Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

9 January 2015

As a conservative Steady Statist convinced that, like woman, the universe, while formally mutating and unstable (“la donna è mobile”), is nonetheless essentially eternal (“Das Ewig-Weibliche” of Goethe), Antigone1984 is naturally pleased that to find that the sky has started to fall in on smart-alec snake-oil astrologers purporting to prove that the Big Bang  marked the beginning about 13.8 billion years ago of “all there is”, aka the universe (an explanation sometimes satirised as “42”).

See the following clip on the BBC website today:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02gfgfq

It seems that hotshot cosmologists with their physical measurements and empiricist methodology are at last coming round to our long-held common-sense view, based on first principles, that, logically, something must have existed before the Big Bang: if something started, then there must have been something before it started, ie a pre-Big Bang state of affairs predating the Big Bang. In order for something to start, there must be a time before it started, otherwise it is meaningless to say it started. So time at least must have existed earlier than the Big Bang. Furthermore, something cannot come out of nothing: ex nihilo nihil. If there is nothing, there is nothing out of which something can come. Therefore there must have been something before the Big Bang – involving supposedly an explosion of energy and matter – took place.

In conclusion, we can accept the hypothesis of a Big Bang as a phase in the development of the universe but not as the starting point of everything before which there was nothing.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

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 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)
2. Partitocracy v. Democracy (20 July 2012)
3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)
4. Capitalism in practice (4 July 2012)
5. Ladder  (21 June 2012)
6. A tale of two cities (1) (6 June 2012)
7. A tale of two cities (2) (7 June 2012)
8. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

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