whats beyond the universe?

[o_billdoor]

There are perfectly rational scientific explanations of all these things. Just because your mind can't understand them intuitively doesn't mean they can't be expressed and proven logically.

For some people, studying mathematics of physics retrains the brain so that the logical solutions to these things becomes the most intuitively "correct" explanation.

The question of what's "outside" the universe is simply one of the passage of information. By our definition of "universe" as an entirety, the following is intrinsically true: nothing outside the universe can affect anything inside the universe. Therefore, no information can flow from outside of the universe to inside of the universe. Because of this, we can never know about anything outside the universe, and may therefore assume that there is nothing outside of the universe. In order to state that something exists we must see it effecting some kind of change, which we cannot do since anything that hypothetically exists outside of the universe cannot transmit any information to us.

Assuming the big bang singularity theory is correct, the same applies to the question of what was "before" the big bang (quite aside from the general relativity theory that explains how there was no time before the big bang). At the point of singularity, the amount of data held in the universe was zero. The singularity had no size, position, velocity or potential energy. Any data that existed before the time of singularity/big bang would have been eliminated, and would therefore have no effect on the universe at any point after the big bang. As above, we can therefore assume that nothing existed before the time of the big bang.

Originally Posted by weetbix

that and the fact that no-one on earth has ever created life from nothingness.

To be able to make this statement, you have to define what you mean by "life". It's simply a question of words -- for some definitions of life, this statement would be correct and for others, it wouldn't.