rcd@opus.UUCP (03/31/84)
I've seen a little bit of confusion in trying to draw analogies between the
current cosmological "big bang" theory and a more-or-less traditional
Judaeo-Christian "creation". I'd like to clear this up from the "big bang"
side.
The point in space and time at which the big bang is supposed to have
happened is a singularity. At that point in space and time, we start
measuring. It's not a creation event; it's just that we don't (and
fundamentally can't) know what happened "before" it - if in fact it's
possible to assign a meaning to the word "before". Moreover, it doesn't
matter if anything was before - no information comes through the
singularity. At the singularity there is no meaning to "here" or "there"
either. It's utterly bizarre, but it doesn't need any supernatural
intervention to fix up the mathematics. (A little supernatural help
with gathering some very old data would be nice, but...)
--
Relax - don't worry - have a homebrew.
{hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd