The Big Bang

A slow day for facts today; I toyed with including a news story about how energy-saving lightbulbs could be dangerous when broken, but I concluded that it would probably be unethical to put something down that I already knew to be total bollocks. It's funny how anything that's environmentally friendly mysteriously suffers from dubious safety concerns which are then splashed all over the news., but I digress.

As the sun went down I felt the first waves of fact-finding panic, and turned to the grandiosely-titled Book of Space, which came free with a Sunday paper a few weeks ago. There were lots of corking bits of info which I glibly digested before Christmas, but I did stumble upon this doozie:

The Big Bang lasted for half an hour.

Now I know what you're thinking, but bear with me. It's really got more to do with the physics of the expansion of the universe, and what scientists propose caused this expansion, based on the position, direction and velocity of matter in the universe. What these clever chaps propose is the following: the universe began as an infinitely hot, infinitely small, infinitely dense 'something', which then expanded like a balloon, rather than exploding outwards as most people assume. Scientific calculations (of the kind that make my brain turn 360 degrees in it's clammy shell) suggest that atoms began to form just 3 seconds after this singular mass began to expand, meaning that the mass would have had to cool down several billion degrees in those 3 seconds.

That's basically the best scientific theory we have for the nature and existence of the Universe. And I thought the lightbulbs thing was bollocks. I don't mean to pour scorn upon ideas I can barely understand, but fuck it, it sounds pretty ridiculous to me. Maybe God made it after all. One of many differences between God's creation of the heaven and the earth and this blog is that God rested on Sunday, whereas I will be poring over the Observer's Sunday supplements, looking for something, anything, of any interest to anyone. See you then.