this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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No. Conservation of mass and energy only prohibit the total mount of mass and energy changing. The universe could have always existed with that mass and energy. We have good evidence that a lot of mass and energy was spread out by the expansion of a much smaller universe around 13.8 billion years ago, but we don't know what the universe was like before that, it could have always existed, or it could have been formed by the collapse of another universe, we don't know for sure.
Anyway, the laws of physics are just empirical observations, they have been proven wrong before. Einstein's general relativity disagrees with Newton's laws of motion and, further study reveled that Newton was (very subtly under normal conditions) wrong.
If you know the math you know that Newton was in fact not wrong, but merely incomplete. Einstein merely added one addendum, which for Newtons experiments was always zero (for all practical purposes) anyway, so in his empirical setting he was as right as he could possibly get.
I think it’s a misrepresentation to call Newtonian physics “wrong”