“I woke up early morning with this strange feeling.
I got up, walked over to the window, opened the curtains,
and looked out over the streets of Rochdale.
The sun was coming up over the hills, the sky ablaze with colour.
I was sort of entranced.
I thought: ‘What is it all about?’
Ah……
Then I thought ‘It’s got bugger all to do with me!’
and I went back to bed.”
That’s my memory of a joke told in a gig by Lancashire comedian Mike Harding in the late 1970s or early 80s. It came to mind as I pondered on such things, as you do, while gardening – indeed as I have done from time to time since childhood.
It struck me that, even harder than imagining how the universe came about, which is guaranteed to give you brainache, is what it could have been like ‘before’, ie before space and time began in our universe, before the ‘big bang’.
How could the universe not exist? Methinks the answer does not lie in the realm of rational discourse.
Featured image shows sunrise over Failsworth, Oldham
courtesy of Martin Butler, via Wikimedia Commons
I can't believe it! 
well that’s it, then, isn’t it. Everything begins. Heck we don’t even know what happens when we die, and that’s pretty basic. Or if we come back as something other (just in case, I have my name in for this life all over again, maybe minus the politics), two legged or four legged, or not at all.
No matter what’s proposed, it always needs to be followed by, “yeah, but what about before that…”
Small wonder people invented gods to help them explain it to themselves. You can always blame something that big on gods and goddesses and six armed monsters.
I think this might be a good definition of Infinity (at least in one direction): in the universe, there is always a ‘before’.
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The thing about the big bang is it’s a mathematical singularity where space and time begin, so what’s ‘before’ mean?
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the assumption being, of course, that our assumptions about the big bang and that it was the start of something, sort of opens the door for what was it before it was a bang?
We are taught from birth that you don’t get something from nothing, although many people do try to disprove that with their credit ratings, so if there was a big bang, (and Im not a creationist, by any means) there had to be something previous to that to MAKE the thing that made the bang. Lol.
As I understand it (and only vaguely) a singularity is the oops in the equation, the place where it all stops working the way we expect it to. Tell me how far off the mark I am, here. If that’s so, then that piece of information is not either available or definable.
So that would mean if we could figure out what that information was, then we could probably work backwards from that, to another ‘before’. And there is nothing to suggest that this time was the first time around, either.
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