“Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover…. That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.” – Astronomer, physicist and founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies Robert Jastrow.
The question posed by the title of this essay is by its very nature so nagging that it has no doubt crossed the mind of virtually every thinking person who ever lived. Forget about complex life forms for a moment: more fundamentally, how could any universe, even one devoid of life — but replete with matter and energy — exist at all? Why isn’t there just nothingness?