Monday, September 01, 2014

The Time Before This Time


Scientists estimate that the big bang – the cosmic event that scientists speculate marks the beginning of our universe – happened some 13.7 billion years ago.

When considering values in the billions – I find the need to exact to the additional seven tenths of a billion quite pretentious.

But regardless, the question remains – in a universe that is supposedly endless – what existed before the big bang occurred?


My understanding – one of only a very simple and uneducated layman to be sure – is that everything that existed in the universe was sucked in by an unimaginable force of gravity into the space that a pea would occupy, and then at its ultimate limit – exploded everything encapsulated in that small space all across the universe – in a gaseous molten form that when it finally came to cool enough to form shapes filled our universe with the orb like masses that we see today.

So the theory goes anyway.

But what was that final period like of the prior universe? When everything was being sucked in? If things were spread as far and wide today – it must have taken at least a million years to collapse?

Think of today – light from neighboring stars taking thousands of years to reach Earth. At the speed of light. To suggest that the collapse happened quickly would mean that the speed of light is not the fastest speed there is.

Or perhaps it's that speed which slows down time, like Einstein postulated. So the million year collapse seemed to happen in an instant.

Seemed like an instant? To who?

These ideas are as staggering to conceptualize in our limited human brains as the concept that the universe is endless.

Perhaps it was not the entire universe that was sucked in – perhaps it was only a galaxy. A collection of solar systems – much like we have today. Could the universe before the big bang at first glance really be that much different than this one that exists in this universal collection of time?

If there was an after, then there had to be a before. Right?

And where did all that stuff come from that exploded into the universe?

That piece of rock, lying there in your garden, where did it really come from. Originally?

And then what about all the pieces of life? This consciousness that has to exist to experience what there is? Did all these pieces, the DNAs of life that are needed to spark an existence – did they all arrive here with all the other matter that congealed into this blob of matter that spun itself around our sun to become earth?

Did they exist before us? Before the bang? Snuffed out as the universe collapsed? Gathered up as part of that gigantic collection of matter that compressed and exploded all over again? If so, then these pieces of life should be all over the universe – planted - tossed out from the big bang like a gardener tossing wildflower seeds into the loose soil in hopes some of it will catch and grow?

The truth is that all we can truly do is speculate on all these things and try, using mathematic and scientific laws that may not even have been applicable before or during that bang.

'We' of course meaning people much smarter than me.

But we are all free to consider, to speculate, to hypothesize.

That big bang was like a reboot of all existence.

A natural cosmic cycle of happenings that occur over and over and over again?

Like searching through the square root of pie looking for the sequence in decimal places to finally start recurring, albeit we haven't found it yet. But it's there. And then we will start looking for the place where it started again after sequence is defined.

Maybe the square root of pie is simply a clue left behind.

Because if you stop and think about it – everything really stems from a circle. Repeating, rotating, orbiting, and spinning start and finish that even though it repeats it never starts or ends.

If this is the case – then the same must be true of our universe, it simply goes round and round inside the blob-ish sphere-ish orb that is our universal boundary?

But of that's the case, what exists on the other side of that boundary?


© 2006 - 2020 Fred Brill - all rights reserved