In a Moment

Before the expansion of this universe some 13 to 14 billion years ago there was a tiny compact Big Something. What it looked like is moot question due to the fact that there were no eyes to see with a consciousness behind them to know that they were indeed seeing anything at all. With Everything wrapped up in such a tight little package there was noting outside its boundary because space too is a Something. When the internal confining forces were overpowered by the expansive forces the universe was set free and has been expanding ever since.

Space, time, the matter and the energy that was previously confined has inflated like a bubble ever since. As space expands it drags with it all the matter and energy that is inside. Alternatively one may conceptualize that space and matter are two attributes of the same proto-something. Cosmologists view space and time as a single entity called Space-time. From Einstein's equation E=MC2 we get that matter and energy are two attributes of the same proto-something, too. This means that we have reduced four somethings down to two. Here we are going to further reduce those two into One. Matter and the space that it occupies are themselves inseparable. One can conceptualize matter as being a special state of Space, of for the purists: Matter-energy is a special state of Space-time.

Just as matter can be converted to energy and vice versa according to the equation: E=MC2., Space-time can be converted to Matter-energy and vice versa by some as yet unwritten equation. The probability statements of quantum mechanics assert that the nothing of space spontaneously becomes matter and can disappear again. Indeed QM says that nothing can spontaneously become something at any time. This is the explanation of how there was the Big Bang birth of the universe without there having been any"before" where there was nothing and then suddenly there was something. Before this big Bank there was no mass-energy nor any space-time therefore all questions of what went bang are moot.

Being that space-time itself is expanding from the origin point, beyond that expansion front there is truly Nothing. In this way the universe is finite but without a boundary. If there was a boundary there would be the supposition that something lay beyond it. Also in this way, there is a horizon beyond which no information, event or deed may cross. Everything we see, know and think are contained within this bubble of indeterminate size and destiny.

There is no telling whether there are other mutually exclusive expanding universes now nor whether this one is the first of many or just the latest of many iterative universes that recycle all the same Space-time-matter-energy over and over. Unless there is or will be some cohesive consciousness that has memory we shall never be able to know. There is an event horizon around our bubble universe.

Now here is the really difficult part to comprehend. Being that we only experience one moment at a time and everything else is merely our memory of past moments and anticipations of the next and future moments, the bubble universe really only needs One Moment to manifest everything we know,experience and feel. The reason we only experience one moment is because there was/is/will be only one moment. All possibilities in this universe exist in that one moment and we are inside that moment too.

All the galaxies that we see in the nighttime sky that are millions if not billions of light-years away may not exist any longer but we won't know that until their death throe light finally reaches us. We must wait inside our time reference for that light to reach us.

Consider a reel of movie film. The entire story that is told in that movie exists simultaneously on that reel. All the images and sound are tightly wrapped in that spiral universe called reel-1. Only in its unwinding and being viewed frame by frame do we get any perception of what is there. But truly there is only one moment where that entire film exists. It is in the viewing of it that motion and sound are created. We could run it fast through the mechanism and the action would be fast. We could run it slower through the mechanism and everything would move slower. If the "frame rate" was 100 per second when the images were recorded and we view it at 24, everything would move very slowly. Pump the recording speed into the 1,000s and we would see things not otherwise seeable by our meager eyes like bubbles popping or bee wings flapping.

Suffice it to say that how long a movie seems to take to get to the end of the reel is partly dependent on how fast the person viewing it takes to see it. Watching a film recorded at 1000 frames per second and projected at 1000 frames per second would produce a perfectly ordinary treatment of objects in motion.

So back to the single moment universe where the big bang went boom and the entire event is over. Being inside the bang bubble makes us unable to determine anything about how long some event or object lasted because we are subject to the same dilation that space-time and matter-energy are subject to. No matter how persistent the illusion is there is only that one moment where the universe exploded, embraced all possibilities and dissipated like smoke in the night air or collapsed again like a cavitation bubble in a boiling pot of water.