Before The Beginning

It seems an appropriate moment to start, as questions about the Big Bang and the need for a creator once again get dragged out of the long grass. We've been here before of course, when Steve published the Brief History of Time which most of us took a historical amount of time to finish. I finally finished it while sitting in a deckchair unaware of being overwhelmed by heatstroke in the coming minutes. My lack of coherent conversation and short term memory lapses we identified later as too much sun and not bewilderment with the vastness of time and space some harsh observers had supposed. Red faced I retreated to the cool embrace of the A/C lounge to chill out.

When Einstein made an event out of space and time he bound them together forever in our consciousness. Anywhere also has an anywhen. Meetings have a time and a place. Trains have an arrival time and a destination .They do, Einstein explained that it just depends on the observer’s point of view. Otherwise chaos prevails, some future events cannot be predicted, as Prof Martin Rees warned us in his Reith lectures this year. Are we alone? Probably not, but we would need to come up with Wormhole hopping technology as seen in the scientist’s favourite scientist’s film about a scientist, Contact.

I never saw Carl Sagan and Kermit the Frog at the same time in the same space, some things we will never know. What happened before the Big Bang probably didn’t worry either of them very much. Carl and Kermit were great educators by any creature’s standards and their fondness for weeds did nothing to dampen their enthusiasm

So chill out and think, in that order, the Heisenberg compensators will never work, it was a joke after all, we will never know exactly where we are at a given moment in time and space. We will never know what happened before the big bang and whether the creator existed at the same time. We do have the here and now, and much more educating to do, we have some great new toys to play with, they won’t help if the story telling gets neglected.....