Would it be possible that some type of formless vibratory energy was always present and that a certain portion of this underwent a phase transition and was thereby transformed into the material universe we now see.
No. In fact, it’s a contradiction in terms, ontologically, to say anything is formless. And so long as you’re suggesting a pre-material “vibratory energy”, you’ll have to provide an imaginative definition for what you mean by both vibration and energy.
Vibration is the oscillatory behavior of a substance or wave (which presupposes motion, which further presupposes both a body to be moved and a space within which said body may move); energy is a conserved physical quantity which does not exist unto itself, but is a property of a material body.
But let’s suppose we can imagine this pre-material stuff. And let’s suppose that it does in fact transition from a pre-material substance into a material universe. Well, further supposing that we leave God/Supreme Intelligence out of the discussion thus far, then we would say that materiality is an inherent potential “state” of this substance, and that its materiality is already assumed in its causal framework. While its materiality did not exist in actuality prior to transition, it already existed in potentiality as an idea and condition of the substance’s existence. The essence of an object cannot be changed to the essence of an entirely new object on a purely mechanical level.
In fact, this transitory quality of the substance, its ability “to transition”, necessarily assumes the existence of the end point of the transition. This also presupposes temporality, or if we must, even a metatemporality, but in either case, this hypothetical substance-in-transition necessarily has the quality of Becoming, which means it is in a process of arriving (and also that the terminal point which is to be arrived at already exists).
A substance which is arriving, yet has not fully arrived must have been created and is not eternal, as since it is arriving, it is contingent and cannot sustain itself. It must be sustained by some substrative Power other than itself.
But barring all of this, a process of becoming is not a process of creating, and a substance which moves from pre-materiality to materiality is not creating. As you say, it is merely transitioning. And therefore the material form of the substance is “created” out of the pre-material form of the substance, not
ex nihilo.
Conclusion in next post…
), as I’m not a physicist, I wasn’t terribly concerned with the actual physics of energy. That said, without starting a whole new conversation–I’m not competent in physics–after scanning about the web, the concensus from the first page of linked articles on Google seems to be that Mr. Carroll is not entirely correct, and that the conservation of energy does in fact largely hold up even in general relativity, given the appropriate circumstances.