In the beginning, there was nothing. But it was a very active kind of nothing that, because of the Uncertainty Principle, allowed bits of energy to be borrowed from nothing, leaving behind holes as a sort of IOU.<p>The likelihood of a virtual particle pair arising was inversely proportional to the energy difference across the pair. Since you need a fair bit of energy to do anything interesting, nothing happened for a very long time.<p>However, since there was an abundance of very long time, eventually two of the photons borrowed out of the vacuum with sufficient energy interacted in such a way as to give rise to matter.<p>Multiply that very long time by all of the matter in the universe (a very long time, squared; lucky we had lots of it) and we have beaches and sunsets.<p>The only remaining question is how all that matter was gathered into the singularity that gave rise to our present universe about 13.8 (or whatever) By ago. Maybe it accreted out of the original matter over another very long time.<p>Or maybe the idea that when you run the expansion of the universe backward you get a singularity is wrong. Maybe matter arising out of the vacuum disappears back where it came from when you run the picture backwards and it only looks like the universe started 13.8 By ago because that&#x27;s how far out the event horizon sits. Maybe the cosmic background is the signature of the vacuum-derived pairs creating matter. Maybe this experiment will demonstrate an alternative origin for the cosmic background.