Before the Beginning:

On Energy, Eternity, and the Right to Ask Big Questions

“Energy cannot be created or destroyed.”

That simple, almost sacred law - spoken in science classrooms, echoed in physics texts - is a quiet doorway to one of the most astonishing truths we can contemplate. If the energy in the universe has always existed in one form or another, then it stands to reason that the universe itself, in some form or other, has always been.

The law of Conservation of Energy states that: Energy cannot be created or destroyed - it can only be transferred from one type to another.

This idea isn’t new, but we rarely pause long enough to absorb what it actually means.

A Universe Already Full

If all the energy that exists now existed from the beginning - then that “beginning” was not empty. The Big Bang wasn’t a moment of sudden appearance from true nothingness. It was, rather, a profound transformation of something already present. Something dense, inexplicable, ordered and disordered all at once.

From this, something quietly radical follows: the universe was not made with energy. It was already brimming with energy.

This reframes the grand question often dismissed by scientists as meaningless:

“What was there before the Big Bang?”

If energy is eternal, then there must have been something. We don’t have to know what it was to know that the question itself is valid.

Just as a river may vanish into a mist and reform downstream, existence may flow in ways we cannot yet perceive. But the river never stopped being. It only changed form.

Does the Universe Ever Die?

We often hear of the universe’s eventual heat death - an entropy-laden hush where all useful energy is spent and nothing more can be done. And yet, in this supposed death, energy still exists. Still there. Just… in a different form.

This isn’t death as annihilation. It’s death as stillness.

And perhaps even stillness has its place in a larger rhythm. Perhaps, in some unimaginable eon, a pulse stirs again.

The ancient mystics, the cyclic cosmologists, the thinkers of both East and West, have long entertained the idea that the universe moves in cycles, like breath… or seasons… Modern science has begun, tentatively, to consider the same.

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao,” wrote Laozi.

Likewise, perhaps the universe we measure is not the full universe that is.

Asking the Right “Wrong” Questions

Too often, we’re told not to ask certain questions - especially when it comes to cosmology, origin, or meaning. But this avoidance is not caution; it is a kind of cultural exhaustion. As if wonder has become inconvenient.

But wonder is not childish.

Wonder is sacred.

- “What was before the beginning?”

- “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

- “What is the nature of energy, that it should exist at all?”

These are not wrong questions. They are the questions. Not to be silenced, but to be held like riddles we live with, rather than solve too quickly.

Einstein once said,

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”

To ask big questions is to keep that beauty alive.

Living With Mystery

This isn’t just about astrophysics. It’s about how we live.

If energy can never be destroyed, then neither can meaning—at least, not fully. Meaning may change form, grow cold, go quiet… but it too can be reawakened.

So live with the mystery. Ask the great, inconvenient questions. Let them shake you gently into humility, or awe, or resolve. Because this world isn’t dead matter. It’s energy in constant conversation with itself - through stars, and trees, and us.

And perhaps even before the Big Bang…

The conversation had already begun.

“What was there before the Big Bang?”

If energy is eternal, then there must have been something. We don’t have to know what it was to know that the question itself is valid.