What a Strange Universe it Seems to Be

Questions from sleepless nights as a young boy:
  
I remember thinking long and hard as a kid about the question "what was there before this world existed?"  Even if I accepted the answer available to me (and almost everyone else) that "God created the world from a "void," this still seemed to leave a mystery . . . what was this "void?"  What really was "nothing?"  I just couldn't imagine what is the absence of everything.
  
The other question that plagued my wandering young mind was what do you find at the end of space, at the edge of the universe?  A wall? A shimmering  boundary with nothing on the other side?  Again the given answer was that it went on forever, an infinite distance, God has no boundaries.  Again I had a hard time getting my 10 year old mind around that concept.
 
Now a half-century later, I finally have been given some answers that I can accept, even if I struggle to fully understand the math and physics (Quantum math/physics was never my strong point.)
 
First Question Answer:  Nothing = the absence of space and time, no matter, no energy.  Just Nothing, but it doesn't last long.
  
Second Question Answer:  If, searching for the edge of the universe, you look sufficiently far into the distant universe with mathematical binoculars, you will see . . . the back of your head!

Both of these books are well worth reading, but even though they were written for the lay public, the concepts might be challenging if you were a liberal arts college major and have had no mathematics, physics, or science since high school.  Hawking's book is shorter, but has better (and full color) illustrations. while Krauss' book gets further into the margins of cosmology, and offers alternative theories (for example he talks about string theory, but admits he personally doubts it is the answer, or even valid.  
  
I would suggest starting with Hawking and after letting that digest for a while, then pick up Krauss.  Neither of these books worked well for late night reading nor with a glass of wine; a clear daytime mind and a cup of coffee helped me.

So what is the bottom line?  
- Something can come from nothing; in fact nothing is an unstable state, and something will always come from nothing.
- Micro-universes appear all the time, but only when an "expansion" occurs is a universe like ours created.
- Multiple universes likely exist, and they may or may not have the same laws of physics as our universe
- In the presence of almost infinite variety of possible events, as long as an event is not impossible then that event will occur.
- "We" are the consequence of these almost infinite possibilities, though we are pretty insignificant considering the scope of the universe in size (~500 billion known galaxies and ~100 billion suns in each galaxy,) and time (13.72 billion years old now and a life-expectancy of at least trillions of years.)
- This does not mean "God" did not create our world, but on the other hand "God" is not necessary for our universe to exist, unless it is the God of Einstein and Spinoza.