Beginning and Ends

The Beginning and Ends of the Cosmos

The universe, it has been reckoned by many of the best minds, began in a single instant. Time and space were infinitely suppressed so that in essence they curved infinitely and were one. There existed a singularity. In this singularity, the form that is said only to exist in reality at the center of a black hole, time and space did not exist. There was true void. The singularity was the beginning, after it; all time marched forward in innumerable instants. But what of before? All faiths claim that some act of creation took place, in which a volitional transcendental mind existed which could will reality into existence. The Higher power is said to have existed without the lower. This religious explanation was a noble attempt to explain existence. But it is a failure. The Jains alone conceived that the universe is completely infinite. The universe has no beginning in time and no end in space.

At the tiniest level, the universe seems to break into smaller and smaller pieces. Some invent other dimensions, other worlds in which to explain this one. Worship of numbers survives as the error of taking temporal reality and splicing cause and effect into an infinite number of universes. Thus says string theory, 'If I cannot unify the infinitely large and the small I will try to go beyond them'. For centuries, men depended on an Other to explain what their sense and their mind found at the fore. Time is not a thing like this; it does not produce other realities. Time is linked to matter and does not exist outside it. The fact that A causes B does not mean that in some undefinable existence it will somehow cause C. Time is only an aspect of reality, a movement of all things in existence from birth to decay. It begins with matter and ends thus.

In the realm of the very small atomism seems wrong, for all particles seem to have smaller pieces. For atomism was the tenet that the universe was made up of indivisible stuff. Atomism thus seems false.

The universe is either a self-contained reality of known reality, that is the visible universe surrounded on its confines by an infinite and impenetrable sea of dark matter, or it is one universe among many, each an island to itself, separated from one another at distances so great that light cannot reach from one to the other as long as each is maintained in existence. You might object to this, but yes, universes are mortal, and they perishable. They perish. This one will perish.

The end of the visible universe is the cosmic horizon, what is beyond it decides the question. If other universes exist beyond this horizon, we may be part of a grand cosmic drift, in which each universe bubbles out from another. The universes would be like ripples in a pool each ebbing out from some cosmic epicenter, our universe drifting further and further into an abyss with innumerable others. Or there could be nothing, the kind of void that nature was said to abhor. Another possibility for the universe would be that of eternal cyclical rebirth and death. Having sketched possible beginnings of the universe, it is now proper to speak of its end. It's death.

The demolition of creation in a two-step, or rather two steps.

Step 1: The cosmological proof of god's existence is shown to be illogical. Mustn't the universe have a cause? What are cause and effect? Cause and effect simply mean continuity from one thing to another. A famous philosopher David Hume said that one cannot assume that cause follows effects because one cannot view all causes and effects. Denying cause and effect is too much, let us simply accept that science makes sense and cause are followed by the effect, and that effect requires cause by necessity. But cause and effect are part of reality. Reality is the cosmos. So the thing we know as reality cannot be said to require an immediate cause like all that is in it.

Step 2: The end of the fine-tuning argument, by the finest tuned of all forces. Others, ignorant of the pure chaos which produced life, ignorant of the capability of an infinite set to produce any number of values, have raised the argument that the universe is fine-tuned to produce life. But there is one force, so mysterious yet so powerful, that is the finest tuned of all forces. The rate of expansion of the cosmos in all directions, the cosmological constant, propelled by dark energy that seems to grow more powerful as the galaxies drift farther from one another. It is this energy, if it continues to accelerate expansion, that will destroy the universe, leaving nothing but a sea of subatomic particles.

So unless god is as much a prick as he appears to be in all scriptures, or unless he is a worse demon than all the devils he claims to stand against, one must find creationism totally absurd, and on some level, insane.

And of the End times.....

Any universe with laws of physics somewhat close to ours will end in three ways. One is the Big Crunch, whereby the universe collapses. Our current universe will probably not suffer this. The other possibility, if the cosmological constant slowed, is known as the big freeze. The big freeze is a slow and painful process whereby all matter runs out of steam, where all stars die, where light cannot reach from one galaxy to another. Darkness would fill every sky. Beyond this, matter finally loses cohesion.

The last ending of the cosmos would be the big rip. The acceleration of the cosmos becomes one day just too great. Everything would fly apart, with matter itself ripped into quarks.

But at the very end, all that will remain in the universe men once thought to have been made for his biological cousins, will be swirling invincible black holes, whose massive event horizons will be the last to evaporate into nothingness. Perhaps if this universe were indeed the child of some long dead cosmos destroyed by the same forces, all would recur again. Perhaps you and I, this essay, and all the joys and terrors and trepidations of life. Perhaps...

And then there was darkness across the face of the deep.....