Thoughts on Universe

I just came back from work. The brisk walk in the evening left me a little too invigorated to just head straight to bed. Today was the day that I’ve been left a little off kilter, since I live in one region of this continent that doesn’t switch back and forth to daylight savings time. Yesterday was the change over for everyone else. The thing that is notable that throws one off base is that the television programming schedules have shifted to begin one hour earlier on the non-local/non-provincial channels and the American networks. Thankfully PVRs are automated to detect this, not that this matters much to me now since I’m suspending my cable TV service starting the end of this week and on through the spring and summer. That’s when I concentrate more on life-enriching things, like fitness and reading on other deeper subjects.

Anyway, the shifting of the time zones, the material I’ve been reading throughout the weekend, and perhaps serendipitously noticing the way Venus and Jupiter were positioned in tonight’s sky, have really inspired me to think about stuff on my academic/intellectual bucket list, as it were. As of late, some of those deeper subjects I’ve taken an interest in learning more about are astrophysics and cosmology; in particular, trying to make better sense and efforts to learn the intricacies of the moment that our Universe* was created. Why? I suppose I’m ultimately curious about learning about my home right down to its most basic foundation. I’ve been absorbed and enthralled with Bill Bryson’s book, A Short History on Nearly Everything.  It’s helping me with trying to noodle out some other supplemental research and writings from guys like Steven Hawking and Michio Kaku.

Bryson himself isn’t a physicist, or even a scientist. However, he is very masterful at doing what scientists often fail to do. That is, explaining scientific material, or whatever other complex subjects he writes about, in a non-pretentious manner, in language that fabulously illustrates and renders the dimensions of such subjects into non-esoteric terms that are more comprehensible. Even with the simplified explanation, I still have to scribble out and diagram things as I try to follow the jest of what I’m reading to figure it all out and pose my own questions.

The challenging thing to start with is to understand the concept of the singularity. The point at which all matter/energy, space will ever be derived from, was hyper-condensed into a super-compact point where there is infinite space-time curvature. When that got a little too tight . . . KaBlammo . . . the Big Bang resulted, creating the expanse, and all the goodies within it that we call the known Universe. In a singularity, the mass within it approaches infinity, and yet the space it occupies approaches the infinitesimal, and there is no motion. With no motion or “space” to move through, there then is technically no such thing as “time”. What is outside of a singularity? Absolutely nothing: in the strictest sense of the word, “nothing”.

Those are the things for me that make a singularity (the magnet on my white board I designated alpha, α) such a hard thing to figure out. Firstly, the sheer density of mass in such a small space is mind boggling, and secondly, because it is so incredibly hard for a human mind to actually think about, or conceive of “nothing” beyond it. If you ever tried Zen, or other forms of meditation, you would know exactly what I’m talking about. As you try to empty your head of thoughts to try to pinpoint your focus onto just only your breathing, thinking of “nothing” else, notice just how many free-floating and intrusive thoughts re-invade your brain soon after you attempt this. It doesn’t surprise me that it can take an entire lifetime to master such a thing. Even the most dull-witted of people have a hard time allowing themselves to imagine or think about “nothing”. Like nature, the mind doesn’t like voids or vacuums. Trying to conceive of something that technically has no “outside”, but rather only just an “inside” with an incredibly small scale and intense density totally baffles me.

The other thing I find myself hung up on in bewilderment about our Universe’s creation is the transition from the singularity to that instant where the Big Bang occurred, and then the resulting rapid expansion of space-time, matter and energy. I’ve just nicely come to terms with Einstein’s theory that nothing in nature travels faster than light in a vacuum. Apparently though, the expansion of the formation of Universe is exempt from this somehow. According to what Hawking and others theorize, the rate of the expansion of the boundaries of the newly formed Universe happened much faster than c, like the c in E=mc² . . . the constant of the speed of light in a vacuum.

Find the thinnest piece of thread you can, and cut it to about 30 cm (12 inches) long. That is a nanosecond, or rather the distance that the fastest thing in nature (a photon of light) travels in one billionth of a second**. In my mind, if Einstein is correct, the newly formed Universe, after one nanosecond, the Big Bang would have been limited an expansion of about the size of my underused Swiss Ball that’s in my collection of other underused exercise equipment. However, according to Steven Hawking, the expansion of the Big Bang was millions and millions of times larger after an even smaller, infinitesimal increment of time under a nanosecond. This really fries my brain. I have no idea why this is so, even through reading the complex literature about it. I’m not sure if I have the wherewithal to understand it completely. It’s probably one of the most perplexing, divine, mystical, oogity-boogity things which, so far, would prevent me from ever becoming a complete atheist.

I try my best not to be ignorant of physical science, but the terminology and the explanations of the esoteric abstractions that are made in the field of physics are far from user friendly. This is the biggest wall I hit when I try to sort this stuff out. As I study this field more, I only get more and more suspicious and confused of such abstractions, especially the ones, it seems, that start with the letter “q”, like “quanta”, or “quasars”, and “quarks” . . . oh those friggin’ quarks! I really can’t make sense of them at all (up, down, strange, charm . . . and these are “flavours’ of the things . . . what kind of crazy bullshit terminology is that!). It makes me think that this was all dreamt up by some physicist getting high on Quaaludes. It’s no wonder with non-simplified and non-contritely explained stuff like this that the masses in general opt to glaze their own minds over with things like wackity-hoo-hoo religious and superstitious beliefs, crappy "reality" TV shows, video games, and shopping, collecting, and  hoarding material shit to smooth over those voids of knowledge that give them existential angst, rather than trying to educate themselves about science, and the things that make up the fabric of reality.

For now, I’ll make my best effort to use my brain for understanding at least little more of this cosmology stuff. Like learning Zen meditation, this has the potential for needing a lifetime to figure out. If I’m not any more enlightened by doing so for this next while, at least through the pages of this book, I’d be better off by spending time with my underused Swiss Ball instead.

*- I’m of the same school of thought as Buckminster Fuller, who always chose to capitalize the word “Universe” ,like it was a proper name of a country, or the way we address “God”, or anything else that is very vast and all-encompassing and singular. I think Bucky was on to something. He even went so far as to drop the use of definite and indefinite articles (“the” and “a”) when he referred to it in his writings, just like the same way we English speakers do with God and nation’s names. I don’t commonly say “a Canada”, or “the Canada” when referring to my own country, like there is more than one Canada to differentiate it from (unless of course you are putting it in a context where Canada is being compared to itself in different scenarios). Why should that not then be the case with Universe: a place that’s home to all and a source of our creation, like supposedly God is?

**-Now look at the end of that thread, at the actual width of the cross section of where it was cut. All matter in the Universe was trying to trying to occupy a space much, much, much smaller than that in the form of a singularity. Isn’t that wild shit to think about?