Elementary Cosmology

The universe, when I was a small child, was very simple. There was the place where we were, and a place above it called “sky.” I gained an insight when I was about 5-years-old while lying on my back studying the sky. I reasoned that the sun was higher than the clouds and that the sky was higher than the sun. This I deduced based on the observation that the clouds sometimes blocked our view of the sun, but the sun never blocked our view of the clouds. Both the sun and the clouds blocked our view of the sky, but it never blocked our view of them. I thought that was a pretty nifty observation.

But then my parents sent me to Sunday school and the picture got very much more complicated.  Unfortunately, they chose a fundamentalist church where my head was stuffed with nonsense by well-meaning adults. I got the idea that heaven was above the sky and below our feet was a place called hell. Okay so far. Bad people went to hell and good to heaven. The trouble is: we were all bad. They kept repeating over and over that we were all unworthy sinners.  In fact, every time you committed a sin, even telling a “white” lie, you got a black spot on your heart. I figured that when you died they must cut you open to see how black your heart is to determine where they should ship the body. It seemed to me that there was no escaping this hell place. I had dreams in which angels with swords swooped out of the sky to slay all the sinners—that is, everyone.

However, I thought of a way out of this trap that we were apparently in. Based on my reasoning of the relative positions of clouds, sun, and sky and that all three of these objects blocked our view of heaven, what I called the sky was really the underside of heaven. All I had to do was climb high enough and I would escape the vengeful angels and torture of hell. So, I began to pile objects on each other, like my tricycle on top of my wagon. An adult asked what I was doing and I told him I was trying to get to heaven which was above the sun and clouds. He laughed and warned me that I would have to make my way through heaven’s sewers.

I had no idea what “sewers” were, but I knew “sewer pipes.”  They were concrete tubes about 10 feet long with a flared end. I didn’t know what they were for but I would sometimes see them stacked up around town. I pictured that the underside of heaven was filled with these sewer pipes making it very difficult to make my way through them.

Well, you probably figured out by now that I could not make a pile of stuff high enough to get anywhere—not even to the relatively low level of the clouds. Many years later, somewhat ironically, I discovered my childish vision of our place in the universe was pretty close to what the Gnostics believed: that we were trapped on earth by evil forces and we had to be very careful about how we tricked evil into letting our souls (“sparks of heaven”) bypass them on the way to heaven. I also learned that when Christianity was in its formative years, its main rival was the Gnostics. In fact, the Acts of the Apostles specifically mentions Simon the Magician, one of the Gnostic leaders, in a very negative light. Just to make sure, I guess, that we didn’t get taken in by the rival company.

(The word “Gnostic,” in case you are wondering, is from the Greek word for “knowledge.” In other words, its antonym, “agnostic” literally means “Beats me. I don’t have a clue.”)

Now what is this little essay all about?

This: that the universe exists inside our heads.

Our brains are pretty good at picking out patterns and seeing causal relationships even when the patterns and relationships are illusions. Our brains demand answers and, if none are apparent, it will make them up out of fragments of observations. The idea that the earth is the centre of the universe and everything revolves around it is a very reasonable one when looked at from the point of view of a human brain. That is what the sense organs that feed it (mainly sight in this case) are experiencing.  The trouble is, as the scientific parts of our brains have been figuring out, that this is an illusion based on a very limited observation platform. Get us off the planet (whether in imagination or reality) and we see something very different. “Hey brain, you got it wrong!”

Now many people’s brains will not accept being contradicted. It was clearly impossible that men have walked on the surface of the moon because our senses tell us that the moon is usually about the size of a twenty-five cent piece and that it is located somewhere between the clouds and the sky. The entire enterprise had to have been created in a television studio. And, what happened to heaven if men can walk on our satellite? We know for sure that heaven exists because it says so in the bible and the bible, having been dictated to us by the guy who made everything, can’t be wrong. If we have doubts, every now and then a weekly “journal,” devoted to reporting the bizarre and sensational, will post a photograph of a distant galaxy under a headline something like, “Scientists photograph heaven.” I know I have seen at least a half dozen of these front pages at various times during my 65 years.

Something scary: when I was in my 20’s I took a female friend to a campground in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. In the late afternoon the moon was visible, as it sometimes is. “Look!” she exclaimed. “The moon rises during the day here.” She was closer to twenty-five years old than she was to five years old.

Now, picturing the universe the way that science has discovered it to be over the past few years, is a very difficult thing to do. I mean, it is big! And old! Not only that, from our vantage point in this minuscule section of our universe, we have been able to describe its structure in considerable detail. What do you mean that matter and dark matter exist on long string-like structures twisting through a void? Space movies have told us for years that we can reach any planet anywhere in the universe that we chose within the time between commercial breaks, and that all intelligent aliens look just like us except for a few additional bumps and appendages and oddly-coloured skin. Even though we can’t do so with any creature on our planet—even those sharing 98% of respective genomes— we can breed with aliens.  It is very handy that they all speak English as well. Any alien that does not look humanoid is probably a psychopathic killer that eats humans even though it has never encountered any before.

And time? What do you mean that it is a fourth dimension and that there are possibly more time dimensions?  Holy crap! And now you say that everything is made up of eleven-dimensional strings that both exist and don’t exist at the same time? I mean, this science stuff is too weird. Besides it hurts our brains trying to grasp concepts like there is no such thing as “before time began,” and that there are other universes, some only a millimetre or so away.  It is just so much easier to picture the universe as it is here on earth according to our sensory inputs; that there is a place above here called heaven; a place below here called hell; and that it is all ruled over by angry angels with swords.