Not with a bang but a laugh

Originally published 26 March 1984

A cre­ation myth from the ancient Mediter­ranean has God bring all things into being with sev­en laughs. Here is how Charles Doria and Har­ris Lenowitz trans­late the first laugh: Light (Flash) / showed up / All split­ter / born uni­verse god / fire god. Those lines are two thou­sand years old, but they apt­ly describe the mod­ern sci­en­tif­ic view of Cre­ation. The Big Bang, astronomers call it. A bet­ter name might be the Big Flash, the all-split­ter. Fif­teen bil­lion years ago there was noth­ing. Then God laughed. Ener­gy sprang into being from noth­ing­ness and flowed instant­ly into mat­ter. Accord­ing to cur­rent cos­molo­gies, that first laugh took a bil­lionth of a bil­lionth of a bil­lionth of a sec­ond, and when it was all over, the uni­verse was off and running.

In 1929, the astronomer Edwin Hub­ble announced a dis­cov­ery that would come to be con­sid­ered as impor­tant as any in the his­to­ry of astron­o­my. The galax­ies are mov­ing away from us. All of them. More­over, the speeds of reces­sion are pro­por­tion­al to the dis­tances of the galax­ies. The mean­ing of this remark­able dis­cov­ery soon became clear. The uni­verse is expand­ing! Space is blow­ing up like a bal­loon, ris­ing like dough in the pan. Like dots on the inflat­ing bal­loon or raisins in the ris­ing loaf, the galax­ies are car­ried away from each as space expands.

If the galax­ies are fly­ing apart, then they must have once been togeth­er. If we run the movie in reverse, the galax­ies fly back togeth­er, accel­er­at­ing. They wring out the vast emp­ty spaces between them. They crush their stars togeth­er like wet sand in a fist. Mat­ter is squeezed into mat­ter. The den­si­ty of the uni­verse soars. The film ends in a blind­ing flash of pure ener­gy, infi­nite, sin­gu­lar, born uni­verse god / fire god, the Beginning.

The explosion primeval

Con­tem­po­rary cos­mol­o­gists can cal­cu­late the con­di­tions of the uni­verse at every instant of its his­to­ry from well-known laws of physics. Let’s run the movie for­ward. The uni­verse begins fif­teen bil­lion years ago in a blind­ing flash, the primeval fire­ball, from an infi­nite­ly dense seed of pure ener­gy. A ten mil­lionth of a tril­lionth of a tril­lionth of a tril­lionth of a sec­ond lat­er ele­men­tary par­ti­cles, quarks and elec­trons, flick­er in and out of exis­tence against a back­ground of radi­a­tion, dis­solv­ing and reap­pear­ing, dis­solv­ing and reap­pear­ing, frag­ments of the all-split­ter, Cre­ation strug­gling to be born.

A mil­lionth of a sec­ond after the Begin­ning, the quarks join in a dance of threes to form pro­tons and neu­trons. Anoth­er thou­sandth of a sec­ond and pro­tons and neu­trons stick togeth­er to cre­ate the nuclei of the light ele­ments. Mat­ter and anti-mat­ter anni­hi­late each oth­er in an orgy of self-destruc­tion. A flood of neu­tri­nos go fly­ing into the future.

Time pass­es, the uni­verse cools. Atoms form. Then galax­ies and stars. Space expands. A few bil­lion years after God’s first Hha the uni­verse begins to look like home, although it will be anoth­er eight bil­lion years before the Solar Sys­tem con­dens­es from galac­tic cob­webs in a dusty cor­ner of the Milky Way.

Not long ago physi­cists and astronomers despaired of ever know­ing what came before the instant of the Big Flash. At that sin­gu­lar moment in the uni­verse’s his­to­ry, their equa­tions shot off to infin­i­ty like sky­rock­ets. The num­bers for the den­si­ty and tem­per­a­ture of the uni­verse increased with­out lim­it, math­e­mat­i­cal moun­tains that could not be climbed or seen over. Space and time col­lapsed into a dread sin­gu­lar­i­ty, a numer­i­cal bot­tom­less pit that became increas­ing­ly nar­row and increas­ing­ly deep until it was a thread of cal­cu­la­tion too long and thin to fol­low. There is a street in my town like that. In the words of a local his­to­ri­an, the street becomes an unpaved road, then a track, then a path, then a squir­rel trail that runs up a tree. Trac­ing the uni­verse math­e­mat­i­cal­ly back to the Begin­ning is like fol­low­ing that street until you find your­self up a tree with no place to go. The ques­tion of what caused the Big Bang was con­sid­ered intractable, if not mean­ing­less. Cre­ation out of noth­ing seemed to vio­late the law of con­ser­va­tion of mat­ter and ener­gy. Physi­cists shrugged and said there was noth­ing more they could say about it. A laugh on the part of the Cre­ator was a good an expla­na­tion as any other.

A froth of universes

Late­ly, a new gen­er­a­tion of young cos­mol­o­gist have become bold­er in the spec­u­la­tions, and have begun to wring from their the­o­ries a glimpse of the world beyond the Begin­ning. They draw upon recent dis­cov­er­ies about the behav­ior of mat­ter at high tem­per­a­tures. They twist their equa­tions of cos­mic space and time into new designs that will encom­pass what we have learned about quarks and neu­tri­nos, the elu­sive W and Z par­ti­cles, and the oth­er sub­atom­ic build­ing blocks of the uni­verse. And out of all this comes an aston­ish­ing pre­dic­tion: Our uni­verse, the uni­verse that began 15 bil­lion years ago in a Big Flash, may be just one among many. Uni­vers­es may boil like bub­bles from some greater matrix of space and time, pop­ping into exis­tence as quan­tum fluc­tu­a­tions in super­space, with the pos­i­tive ener­gy of stars and galax­ies bal­anced by a neg­a­tive grav­i­ta­tion­al poten­tial, bub­bles of Cre­ation that add up to zero, bub­bles that explode from noth­ing­ness with­out vio­lat­ing the laws of physics. One of those bub­bles is our space and our time, and con­tains the Milky Way and its bil­lions of sib­ling galax­ies. If the new cos­mol­o­gists are right, then uni­vers­es are pop­ping into exis­tence all the time, and our star­ry night is the inte­ri­or of a sin­gle bub­ble in a frothy ongo­ing spon­ta­neous Creation.

If this stuff makes your head spin you are in good com­pa­ny. Hav­ing a head that can spin is a require­ment of all great sci­ence. Coper­ni­cus’ head was spin­ning when he rec­og­nized that the earth is one plan­et among many. New­ton’s head was spin­ning when he told us the sun was just anoth­er star. Hub­ble’s head was spin­ning when he proved that the spi­ral neb­u­las are Milky Ways.

What­ev­er else we have learned about the uni­verse, this much is clear. The uni­verse is rich and strange beyond our imag­in­ing. It does not hold back on scale or struc­ture. God’s first Hha was no snick­er, but a roar­ing belly-laugh.