Sunday, August 8, 2010

Inspirations provided by Stephen Hawking

I'm almost all the through with Stephen Hawking's monumental work of non-fiction, "A Brief History of Time" which analyzes the creation and structure and function of the universe according to physics making use of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.

Anyways something got me thinking.  It is a possibility that the universe was created with the "Big Bang" (a singularity about ten thousand million years ago that caused the universe to literally explode into existence) and it is a known fact that the universe has been expanding since then.  But because of gravity and the gravitational effects between planets and stars, the universe might reach a point where it can no longer expand, and will instead recollapse into a singularity similar to how the universe began.  Now something interesting about the recollapse of the universe is that the laws of physics and life as we know it would be reversed.  For example, rather than watching a movie forwards, we would be watching a movie backwards.  The past and the future would switch places.

What we don't know is what caused the Big Bang.  So feasibly the universe could recollapse into an infinitely dense, infinitely hot, singularity.  Therefore, something could cause it to explode again.  Maybe our universe has been constantly expanding and contracting for an infinite amount of time with life evolving differently every time.  Maybe that's what our omnipotent creator is doing with us.  He's watching to see how things turn out each time when he blows up the universe.  Anyways, it just got met thinking.

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