At some point it dawned on me that something had to exist for the “big bang” to happen in. It was probably my first real, practical look at infinity.
Imagine something as vast, and similarly shaped, as the ocean. With everything we on earth have ever seen in the nearly 14 billion years of light that we have access to exists in a tiny, spontaneous bubble in that ocean.
Since we simply can’t see out that past our little bubble, a lot of our explanations for reality work within the context of a bubble.
That really irks me.
We develop this linear explanation of the universes timeline
The Big Bang -> Existence -> The Heat Death
The big bang is this idea that all matter and energy in the universe originated from an explosion.
This explosion, set forth a chain reaction that set everything we know into motion. Everything from galaxies to the bird that just flew by my window.
The sounds you hear, the people you love, the thoughts you have are all a result of the energy produced by this bang. This energy drives existence. It’s conserved when your tomatoes eat photons from the sun and convert them to energy, which is then consumed by you.
As this energy pushes along through time and space, it settles. Like anything else, it has it’s limit. The heat death is the idea, or rather, the inevitability, that all energy in the universe will at some point fall into equilibrium. The ball will stop rolling and everything just falls to a stand still at the atomic level.
It implies two things:
1. Time began somewhere
2. Time will end somewhere.
I do think that if the big bang is how what we can observe began, which it seems to be, there will be a beginning and an end to this explosion that we’re all cascading through. But I don’t think we’ll actually reach a heat death before the energy is in some way recycled. It seems more likely to me that the universe eats itself through black holes, and as they consume everything and each other, they would eventually reach some degree of criticality.
That kinda shits on the second law of thermodynamics. Hawking would be pissed, but it’s just kind of a copout to accept that reality ceases to exists because we’ve decided that in our bubble, this is how things work.
What if everything spills out like when an above ground pool spills out into the yard, and everything begins again.
Infinity isn’t terminal, and I’d think that has to apply to time and energy as well.
The real question, I guess, is how is energy re-introduced into a universe. What’s the process that drove the big bang to release it’s massive store of energy? Where did that come from? Is it different from anything we know like nuclear fusion? How, tf, do we get back to a higher energy state from nothing?
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