A Lopsided Mess
At this moment, abetted by the coming New Year and recent cosmos worthy news about the Large Hadron Collider, a memorable conversation comes to mind. It was some years ago, with a prize-winning astrophysicist. He and I found ourselves on the same college campus, he to address all the undergraduates, me to talk to a smaller group about publishing. We met by chance at the university’s guest-housing facility, over breakfast. I was unaccountably nervous about my upcoming performance–well, maybe not quite unaccountably, because I was going through very unpleasant occupational times then. In any case, we exchanged introductions and pleasantries, and when I found out what his profession was, I began to ask him some questions that had been on my mind for a long time. I’ve always been interested, in a thoroughly amateur way, in cosmology–how we and all this stuff got here. (Prize-winning astrophysicist’s comments are in bold text, below.)
“What? Does God exist?”
“Do we know anything about what happened before the Big Bang?”
“You mean what happened when there was no such thing as time?” he said, with a chuckle.
“You mean, if I put a fully wound clock into whatever there was or wasn’t before the Big Bang, it wouldn’t run or it wouldn’t measure anything, because there would be nothing to measure?”
“There was nowhere to put the clock–not even nowhere,” he said, as I recall.
“Let me try it this way: Did the Big Bang happen, in the way that we generally say that something happened?”
“Well, yes–there was an event.”
“Has there ever been any event that we know of that wasn’t preceded by a time when that event hadn’t happened?”
“No, not in the usual sense of those words.”
“So if the Big Bang happened, if it took place, then something had to have happened before it. Something must have caused the Big Bang.”
“Well, I think that sense of ’cause’ doesn’t obtain here. You know, by the way, that no object would be here at all if the Big Bang had been symmetrical.”
“What do you mean?”
“If it had been even, with matter going out equally in every direction, then we would have a lot of matter evenly distributed and no planets or galaxies or anything.”
So the Big Bang had been messy. The original tiny butterball of whatever-from-nowhere had exploded unevenly, and I could intuit how that meant that stars and so on could gather together and begin their grand and cataclysmic promenades. And how this man and I came to be sitting where we were sitting and saying what we were saying.
“Why are you interested in these things?” he asked. “You seem pretty intense about them.”
“They make me feel small,” I said, taking myself by surprise. “Right now this conversation makes me less nervous about giving my speech, but in general, thinking about the vast scale and titanic forces of the universe– I don’t know. When I was a kid, they frightened me. Now they comfort me. Just in general they seem to take the pressure off my tiny little life. And given my troubles at work, that’s a relief. I think the Bible says we are as a mote in the eye of God.”
“But the answers to these questions don’t give us the whys, do they?” my new friend said.
“No, but those answers, even if we had them, would be like the Big Bang idea, they would just lead to others.” I rather suddenly felt quite relaxed–maybe it was because the universe itself started out as a lopsided mess, like me. “Such as: Shall we have some more coffee?”
