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The faithful - of divinity or
whatever is its opposite - sometimes have no option but to inhabit artificial
extremes of the language they best know. Consider "singularity" for example. In
astrophysics and cosmology it means a point in space-time at which gravitational
forces cause matter to have infinite density, and infinitesimal volume, and
space and time to become infinitely distorted. But seriously, does this really
mean anything to anyone besides rousing in them the awesome inference that
everything can get confined to a point which virtually doesn't exist ? Yet we
are told to live with the fact that not only does it do so but in the process
also creates existences out of it.
Such as black holes, for
instance. Matter which falls into one gets squeezed and squished till it has no
more dimensions left and apparently drops out of being by getting relegated to a
singular state. What happens to it thereafter is a physicist's choice of words,
once more. Ditto the Big Bang. Here we have to imagine a condition of some
no-thing which was in "existence" at a point of time about 14 billion years ago
which became active all of a sudden and produced an abrupt inflation outwards
that saw the creation of space, matter and time and everything else around that
goes with it. Though for what reason, and why, we are not informed by people who
are not informed about it either.
They say it's due to something
consisting of three more words: "quantum vacuum fluctuation". This is the belief
that things - including even the entire universe-can arise from nothing via
natural processes because in the quantum microworld energy can appear and
disappear out of nowhere in a spontaneous and unpredictable fashion.
So where did all the matter come
from in the first place ? Physicist Paul Davies would have us believe the whole
show began as a perfect void and that all the particles of the material world
were created from the expansion of that. (one must remember to ask Prof Davies
what he means by the word "began" here.) In any case, how is this so much
different from the old Sioux American-Indian belief that matter is a part of
un-matter which manifests itself and vanishes unto itself again to reappear one
more time and fade out and so on and so forth ad infinitum ? Speculative
philosophy is one thing. But when it consists of man trying to stand outside
himself and his experience in order to put it into words and define it, it gets
dicey. |
