Genesis.V2.exe

Boom 

Okay, so I don't know how or why - all of a sudden reality explodes into being. It is said that since this is the moment that space expands into existence there is no "outside" or "into" for it to "expand into". Up, down, left and right and every direction in between are all hot off the presses.

I visualise that in a dimension beyond imagination, a point of potential can no longer contain itself and explodes or implodes 3D space into being, from our point of view space is expanding outwards, creating more of itself, as my cube resists the force of the reality-tsunami that has just enveloped it.

Who knows? For now this whole part of history is out of our reach, unless you're willing to believe that an anthropomorphic dictator created us all. I don't see how that's too different from a hypothetical super-dimensional explosion that has no source, but there are clues and facts that we can trace back which make it more likely than a homophobic wizard.

I prefer explanations based on peer reviewed study and deductive reasoning. Peer reviewed studies are based on experiments that, when repeated produce the same results or at least to within an acceptable margin of error. This means that nobody has to take my word for what I'm saying - the rules that determine it can be checked if you want to. I'll even fund your research. *

My (slightly shit) Examples

The apple, unobstructed, will always fall from the tree. Ask a hundred (sober and honest) people and they will all tell you it fell down towards the ground. Ask a hundred people why the apple fell and you'll get a hundred different answers. Some people might talk about ripeness, or wind, weak branches etc The apple and the tree, independently, all do the same thing. The people, don't all see the same thing. Objective facts are repeatable. Subjective experience rarely is. 

Deductive reasoning follows statements of fact through to their logical conclusion and can work in either direction. Observing that a metal container of water on a shelf produces steam and heat, we can deduce that the water was not always on the shelf and that at some point it was brought to the boil. We can deduce that at some point the water was cold and that it will be again because it is a fact that water at rest equalises to the temperature of it's environment. We  cannot look at this container and say 

"This water is emitting heat and steam, therefore all water emits steam and heat." 

This is not a good argument about water because it disagrees with facts that we can all observe in every day life around us.

SO - why am I rambling about all of this logical blah-blah? It is because those same principles of fact and reason are components of peer reviewed experiment and also are the bare minimum of qualifiers that we should need if we're going to accept an explanation for why something is the way that it is.

I'm sure that you've also heard the saying that we are all stardust or that the atoms that are inside us were made in the hearts of stars? As poetic and beautiful as it sounds it is in fact almost completely true. 

So we have a bang - now the universe exists for some horrible reason and then goes through a cooling down period. I'm skipping over this bit. For the purpose of unpacking the 'why gas clouds become people'  quote and the stardust thing we're going to start at a different beginning. 

You might say that everything that's just happened here is like the triumphant orgasm of a loving couple post copulation, after which an egg has been infected with a plucky young sperm. 

There is now a moment of peace in the universe. The exciting bit is over and everything has calmed and dimmed down to a familiar quiet darkness once again. Except that this time, if we scroll through the various filters of our magic time travelling cube I might see sheets and beams of radiation, atomic clouds and waves of this and the next thing. It's a black silence to our eyes, but we are no longer strange and exotic matter in an interdimensional void of non-existence - we are matter among matter, sparse as it might be.

More Terrible Analogies

Concrete is a substance that is fairly simple and largely unremarkable. It is made of a couple of ingredients - aggregate, cement and water.

I could explain to someone how the combination of aggregate, cement and water can be used to build more and more complex systems that result in the development of buildings and cities which allow civilisations to grow.

Trying to explain what the ingredients of cement are and who owns the factories where they come from would be a different story and would get in the way of explaining how concrete builds cities and bridges. We know that cement is a thing, we know that there is a process by which it got here.

In the same way those of us who believe in the big bang** theory also believe that after it we were left with a very simple universe of cloudy hydrogen, out of which everything else was made. Roughly 300'000 years after the big bang it settled down into being mostly hydrogen.

We now have a vast embryonic universe with little more than a cloudy soup of hydrogen atoms. Hydrogen is the simplest and lightest atom on the periodic table, being made of one proton, one neutron and one electron. All subsequent atoms are more complex or numerous configurations of those three particles. You could say, from a certain perspective that everything that exists is made of only 3 basic ingredients. From you to me to planets and pancakes everything is made of atoms. Everything is a mix of protons, neutrons and electrons

Right then. How do we go from soup to pancakes?

Einstein's Gravy-tones, Baby

Albert Einstein was incredible and most people - me included - don't really understand to what level. His genius seemed limitless. He was drawing up theories on paper and blackboard that were being proven correct one hundred years later when technology caught up with his ideas!

He had a mind that was able to see behind the veil before anyone even knew there was a veil there. One of the many brilliant things about his work was his mission to reduce the apparently separate surface phenomena of the world and connect them to a deeper function. 

He felt that it should be possible to find a single equation, one string of letters and numbers that could describe the engine underlying all of reality. Until the day he died he was working on a way to bridge the gap between general and quantum relativity - to find a way to connect the mechanisms that govern the very very large and the very very small.

Still this work is not finished and it makes me wonder - if his life had been artificially extended by some as yet undiscovered technology - given enough time, would he have been able to? How many discoveries about the world have missed or been needlessly late to in losing the absolutely unique mind and personality of Albert Einstein.

Auld Al here understood that time was not separate from the physical dimension of space. Rather the phenomenon of "Spacetime" is a single fabric which is distributed throughout the universe. He deduced that the presence of a mass, such as a planet, elemental cloud or star distorts spacetime so that it's not so much that there is a separate force pulling things towards it, but rather than the path through spacetime has been bent in the direction of the object.

What this means is that a giant rock, sitting still in the middle of space all by itself, won't do much of anything without an outside influence. Magic another giant rock into the vicinity and they will begin to fall towards each other, eventually colliding. 

Back in the soupy mess of hydrogen, those same forces are at work. Although hydrogen is a light gas weighing on the shy side of not very much, gravity never the less acts upon it and all things being the same - nobody really minds how long this takes. 

This is taking longer than I thought. I'm very long winded, even to myself!

*I definitely won't fund your research, I'm really fucking poor. Check with me again in the future, or the deep, deep past - depending on how successful my time time travel company becomes and was or is.

**I just realised that I really don't like the term the Big Bang - there are so many things wrong with it as a name for what it describes and it's kind of reductive in an unhelpful way.