Why is there a universe anyway?
A thematically connected pair of extracts from my new (old) book.
I have a new book out! Ish. It would be more accurate to say I have a new edition of an old book out, but that’s a much less striking opener, and you saw straight through my cunning ruse, damn your eyes.
Anyway: my 2021 book The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything has been reprinted with some updates, half a dozen more entries, and this lovely new cover art:
If the title of the book seems to rhyme with this newsletter, that is not a coincidence: not only did I choose the newsletter’s name in a vain hope of brand synergy, but as a collection of lists, facts and curiosities, it’s very much in the same kind of style. The book is, in essence, the feature-length follow up to this newsletter, which just happened to come first - in roughly same timey-wimey fashion that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story came out before the TV series to which it acts as a finale.
To celebrate publication day, and provide some helpful proof of what a good Christmas present it will make, here are the book’s first two entries.1 Enjoy.
Some creation myths
Let’s start at the beginning.
A creation myth is a symbolic narrative explaining how the world and those who inhabit it came to be. Sometimes, it’s meant to be treated as historic and literal; a lot of the time it’s more of a metaphor. Either way, its purpose is to convey profound truth about a people or a culture, and, one assumes, to give parents down the ages something to tell an annoying six-year-old who won’t stop asking, ‘Whhhhhy?’
Once upon a time, there were probably as many creation myths as there were tribes or villages. Today, however, even though there are more people than ever, over half the world’s population subscribes to religions that believe some version of a single creation myth. You can probably sing along.
One deity, six days
Over a period of just six days, a single, all-powerful god divided Earth from heaven, and light from darkness; made the Sun, the Moon and the stars; and created, basically, everything. Then, on the seventh day, he did something different (rest in Judaism and Christianity; settled himself into his throne to oversee his work in Islam).
What did God create on each day according to the
Book of Genesis?First day: Light; divided it from darkness
Second day: The sky; divided waters above from waters below
Third day: Land and plants
Fourth day: Sun, Moon and stars
Fifth day: Fish and birds
Sixth day: Animals and man
Seventh day: Nothing – day of rest
The exact details of this story, and how literally you’re meant to take it, vary according to religion and taste. (Adherents of ‘day-age creationism’, for example, would have it that the days aren’t literal, but much longer periods lasting thousands, millions, even billions of years, which is a fairly convenient get-out clause.) Regardless, however, all this remains a deeply unsatisfying explanation for the existence of a universe, to my mind. It’s an example of what is known as a ‘creation from chaos’ myth, in which a divine being creates the world by bringing order out of the primordial void that preceded it. That simply shifts the big question from ‘Why is there a universe?’ to ‘Why is there a god?’
It is nonetheless a striking insight into the success of monotheism that, a couple of thousand years after one Middle Eastern tribe came up with this story, roughly five in nine humans2 come from a religious tradition that subscribes to it.
Pangu and his massive egg
In the Chinese philosophy of Daoism, the first man, a primitive hairy giant called Pangu, who may also have had horns and tusks, grew for the pleasingly specific time period of 18,000 years inside a massive egg. Eventually, he hatched, splitting said egg in two, the yin and the yang.
In some accounts, Pangu goes on to use his yin and yang expertise to separate Earth and sky, and put the moons, stars and so forth in place, before turning his attention to the landscape, chiselling valleys and piling up mountains, rather like the monotheistic god. In other versions he doesn’t do any of that, and instead, after he’d lived for another 18,000 years, the cosmos was formed from his corpse: his eyes became the Sun and the Moon, his hair trees and plants, his sweat rivers and his body soil. Animal life, upsettingly, evolved from the parasites that lived on his body.
You can worship Pangu, if you’re so minded, at the Pangu King Temple in Guangdong province. The park is said to be lovely.
Mbombo is unwell
The Kuba people of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo have a different ex nihilo creation myth. Mbombo3, a huge, lonely, white giant, was alone in a watery, primordial darkness, when suddenly he felt an intense pain in his stomach. This was not surprising, given that shortly afterwards he vomited up the Sun, Moon and stars.
The resulting heat dried the land and created hills and clouds. Mbombo, alas, was distracted from all this by the fact he was vomiting up nine animals (which went on to create all the other animals), followed by some men. One of the animals he vomited up, incidentally, was a big black cat called Tsetse, who proved herself enough of a pain in the backside for Mbombo to chase her into the sky, where she became thunder and lightning.
Some radical self-care
In some versions of ancient Egyptian mythology, the world was created by the first god Atum, who created himself and then found he was lonely, so decided to create some friends.
This is nothing spectacular in itself (although the bit where he created himself raises an eyebrow). What’s notable is how he did it: not to put too fine a point on it, he knocked one out, and when he ejaculated, a pair of gods emerged from his semen.4
In what is not a coincidence, masturbation was considered by the Egyptians to have a sacred quality, and was even involved in certain rituals. So, now you know.
From the deep
Many cultures have an ‘earth-diver’ myth, in which an animal drags the Earth up from the seabed of a primordial ocean. In the Cherokee creation myth, for example, a water beetle came from the sky, reached the surface of the Earth, and became increasingly irritated he had no place to rest. So, eventually, he dived to the bottom, and brought up some mud. That magically grew to become the Earth.
Similar stories can be found in other Native American traditions, as well as in East Asia and even Siberia. That seems a curious coincidence, so some experts have speculated that they have a single origin, somewhere in Asia.
Time after time
Another trope common to many Native American myths: ‘emergence’, in which this world was the result of a previous world, which was in turn a result of another world, and so on.
In the Mayan creation myth, for example, a pair of gods – Tepeu, the maker, and his pal Gucumatz, the feathered serpent – created the world, then decided after all that effort they’d like someone to whom they could outsource care of their creation and, hey, who would also appropriately praise the gods for their hard work. So they created all the animals, and asked them to praise them, before realising, belatedly, that animals can’t speak.
Next, they tried making men from wet clay, but they fell to bits as soon as they attempted to speak. After that they tried wooden men, who could talk and breed and so on; but they had no minds or memories, so their words were meaningless, and in a fit of pique the gods destroyed them in a flood. Those who escaped became monkeys.
Finally, they made another race of men out of maize (which was, coincidentally, the staple food of the Mayans). These guys had the wit to recognise and thank their creators, and so they became the Mayans.
The odd thing about this story is that, centuries before and continents away from Charles Darwin, its path from animals to monkeys to men looks a lot like the passage of evolution.
The Big Bang and evolution: Probably not a creation myth
Here, best we can tell, is what actually happened.
In the beginning there was … something. Some physicists, on the grounds that the universe has been expanding, used to roll the tape back and assume that the universe must have begun as a singularity: an infinitely small, infinitely dense, infinitely hot point, containing everything. But other physicists doubt that theory on the grounds it results from general relativity, which applies at larger scales, and not the quantum mechanics that applies at tiny ones (the two theories have never got on). And, anyway, the information available to us only goes back so far. So the very earliest history of the universe is currently lost to us.
Then, around 10−36 seconds after the start of the universe, which is pretty soon, the universe suddenly began expanding, doubling in size, and doubling again, many dozens of times. This only lasted until sometime between 10−33 and 10−32 seconds after the singularity – it was over in a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth5 of a second – but, once this ‘Inflationary Epoch’ was done, the scale of the universe had increased by many trillions of times. This is the ‘Bang’ part of the ‘Big Bang’, and explains, among other things, why matter and radiation are distributed so evenly around the universe. But at the time of writing no one seems to know why it happened.6
As space expanded it began to cool, enabling the plasma of fundamental particles like quarks to coalesce into protons and neutrons. The universe was, by this time, perhaps a millionth of a second old. Within a few minutes it had cooled enough for some of those protons and neutrons to combine into what would later become the nuclei of helium or deuterium7 atoms. Actually creating those atoms took rather longer, however: recombination8, the point at which the universe was cold enough for negatively charged electrons to begin orbiting positively charged nuclei, took around 370,000 years.
This, you may notice, is quite a jump in timescales.
The gradual cooling had another side effect. For the first time photons could travel freely through the universe without banging into electrons and scattering. That meant that space was now cold enough for light to pass through it: in other words, it had become transparent. This didn’t matter much, however: there weren’t any stars, so there was nothing to see even if there was anyone to see it, which there wasn’t. This bit’s known as the ‘Cosmic Dark Age’.9
After a couple of hundred million years, gravity caused clumps of gas to collapse in upon themselves and ignite, and the resulting stars to gather together in groups we’d later call galaxies. These first stars were probably bigger – hundreds, even thousands of times bigger – and shorter-lived than today’s. They also fused hydrogen and helium atoms together into heavier elements, which scattered around the universe when they went supernova. This would prove very helpful for anyone who happened to live in the universe later.
Around 4.5 billion years ago, a mere 9.3 billion years after the universe began, a particular cloud of gas on one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way collapsed to form another star. The leftover matter around it coalesced to form moons and planets, including one orbiting its sun at a distance of roughly 93 million miles. At some point – possibly quite soon afterwards, possibly it took as much as another billion years – life began on this planet, probably around the hydrothermal vents: points on the bottom of the ocean floor, at which water, superheated by volcanic magma, explodes back into the open sea.
Some of these single-celled life forms did better at surviving than others. Occasionally, a random mutation would give particular strains an advantage, and they would reproduce while others died out. Over the aeons that followed, some evolved to breathe oxygen, or to combine with others to form multicellular organisms. Some became plants; others animals; some developed more complex brains and nervous systems thanks to their clever use of a backbone. Until, after a lengthy period in which the planet was dominated by the giant reptiles we call dinosaurs, smaller, furrier ones known as mammals began to take over.
And then, around 4 million years ago, a group of apes who walked upright instead of on all fours decided to make their homes on the savannah instead of in the forest. They learned to build shelters and make tools, to communicate with speech, to hunt and farm and trade. A few thousand years ago they began writing things down, so their descendants could read about them. A few hundred years ago, they learned how to make books, and a couple of decades back they invented the internet, so that anyone with an electronic device could access pretty much all the world’s knowledge from just about anywhere on the planet.
And it turned out that most of these apes didn’t really care about all the world’s knowledge. They just wanted to be rude to strangers and to look at pictures of other, smaller, furrier mammals.
And that brings us pretty much up to date.
Other topics covered in The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything include, in no particular order: time, space, galaxies, planets, countries by size, countries by age, large numbers, the metric system, atrocities, wars, pandemics, earthquakes, penguins, ice cream, African civilisation, gay marriage, curious geography, philosophical razors, and a fight between Harry Potter and Spider-Man. You can buy it now, from Waterstones, Amazon or Bookshop.org.
Apologies if you already have the book and have thus already read them, but I could hardly write special ones just for you.
In 2015, according to the Pew Research Center, 31.2 per cent of the world’s population identified as Christian, another 24.1 per cent as Muslim, and 0.2 per cent as Jewish. That, by my count, makes 55.5 per cent.
Other transliterations have him as ‘Bumba’.
This is actually only true in certain later versions of Egyptian mythology – others have him spitting or sneezing – but, come on, don’t pretend those are half as fun.
A trillion, if you haven’t had the pleasure, is a million million. A billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth, then, is a very small fraction indeed.
There are other theories about the very beginning of the universe. In the cyclic model, for example, the universe will keep expanding until the Big Crunch, at which point it will begin to contract once again, before bouncing back in another Big Bang, after which it will expand again, and so on. Some variants of this model involve teeny tiny vibrating strings; some require the visible universe to be a four-dimensional subset of an 11-dimensional space – a ‘brane’, short for membrane – which periodically bangs into another brane. But I could write thousands of words on this and neither you nor I would be much the wiser, so I’m not going to.
‘Heavy hydrogen’: hydrogen atoms with a neutron in their nuclei. Regular hydrogen nuclei are simply protons.
The name is misleading since it implies they had been combined before. They hadn’t, but the name seems to have stuck.
The term ‘Dark Ages’ generally refers to the centuries from roughly the fifth to sometime between the tenth and fifteenth: the period after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, but before the Renaissance. Historians dislike this term because of both its negative connotations and its Eurocentrism. It ignores the fact that, on much of the planet – in the Islamic world, in China, even in southeastern Europe – civilisation was chugging away, and chucking out scientific advances as fast as it ever had. I would, however, suggest another reason to dislike it: it looks stupid compared to the literal Dark Age, which went on for quite a lot longer.
Considering the current news, one can’t help feeling, come friendly asteroid.
My main cause for wonder is where the “God” came from in most of those stories. And indeed in some cases, how he created himself. For my entertainment at moments I’m not writing or painting myself or building scale models, I’m going to buy your book!