Cosmology

Since I’m on the down-slope side of the bell curve that describes the progress of our existence, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on the cosmos. Questions of relevance, priority, and truth are never far from center stage in the Globe Theater between my ears and I have new takes on immortal phrases such as “. . . all the world’s as stage . . .” My friend John Campbell has helped me rid myself of the last vestiges of metaphysics by getting me to ask myself the appropriate questions and the people whose minds I most respect, in particular my son James, have affirmed the validity of my current existential paradigms.

Again, I have been thinking extensively about the framework of our existence – both the spiritual/social environment and the larger setting in which the continuum is unfolding. I think about not seeing stars or, at least, seeing them as they looked hundreds of millions of years ago. I think about Schrödinger’s Cat and the Big Bang and Black Holes and Heisenberg and, most of all, where God sits when he reads the paper. I think about the edge of the universe and what’s outside the edge, because our experiences are all about things that have boundaries and when the boundaries disappear we have to create them or go crazy.

So here’s my radical cosmology, based on no supporting evidence, only common sense. So let’s say that the universe is infinite in size and eternal in time; to think anything else is to beg the question as to what container holds the universe and what container holds that container and so forth. With respect to eternity, what was happening before the beginning of time and what will happen after the end of time, and in what temporal timeframe will it happen?

Given this lack of constraint, what makes us think that the celestial bodies, galaxies and so forth, that are within the reach of detection by our technology, are all there is. Infinite space is pretty darn big and has room for a dynamic organization of matter. What makes us think that other “clumps” such as ours may not litter the infinite expanse in an eternal dance of celestial attraction?

To the original theory of the Big Bang was added the idea of the Big Collapse, probably because we like to think in terms of cycles. But the evidence appears to be that everything is still moving outward from the original starting point with no sign of contraction, which seems to posit the initial explosion as a seminal event, akin to the beginning of time.

But what if Big Bangs are a regular occurrence in an infinite universe where matter congregates, explodes, and sends its constituent parts in search of another gravitational well to fall into? In that case, the scenario would be an infinite redistribution of matter which reflects the gracefulness of the physical world much more faithfully than the cosmological inbreeding that a cyclic universe describes.

I don’t know? Maybe Switzerland will enlighten us.