Chapter 2

The beginning

That is the general idea. I want to reiterate, however, that this is going to be the barest of sketches, offered only as a hint that what seems to have happened in evolution and history can without forcing the data be looked at as a development of love in and for the world.

In the beginning, the universe blew up.

That is, at the instant of the beginning, the entire universe was a tiny body, a "black hole,"which was completely unstable at its creation, and could not exist; and so it immediately destroyed itself. The first act of the universe was its total self-destruction.⁽¹⁾

Immediately after the beginning, there was light.

The law of conservation of energy was in the universe at the beginning, and so the universe did not go out of existence, but transformed itself into electromagnetic radiation. Not visible light, of course, because the radiation was far more energetic than light in the visible spectrum, but energy of the same form but a much shorter wave length than light. So the self-destruction of the universe was the creation of light.

First Law of Dialectical Evolution: Those stable stages of evolution capable of surviving remain in the universe throughout its evolution.

And so it is with this second stage of the whole universe: the radiation from the initial explosion is still with us as what we call "cosmic radiation," which permeated the universe.

The light, of course, fled the center of the universe; and this meant that the tiny universe expanded. But the mass of the initial body, and the mass-equivalent contained in this light, was so great that the light bent back upon itself in a tight curve, and could not simply run away from itself--which would have stopped evolution at the very beginning.⁽²⁾

But as the universe expanded, it became less dense, and so the curvature of space in which it was confined became larger and larger, and is still expanding to this day. We do not know if this curve will become so great eventually that it will "straighten itself out," so to speak, and the light and everything resulting from it will free itself from itself altogether, leaving each of the results alone, or whether the total mass of the body is such that an ultimate size will be reached, creating an instability whose purpose is a body of the original size, making the whole process start once again⁽³⁾--or whether God will intervene, when the final complexity is reached (or wherever he wants, of course), and stop the whole process, imposing an equilibrium on it which will then be our eternal universe in which change no longer takes place.

But to return to the stage we have arrived at, as the light bent back upon itself it interfered with itself. Some of this interference was simply of the sort in which one wave rides upon another, as it were, making the light more intense or less intense depending on the phases of the component waves. No advance occurs in this type of interference.

But there is an interference called "pair production," in which light meets light and tangles itself up within the other beam, in such a way what results are two "particles."⁽⁴⁾ This occurred occasionally; and on the assumption that the initial energy of the explosion resulted in energy of all wave lengths, then all sorts of particles, stable and unstable, from the heaviest to the lightest, would have been formed; and since the universe was very small, the light interfered with itself very often, and the universe therefore filled up with particles. Much light remained, of course; but now it was accompanied by the products of its own self-destruction. That is, the light destroyed itself (or "negated itself," if you will) as light, but the result was something new, in which what had been only implicit ("in itself") in the light was now explicit ("in and for itself." The act of this type of self destruction is the light as "lighting itself," so to speak, or light "for itself." How very Hegelian, right at the beginning).

The point is that a particle has greater complexity than the light which made it up. The reconfiguration of the internal structure of electromagnetic energy separated out the electrical and magnetic aspects of the energy into two distinct fields, and created another aspect that was not there before: mass, with its gravitational field and its resistance to a change of motion. Mass is in light only implicitly, potentially; in the particle it becomes explicit. And with fields, space in the true sense emerged.

Already, then, we have instances of self-destruction's resulting in something at least in some sense greater than what it was before. Certainly, a body (a particle) is more complex than the energy out of which it is formed; and as we go along in evolution, we will find a tendency toward greater and greater complexity: what Teilhard de Chardin called "complexification." The tiny body which emerged also showed Teilhard de Chardin's "intensification" in the sense that the light produced this greater complexity by wrapping itself up within itself, so to speak, instead of just spreading itself outward.

But this greater complexity and internalness is at the expense of intensity. Energy is lost in pair production, and drained off as the kinetic energy of motion of the particles that fly away from their corresponding anti-particle.

But since there were many many particles formed, then as they moved, they collided with one another. When a particle collides with its anti-particle (as it has a natural tendency to do, since the opposite charges attract each other), the two destroy themselves once again into the light from which they emerged, except that the light wave now has less amplitude than the original light that created them, because of the energy lost as kinetic energy.

Here we have progress followed by regress, and the only result is a gradual degeneration of the available energy, according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. As energy becomes less intense, it can do less, until eventually all becomes merely heat, and we have the "heat death" of the universe, in which there is a uniform temperature of a few degress Kelvin, and nothing else except this heat.

If the structure of the universe were such that all that particles could do in interacting with each other would be to blow themselves up and return to electromagnetic radiation, then evolution would stop right here. So evolution is not simply due to "chance." The structure of the new emergent particles has to be such that they can interact in new ways in order for anything new to happen.

And it is true that in many, many cases, the young universe fluctuated between light and particles. Many particles were also inherently unstable, and "decayed" into other particles and different wave lengths of light.

Protons and electrons are stable particles, however (as are anti-protons and positrons); and when one of these particles came close to another of different mass and charge, then they did not destroy each other and return into light, but produced a hydrogen (or anti-hydrogen) atom or a neutron, with a new configuration of internal space, each of which was electrically neutral, since the electrical field was totally bound up within the atom. And as the universe expanded, these newer particles, uncharged now and so not attracted electrically to other particles, continued existing as the other particles either vanished back into light or created new hydrogen atoms or free neutrons.

Once again, there was a creative destruction. Electrons and protons destroy themselves as such when they interact; and though the locus of the "remainder" of each, so to speak, is identifiable in the atom (the proton and any neutrons are in the nucleus, and the electrons form a negative shell around it), neither exist as protons or electrons any longer. Each gives up some of its identity, and what emerges is a new body, which has its own new properties. Hydrogen is not a mixture of protons and electrons; its essential reality is different: more complex, and more internalized.

We must assume that at some point there was a preponderance of hydrogen over anti-hydrogen, and the anti-hydrogen (the anti-proton positron atom) destroyed itself back into light in meeting its anti-atoms--or that there is an anti-universe that exists either in isolated pockets of our universe or in a universe cut off from the one we know. If equal hydrogen and anti-hydrogen were confined in a small area, then it would all destroy itself again, and there would be no further progress in the universe. So we will assume that something allowed for there being hydrogen in such a way that it remained stable. Once again, the structure of the universe is such that matter and anti-matter did not simply reduce everything once again to electromagnetic radiation.

Can chance account for this? No, as I pointed out in Chapter 3 of Section 4 of the fourth part 4.4.3, chance can account for (explain) nothing. Chance is inherently irrational; the "laws of chance" are the laws of what is left over when the remainder is simply random.

So here I find the first hint at the finger of God arranging things so that evolution is possible. As can be seen, the manipulation is gentle, almost unnoticeable; but it is necessary, or there is only fluctuation, not direction.

But advance even beyond this stage is possible because hydrogen atoms are only electrically stable; chemically, they are not. But they can join with other hydrogen atoms into a hydrogen molecule; and we can assume that this is what happened to most of the hydrogen in the small but ever-expanding universe.

This is the first relatively stable stage of the universe: a universe filled with light and hydrogen gas. Much of our present universe is just this.

Notes

1. Note that this initial instability, which prompted, if you will, the Big Bang, is "a sign of contradiction" to those scientists who insist that the universe is self-sufficient. The only scientific theory which would be consistent with this is the theory of a pulsating universe, in which the Big Bang is the result of the collapse of the preceding stage. The trouble with this theory, however, is that it postulates a mass for the universe much greater than the mass that has been observed. It is not scientific to say, "Well, there doesn't seem to have been a universe that collapsed, and the initial condition of the universe was unstable, and the universe is self-sufficient." This is a contradiction in terms. If the universe was initially unstable, it couldn't have got that way by itself from a stable condition (since equilibrium does not spontaneously move to instability, but rather the other way), and therefore, something other than the universe created it. Science, as I pointed out in Section 4 of the fourth part, is founded on the premise that it will not accept unresolved contradictions.

2. This is significant. We will see throughout this sketch that it is the structure of the universe which accounts for there being an evolution. If mass were not as Einstein discovered, of a nature to attract even light, then the light at the beginning would simply radiate outward, like the light we are familiar with, and would have no opportunity to interact with itself and produce particles.

3. As I say, there isn't any evidence that that much mass exists; so it is merely a logical possibility.

4. Remember, particles are not really little lumps of something; they are only, like everything else involving energy, reconfigurations of energy. See Chapter 3 of Section 2 of the second part 2.2.3.