Monday 2 May 2011

My Personal Cosmology

This is, of course, tantamount to a declaration of faith (after all; what evidence could I provide to support it?). My answer to the question: why did the big bang bang? I posit a single hydrogen atom. It is all that exists; it exists and that's all. It travels back through time, setting up a complicated interference pattern with itself. But there is no 'time' or 'space', not as we currently understand it, not yet. So it arrives back when it starts and exists once again following the arrow of time forwards. This means (since there's no time it doesn't happen sequentially like this, but bear with me) that 'now' there are two atoms, coexisting in the same 'location'; but the topography of the pre-universe can bear this. The atom exists, moving forwards and backwards through time (40 billion years, perhaps) 10^80 times. This happens to be the density threshold, according to the pre-universe topography, beyond which the copresence of so much 'matter' becomes unstable. The reduplicated unity breaks down, and the big bang occurs, spreading this matter into -- or more accuratety, creating the spacetime of -- the observable universe in which we live.

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