Let's start by writing whatever I feel is interesting.
What started the Big Bang? That's something I hope to get a greater understanding of as time goes by, I'm easing myself into it. Something from Nothing is a book by Lawrence Krauss that I'm told explains in great detail a solid theory on the subject.
I think it's amazing so far, partly because it involves anti-matter, something I was absolutely obsessed with in high school. I used to go around telling everyone I met how neat I thought it was. I liked to think about anti-planets, and anti-galaxies, and anti-me and anti-Bill O'Reilly, anti-cake. The thing that intrigued me the most though, was the idea of a fuel source that was 100% efficient. When anti-matter collides with matter, they are annihilated in equal parts. That means that if you have 1kg of all-Australian made, true (fucking) blue, white sugar in one hand and 1kg of malevolent nega-sugar in the other hand and put them together then you'd have nothing left but pure energy. Nothing, zilcho. Although the fundamental flaw with this analogy is that you are most likely also a matter-made person and would have annihilated yourself the moment you came into contact with this anti-stuff.
Anywhys.
So this Krauss dude used this knowledge to logically explain the question 'If there was nothing before the Big Bang, what created the Big Bang?'
It is common knowledge sown into all of us from a young age, that you cannot get something from nothing, and we see evidence of this every day in our lives. You don't create food from nothing, you cook it from ingredients. You don't summon an automobile from the fiery depths of the astral-mobile plain, we get Koreans, Germans and Japanese to make it from minerals that are ripped from the Earth, and of course those minerals themselves were forged in stars from Hydrogen atoms. So it's natural to be very skeptical about this being anything but an unbreakable, fundamental physical law. It's extremely counter-intuitive to think of something coming out of nowhere.
That's what makes quantum physics so fucking cool and exciting! Shit don't give a fuck what you think. It do what it want. There are simple metaphors to help us get a grasp on certain concepts, but for the most part, probability fields, expansion of space, dark energy, these are things that are beyond our field of perception, we haven't evolved with the capacity to view them, how can you expect them to make perfect sense to a little squishy pink biped like you? You fucking brainless twat. I fucking hate your guts, I hope you die.
Krauss said we should think about that act of antimatter-matter annihilation, matter becomes pure energy, energy dissipates until it is nothing, and now reverse that process. Start with nothing, get energy that turns into matter and anti-matter.
"But Ryan! That's reversing the passage of time! Time doesn't go backwards, you cock-sock! I hope your testicles get chewed off by hungry dolphins!"
Well, you'd be right, hungry dolphins will eat anything. But more importantly, you're wrong about time. I'd like people to correct me here if i'm wrong, because from this point on I'm really speculating. From what I understand about entropy, the arrow of time is not an arrow, it's more of a tendency. It's is significantly more likely that time will move forward, but for it to do otherwise is not impossible. The idea is that if you open a bottle of Diet Vanilla Coke (Satisfy Your Curiosity), the gas molecules spread out in random directions to conform to the density of the air around them, but it is not theoretically impossible for all the molecules to simultaneously reverse their direction and head back into the bottle, it's just highly improbable. The same can be said about a Big Bang. It is so very unlikely for energy to come from nothing instead of nothing coming from energy, but given enough chances it has to be possible.
I'm aware this raises more questions than it solves, which I personally think is the fucking excellent thing about it. I feel that indicates it's a step in the right direction. I'm reminded of a Bruce Lee quote:
There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond themI think that's also excellent. This gives a good indicator that The Big Bang isn't yet our plateau, there's another mountain beyond that, and I find that very exciting.
