Read up on the most abstract of concepts in this article by phsyorg.com. I always liked the idea of cyclic cosmology, finding it a rather neat concept - in fact it was almost worryingly neat, and all my tacit doubts have been articulated by no other than Andrew Motion in a Guardian article:
The idea of there being no end to space seems logically impossible. How can there be no limits to space? We know the universe is expanding, but what is it expanding into? Is it squeezing into something else and making that contract, or is the universe just venturing into nothingness? In which case, nothingness and somethingness appear to be much the same. We are also told the universe may contract in time; this raises similar questions. What replaces the space that was the something of the universe?
The question posed by Motion to me oscilates between one of science and one of philosophy. I'm always tempted to try and understand big questions in scientific terms - applying an understandable rationale to an irrational situation is an instinctive reaction. And indeed the discoveries made by Penrose are thrilling in this sense; tangible evidence to help us understand an unimaginable and unfathomable happening. But the filter of language, in either a mathematical or lyrical sense, is inescapable - albeit a necessary tool. We need linguistic parameters to work within, and as such our faculty to elucidate is both a freeing and a limiting force; when there are no appropriate words you cannot ever describe a thing adequately, and our language certainly has no facility to describe time before time.
Tuesday, 30 November 2010
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