Saturday 13th June
Sometimes I think I should have been an AstroPhycisist, not because I have any great skills, mathematical or chemical or otherwise. And actually at school I always hated those three double periods of science every week. They were always in the afternoon, one would be Biology (interesting in a way), Chemistry (I barely understood the Periodic Table of Elements let alone the difference between metals acids and salts) and Physics. Now physics did at least interest me, it is really about the way the World works, how energy is converted into heat or sound or light but never disappears, how light is refracted, how sound travels through objects. But at age sixteen I chose Art over Science and don’t really regret that but I do wish I had paid a little more attention in Science lessons.
Over the years I have avidly watched Horizon and am fascinated by the Universe, how it is constantly expanding (to where?) and the Big Bang itself, which I understand theoretically but find it hard to actually believe. But like much of the Laws of Physics it (the Big Bang) makes sense because everything else fits into that theory. Every now and then though some clever Physicist has a different idea and at first is argued down but eventually they persevere and their ‘wild’ theory becomes established as the truth. And my big question is, if everything came from the Big Bang, where the entire Universe was compressed into a tiny speck and suddenly exploded sending everything we know hurtling into the nothingness of space, where was all this stuff before the Big Bang? I suspect that the Universe may have been contracting long before the Big Bang, but that theory isn’t very popular.
And what a lot of stuff it really is. The Earth is one tiny planet amongst billions in billions of Galaxies and believe me there is a hell of a lot of stuff just right here on Earth. Hard to imagine it being compacted (along with all the other stars and planets) in a tiny speck at all. Maybe Yoko One got it right – she called it an Approximately Infinite Universe, meaning I assume that we have created the concept of infinity to describe something so big we cannot imagine it having a beginning or an end, but this concept is itself only an approximation of the reality. Maybe in a few hundred years time Mankind will have the answers, but again I suspect they may not be the finite answers, even if anyone is actually asking the right questions.