Big Question, by Douglas Adams, of "Life, the universe, and everything," which is facetiously revealed as not even a question at all, in the final analysis, so then the question needs to be found. That old joke answer was, "it's turtles all the way down." This was in response to the fake answer of what is under it all ("it all"), as being a giant turtle, and then, well what is under the giant turtle?

So taking this into the modern knowledge of physics and cosmology so far, the answer to what is matter, is, it's energy all the way down. People are often after something more at this point, and The Big Question at is really at root when they ask what is matter, or similar questions. If that is what you're after, let me know and I will have a bit of fun digressing on that.
Points scored for the Douglas Adams reference.
 

A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing by Lawrence Kraus​

Krause has a PhD from MIT and has taught physics at Harvard and Yale . He provides a scientific ( not religious ) explanation. I have his book on my shelf and last read his book 10 years ago. It was sciencey but an accessible read for a lay person like me :)

 
It just "is". And it's simple as that. Matter didn't just "come into being". It's always been there and always well be. This idea that "matter" has to have a "beginning" - a point in time... or a "how did it get here" - a physical way of entering into space and time... is basically tilting at windmills.

The How, Why, When and Where questions are just man-made constructs to try and establish a "reason" for being. The reason - and the answer to all those questions - is all the same. It is what it is. It just "is". I know that phrase is used all the time to explain the unexplainable (especially by football coaches at the presser) but "it is what it is".
That has been my lay person view. For me the first cause is existence and the "age" of the "universe" is an irrelevant concept.
 
Points scored for the Douglas Adams reference.
So you were after more than matter. To expand on the something rather than nothing, and on your angle above:

When I am confronted by this kind of thing, I always seem to come back to the notion of candidate answers. For a long time it has seemed to be that if you want to ask a useful question, or just an interesting question, it needs to have some possible candidate answers. Meaning there needs to be some sort of conceptual space about what an answer could be like, or how it could function for new knowledge. I could digress on that, but suffice to say, answers that have potential meaning, and that could fit into the puzzle of the meanings one has already arrived at (even tenuously).

So let's consider even capital B Q Big Questions--like, "is there one universe, or a multiverse?" or, "is consciousness built of separate events in a chain, like frames in a movie, or continuous like a stream?"--two of my favorite Big Questions. I can ponder the ways the answers could go, even if there are other candidate answers that I don't know and could be correct.

When I run into a Douglas Adams question of "Life, the Universe, and Everything," I don't have any candidate answers. The fact that answers are built-in as having no shape and no foundation--no possible current candidates--puts my brain in clutch. I know, the Zen (religion, not the troll poster) answer for that is "exactly!" But here, personally, I lose interest.

Is there something sadly wrong with me here? Perhaps. But I can give you a sense of my stance here, if you consider the question, "why is a square not a circle?" The shape is not the answer, because here I mean it as another Big Question. It's also a meaningless question because there are no candidate answers. I see "why is there something rather than nothing?" as meaningless in precisely the same way as the square/circle question.It has no use because it has no candidate answers at all.
 
Why would you quit?
Unless you are Timothy Leary, age catches up with you. I had the interesting experience of attending his lecture in Atlanta circa 1977. He was around 60yo and suggesting that over time we would be able to sustain our human lifespan forever.

Now I was a young lad and he lost me as he continued his lecture. I was heartened when Leary paused and said that he could see many of us were "lost" but reassured us that his lecture would circle around so we could catch up.

At 26yo and watching Leary , I realized that I no longer had the capacity to "turn on, tune in, and drop out."
 
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