The Moonshine Memoranda: THE BIG BANG

The following is the abstraction of a topic currently featured in V.H. Ironside, Behold! I Teach You Superman

“But at last there happened that which awoke me.”

Nietzsche

Of course, in order to understand the initial conditions of the universe, we have to turn to nucleosynthesis, which is to say, to the dynamic microphysical processes of the Big Bang. The effect

produced by the Big Bang, the actual micro-second of creation some 13,7 billion years ago, was primarily one of the passage of time, i.e., of the relation of thought to extension.

The mind’s relationship to time is fundamental. It defines our concept of space. In other words, for judgments of extension to be intimately involved in both spatial and temporal dimensions, an expanse of space is traded for a period in time. Indeed, we define space in terms of time and the speed of light. Accordingly, while the track of a particle through four-dimensional spacetime is referred to as its world-line, extension is the analogue of time. As a matter of fact, there can be no Space without something extended of which Time is the thought or idea. Which is to say, because extension serves as a basis for definition, the actual concept of space is a function of time. It shares with it the necessary property of being purely extensive, activated by polarization, and of being self-sustaining. Hence, space and time have a mutual role, as structural elements and as catalysts for self-organised complexity. As a matter of fact, space and time inhabit separate realms of understanding only in the human mind. Time detached from space is thought. Thought has introduced a permanent discontinuity into human consciousness. And as such, the Continuum as an idea could transpire only by their conceptual separation, the great Promethean conflict between divine and human laws. For by the time their relationship is introduced

to the human mind, both facets of the Continuum are already well-defined in terms of extension and duration, so that their necessary equivalence is all but disregarded and the conceptual separation to all intends and purposes considered an independent law of nature. Space and time defined in this way obey all the laws of logical necessity, and it is a perfectly absurd notion to assume that an initial system which was cumulatively generating necessary consequences should have been caused by anything other than itself.

It is essential to bear this in mind, since the notion of mass or energy as something external or received, and not to be identified with the relation of its own necessity, frequently leaves itself open to misinterpretation as evidence of design. Whereas in reality when we attribute momentum to mass we do so in the same a priori, or necessary, sense as when we assign extension to space. Both express the same thing, so that the amount by which the mass of a moving object increases is exactly equivalent to the amount by which time slows down. Momentum is the product of mass and velocity. In other words, mass and energy are, in fact, two aspects of the same phenomenon: E = mc².

At what we call zero-time, mind became matter! Or, indeed, energy - and momentum (or

mass, which we perceive as weight and which one would suppose to gravitate equally in all directions). Inflation is instantaneous, in other words, and accompanied by instantaneous comprehension. It is an articulation and expanding of Self. And no one articulated this more clearly than the cosmologist Arthur Eddington who, in 1921, outlined the material consequences of the general relativity theory: “All the familiar terms of physics - length, duration of time, motion, force, mass, energy, and so on - refer primarily to this relative knowledge of the world; and it remains to be seen whether any of them can be retained in a description of the world which is not relative to a particular observer.”^{^[1]}

Fat chance!

Neither by the grace of God nor by intelligent design, but by the overmastering control of logical necessity, the Big Bang permits us, quite methodically, to consider the creation ex nihilo of human knowledge. Whether we like it or not, our cosmic inheritances, its very title deeds, lie in the thought, a template which has to be accepted as a virtual concept rather than an established material system. And not least because circumstances make of logical necessity a conceptual law of creation. I say ‘logical’, because it is logically dependent on the immediate mode of its own necessity, and ‘necessary’, because the logic, conceived as a chronological idea, follows directly from the concept of extension as the rationally requisite feature of time - which is, of course, just another way of saying that it has behind it the overpowering suggestiveness of an idea, or of purpose perhaps, rather than of substance.

Its four-dimensional manifestation therefore falls into the most authentic form of human perception, in which man is the sole arbiter and the Anthropic Principle defines the law of creation in all its purity, precisely because having come to knowledge of itself it makes everything subject to the a posteriori, or theoretically essential, nature of itself.