Ok, you have two choices. Firstly that the universe was created in the ‘big bang’, from nothing, and expanded from an infinitely dense singularity, or single point, containing the entire mass of the known universe, to become just what it is today. Or, you can add God to the equation, say ‘He done it’ and do away with all the maths.

And some find it hard to imagine the ‘big bang’. Everyone does to some degree. Because it begs the questions: but where did that singularity come from? what was there before it? why did it explode? is there any tv footage of the event so I can picture it better?

Yet if you add God into the mix it gives the flexibility to ignore most of the science, which is good, but it doesn’t answer any of those questions. It just changes them to: where did God come from? what was here before Him? why did he make Jupiter so fucking big?

Because we have serious problems with concepts such as ‘infinity’. And beyond. The universe is not infinite, we now know. Its much smaller. If the world is 2 billion years old, rather than the 6000 years old claimed by the Old Testament, you can work out the size of the universe. Its ‘easy’.

At the big bang There Was Light. Shitloads of it, and it travelled, unsurprisingly, at the speed of light. 186,000 miles every second. So in one day light travels by 186,000 miles, x 60 minutes, x 24 hours, which is about 270 million miles. So in 2 billion years… add 3… carry the 9… its a fuck of a long way. Which we reduce to ‘2 billion light years’. A light year being the distance travelled by light in one year. Its definitely beyond your railcard limit.

Nothing can move faster than light. Einstein’s theory of Relativity produced an equation that showed if you did travel faster you’d end up with the square root of a negative number. Which wouldn’t sit well after lunch. Because they can’t exist in the real world. So you might pop up somewhere else. Or in another time.

This happened to me once when I was a student. I left my girlfriend’s house and went to the pub in Bethnal Green. Only to wake up the next morning in a bedsit in Denmark Hill with someone else’s girlfriend. With no memory of how I got there. ‘No!!!’ I pleaded to my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, ‘I must have been on a bus travelling faster than the speed of light and just kind’a warped into that blond’s bed!!!! Honest!!!!’

It can be a problem. You never hear the bullet that kills you. I learned that in Western movies. But its true. If someone fires a rifle off in the distance you see the barrel flash, then a second later you hear the bang. Because light travels much faster than sound (only 760 miles per second). That’s why we all count when we see lightening strike. The time between that and the thunder is the difference between the light and sound of the same event reaching you. So you know how far away the storm is.

So if we travelled faster than light we’d arrive somewhere before we’d seen it. Like women driving. It would be awful. Catastrophic. But then we’d be able to reach the end of the universe and see once and for all what lies there. Could be just nothing. But what would ‘nothing’ look like in that place? A hole? A gap? A vacuum? Another Emirates Stadium?

I’m going now, I have a headache.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx