David Darling

– Max Planck          

Out of this nothingness there arises a stir – an eddy, a flicker, a something inconceivably small. And with that something, as part of it, time, space, and other wonders come spontaneously into being. The lid of Pandora's cosmic box has begun to lift and from beneath it issue all the marvels of creation.

Yet by whose hand has that lid been set ajar? And if the answer is "No one's," then how is the magic of genesis performed?

And now these older tales are joined by fresh myths born not of faith, not of archaic wisdom unchallenged, but of science, yet no less strange for all that. Gone may be the gods – gone, at least, is their essential presence at each stage in the shaping of what is real. Now nature alone is seen as potent enough, creative enough, to draw itself into existence.

In the beginning, so these new myths of science would tell us, there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not matter, or energy, or space, or time. Then came a tiny hiccup, a trivial fluctuation that transformed nothingness into something. Perhaps, our myth would have us believe, the primordial nothingness was unstable.

Remarkable. The universe born out of nothing, of its own accord . . .

But no – not entirely nothing. For if time itself had its origin with some capricious inaugural event, then how did that event manage to occur at all? How could the act of creation begin outside of time?

Unless the rule book of nature was written prior to genesis, how could a state of unbeing know that it had to change? Is nothingness not a much simpler condition, therefore one more likely to prevail, than that of a universe teeming with exotic forms of matter and energy? To all appearances the absence of anything could hardly be more perfect. Why should it sully itself with the seed of stars and stargazers?

This is the central dilemma of genesis – and it afflicts all cosmologies, ancient and new. Wherever the universe came from, before it could emerge there had to be guiding principles, preexisting natural laws. But where did those laws come from? And, in any case, how can a law exist disembodied and outside of time?

Perhaps "before" the laws of physics came the laws of logic, so that the physical laws chosen were the only ones, in combination, that proved logically consistent. But who said the cosmos had to be logical? And whence did the rules of logic appear?

Imagine a stream that courses down a tall mountain. At the foot of the mountain, on the banks of the stream, there dwells a tribe. To the people of this isolated commune the stream, with its clear, refreshing water, is all-essential. It is their very lifeblood. And so, because of this, it is also the focal point for the musings of the tribal wise. Where does the stream come from? What is its true beginning? So steep and high is the mountain that none can scale it to seek a definitive answer. And so the wise contrive their theories and spend their days arguing this way and that. It is the god of the mountain, say some, whose tears, shed for the loss of his beloved son, tumble down as the waters of the stream. No, insist others, that is only an admission of ignorance. The stream must somehow issue naturally out of a crack near the mountain's summit. But what happens within the crack – there remains a mystery.

Each day the tribe is blessed with cloudless skies. But almost every night, when the people sleep (and they sleep very soundly), it pours with rain. The rain falls on the mountaintop, collects as a stream, and serves, with each new day, to sustain the tribe and its puzzled priests. Farther down the valley, where these insular folk never venture, the little stream grows to become a river. And, after hundreds of miles, the river reaches the sea, whose water then evaporates to form clouds, which in turn drop rain on the great mountains, to feed the stream that nourishes the tribe. How shortsighted of these primitive folk never to have realized all this!

But then, what of the universe? To the high priests of science, and philosophy, and theology, that, too, is usually regarded as having some special point of origin. And yet is this not just as myopic a view as that held by the sages of our imaginary tribe? The stream, it transpired, had no true source, no real beginning. Might the same not be true of the cosmos?