Genesis.V1.exe

Au Debut: Rien (In the beginning: nothing)

My version of 

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth."

 would instead read

"Hydrogen is an odourless, colourless gas which, given enough time, turns into people.".

I still don't know who said it* but it has this beautiful simplicity that betrays the titanic scale of the story it contains. I'm tempted to draw parallels between it and equations like E=Mc2, both of which are elegant in their simplicity despite the enormous cosmological phenomena they each describe. I can say it in one breath, yet it holds the story of billions of years of history; in between the lines it reminds me of how we materialised from almost nothing.

'Nothing' as a concept is very subjective. It means different things to different people, in different situations. Once I've finished a bottle of water I might say that there's nothing in the bottle now. Someone else could say "Actually, there is air in the bottle." Point at the sky and say "Out there in space, that's the only place where there is nothing." Once again neither of them are wrong but a quantum scientist could then say "Well, actually so-called empty space has hydrogen and radiation, sparse, tiny particles etc...". 

I wonder if we would ever reach the end of that discussion. What if someone new kept coming along, each in possession of an increasingly fine tuned microscope or measuring device? How far can we zoom in before it's impossible to get any smaller? If we do reach that point then is the gap between two of whatever this new unit is the true nothing? 

Once more I brick myself and need to take a step back, sit down and shake it off. I cannot proceed any further without someone more advanced and educated than I am. I can say something about the Planck length or Planck scale, in the vague knowledge that for some reason this is theoretically the smallest we've ever imagined but I don't know why or by what experiment so I don't really understand it.

I know that there was a scientist called Max Planck who either measured or proposed an absolutely minimal expression of energy, the absolute smallest teeny tiny thread of reality and called it the Planck length, but if that's all I know about that I might as well say "Hmmmwell, akshually Max - I can imagine something even smaller and it's called the Nath Length."  

...hmmm...

On second thought I don't think I want my name and the smallest conceivable thing to be linked forever. I have confidence issues as it is.

Anyway...those last three paragraphs on nothing - no thing - were to legitimise my "...how we materialised from almost nothing." sentence about the hydrogen gas quote. Can you tell I'm an overthinker? And probably a pain to listen to, since I tend to orate rather than converse, but if you're still here then good cos I plan on taking us on a wee journey. 

My Travelling Glass Cube

Flex with me the muscles of your inner eye. I want to show you my Cube. See it with me, close your eyes if you must: a cube, made of an unknown substance that resembles glass in every way. I can step inside and it is the perfect temperature and atmosphere. I can move in and out of it when I want, but it is otherwise totally indestructible. No matter the conditions outside of it, when I'm inside time, space, air, pressure, temperature and everything else behaves in a comfortably habitable way for me.

It can travel any where and any time by willpower and if need be, the glass can also act as a filter to let me see x-rays, ultraviolet light, telescope in and out of view, protect my eyes from too much light and anything else I need it to be.

What would you do with such a device? Let me be clear that it is not magic. It's simply by design of a species so advanced as to be able to build such a technology that to a primitive observer such as you and I - it seems no less than magic. 

As I step into the glass it is as though it liquifies to my touch and I pass seamlessly through it. As I do an iridescent ripple travels through the material, around the cube and disappears back into the point it came from. Stood inside it is solid as it ever was (I also happen to look really good and slim while I'm doing all this - sooo if you can picture this cube you can squeeze that in too). Now - where do you want to go?

Doesn't matter, I'm not really asking. With a faintly wet 'pop' we disappear. 

From our perspective, though, it's everything else that has disappeared. It's pitch black outside now - and impossibly silent. We are in a place that no one has ever been able to describe accurately, because it is beyond and outside of everything we consider real. 

We are before the universe - before creation and before the Big Bang. Time has not yet started ticking - neither the first second, nor the first minute has yet passed.  Every single space and particle is the same thing, same place, same time - an unknowable point of phenomenal potential. 

Standing in my box I scan through every available filter, every imaginable permutation of energy, matter and light and yet all I can see is my own reflection. Even willing the cube to become entirely invisible I cannot see - even my own hands are invisible now because light itself doesn't exist yet. 

This is how I picture the very beginning and I'd like you to see it with me, if you can. I know that some people are not particularly visual that way and some people are unable to visualise in their minds. That's okay. Try to think back to before you were born. What can you remember or feel of that time? There's nothing there when I do it. No emotion, no memory, no sense of importance or ego, no fear, no nothing - there just wasn't anything. I am imagining we are standing in reality's version of that.

Some scientists speculate that the pre-universe was like the singularity of a black hole - an infinitely dense point where all of space and time and matter is condensed. For a long time this was the dominant scientific idea. 

Only fairly recently have I begun to hear people such Sir Roger Penrose draw up different theories of how one universe evolves into another big bang and another universe which then evolves into another big bang and so on. I haven't been paying much attention to new ideas of the beginning. Most of my life I have read that the strongest theory is the Big Bang, so it's the closest thing to understanding that I have at the moment. It's the idea that I've had bouncing around my mind and subconscious for the longest - so it is the idea that I am most comfortable attempting to conceptualise. 

I don't know what triggers it, but in a moment this seed is going to explode reality into action and it is on the basis of that set-up that I want to unpack that quote. Once more for the folks in the back:

"Hydrogen is an odourless, colourless gas which, given enough time, turns into people."

If you know, you know and if you don't I'm about to try and brekkit down for ya! Well....for me. As I said in the first post (I think) this is more of an experiment in whether or not I have really understood some of the things that have fascinated me over the years, months, days and hours. 

If I understand the thing properly, I should then be able to explain and convey the thing in such a way that the reader can understand. That's all this is. 

*I know his name: Edward R. Harrison, thanks to Google - but it doesn't really matter.