Why is there something rather than nothing?
Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the Universe is simply that it, and everything in it, exists. But what's the reason why?
It's a question that almost everyone has wondered at some point: given all the things that exist around us, in this world and in the great Universe beyond, what's the reason for why it all exists?
This is one of those questions, I’m sorry to say, that science not only doesn’t have a satisfactory answer for right now, but will probably never have one.
There’s an enormous difference between a “why” question, which science isn’t really well-equipped to answer, with a “how” question, which is the bread-and-butter of what science is good for. If we were to ask the question of why we’re all here, there isn’t a scientific way to approach this question: we can’t formulate a testable hypothesis and derive what sorts of things we can go out and measure to answer that. Even if we determine the underlying rules that reality follows, there’s a limit to what we can derive from them: we can derive physical consequences that stem from those rules and some set of initial conditions, but we cannot derive any sort of purpose behind those consequences using the tools of science.