“Okay, Moire, I guess I gotta go with the Big Bang happening, but I still have a problem with it making everything come from a point full of nothing.”

“Back at you, Mr Feder. I have problems with your problem. To begin with, forget about your notion of a point with zero size. There’s some reason to think the Bang started with an event sized on the order of the Planck length, 10^-35 meter. That’s small, but it’s not zero.”

“I suppose, but with the whole mass of the Universe crammed in there, ain’t that a recipe for the ultimate black hole? Nothing could get outta there.”

“Nothing needs to. What’s inside is already everything, remember? Besides, there isn’t an outside — space simply doesn’t exist outside of the spacetime the Bang created. Those bell‑shaped ‘Evolution of The Universe‘ diagrams are so misleading. I say that even though I’ve used the diagram myself. It’s just a graph with Time running along the central axis and Space expanding perpendicular to that. People have prettied it up to make it cylindrical and added galaxies and such. The lines just represent how much Space has expanded since the Bang. Unfortunately, people look at the bell as a some kind of boundary with empty space outside, but that’s so wrong.”

“No outside? Hard to wrap your head around.”

“Understandable. Only physicists and mathematicians get used to thinking in those terms and mostly we do it with equations instead of trying to visualize. Our equations tell us the Universe expands at the speed of light plus a bit.”

“Wait, I thought nothing could go faster than the speed of light.”

“True, nothing can traverse space faster than light or gravity, but space itself expands. At large distances it’s doing that faster than light. We actually had to devise two different definitions of distance. ‘Co‑moving distance‘ includes the expansion. ‘Proper distance‘ doesn’t. In another couple billion years, the farthest things we can see today will be co‑moving away so fast that the photons they emit will be carried away faster than they can fly towards us. Those objects will leave our Observable Universe, the spherical bubble that encloses the objects whose light gets a chance to reach us.”

“My head hurts from the expanding. Get back to the Bang thing ’cause it was small. Too small to hold atoms I guess so how can it explode to be everything?”

“‘Expand’, not ‘explode‘ — they’re different — but good guess. The Bang’s singularity was smaller than an atom by at least a factor of 10²⁴, but conditions were far too hot in there for atoms to exist, or nuclei, or even protons and neutrons. Informally we call it a quark soup, which is okay because we think quarks are structureless points that can cram to near‑infinite density. We don’t yet know enough Physics for good calculations of temperature, density or much of anything else.”

“That’s a lot of energy, even if it’s not particles. Which is what I’m getting at. I keep hearing you can’t create energy, just transform it, right? So where did the energy come from?”

“That’s a deep question, Mr Feder, and we don’t have an answer or hypothesis or even a firm guess. It gets down to what energy even is — we’re just barely nibbling at the edges of that one. One crazy idea I kind of like is that creating our Universe took zero energy because the process was exactly compensated for by creating an anti‑Universe whose total anti‑energy matches our total energy.”

“Whaddaya mean, anti‑Universe and anti‑energy?”

<deep breath> “You know an atom has negatively‑charged electrons bound to its positively‑charged nucleus, right? Well, the anti‑Universe I’m thinking of has that situation and everything else reversed. Positive electrons, negative nucleus, but also flipped left‑right parities for some electroweak particle interactions. Oh, and time runs backwards which is how anti‑energy becomes a thing. Our Universe and my crazy anti‑Universe emerge at Time Zero from the singularity. Then they expand in opposite directions along the Time axis. Maybe the quarks and their anti‑quarks got sorted out at the flash‑point, I dunno.”

“So there’s an anti‑me out there somewhere?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

~~ Rich Olcott