THE COSMOS AND US - 3

Now, we can’t deal with whatever was before the Big Bang, because there WAS NO BEFORE. Time itself began for us at that point.

Stephen Hawking, in his book ‘A Brief History of Time’ deals with what happened next.

The Bang consisted of pure energy since the particles we know today could not have existed at the temperatures there must have been. But as the expansion took place, the temperature dropped, just as air trapped in a tire or a balloon feels colder when it get out. The expansion causes a cooling. And the particles that make up our atoms were formed as the cooling took place.

Here’s where we get the first inkling that Intelligence is built right in to the fabric of our Universe. From a pinpoint, there is nothing to suggest that the whole Universe shouldn’t just have been filled uniformly up with basic atoms of Hydrogen, with protons and electrons, and the odd neutron here and there. A uniform hydrogen ‘soup’ could not produce us.

There is a very modern branch of mathematics called Chaos Theory. What it shows it that pure chaos or randomness cannot be sustained. The tiniest of perturbations is inevitable, and leads to spontaneous creation of order from chaos. There is a movie called The Butterfly Effect, based on this idea - that a tiny perturbation creates a huge alternation of things over time. The title comes from a saying - that a butterfly flapping its wings sets in motion the stirring of air that starts a tornado.

In the case of our early Universe, hydrogen clumped together into clouds, till the clouds were pulled together by their own gravity, forming suns. The initial disturbance will have been a slight amount of turbulence in the early Big Bang, as energy condensed into the first particles of matter.

The bringing forth of order (non-randomness) out of chaos (randomness) is built right in to the nature of our physical universe. It is part of the Law by which we live.