Singularity

March 16 2016

The Big Bang 
went off without a sound.

And even if there had been air

filling whatever was there before

there was no one to hear.

So the universe began

with as big a bang

as a tree, falling in the forest

snagged on the underbrush.

I imagine lightning storms

looking down from above.

An electric planet, convulsed by deadly light

that would seem, from space

uninhabitable.

I imagine a newborn babe

before its cry

bursting-out into the world.

Except that we hear, pre-birth.

The rush of blood.

The heart’s dull thump.

The muffled sound

of aquatic life

suspended in amnion.

We do not erupt

out of nothingness

into noise.

So before the universe burst forth

with the light of centillion stars

was there something to hear?

Absolute dark’s

barely audible rumblings?

Possibility’s

faint electric buzz?

The whimper

of quiet surrender

that comes before the start?

Or the high-pitched scratch

of infinite thinness

as galaxies speed apart?

In the April 2016 Atlantic, there was a short article on the future of noise. (I was thrilled to read there should be less!) It closed with “A Brief Chronicle of Noise”, and this was the first item in the list:

Beginning of time: Despite its name, the Big Bang is silent, because there is no existing space through which sound waves can travel.

That sentence stuck with me, and gave me the beginning of this poem. The rest was a kind of stream of consciousness riff, and makes as much or as little sense as you like. Although if you take note of some of my musings below, you’ll see how they may fit the poem’s concluding stanzas.

I’ve seen images of lightning storms from the International Space Station. It’s shocking, how much electricity is loose. And unnerving, the silence.

Spell-check is not happy with centillion:  apparently, too uncommon a word for its lexicon. I originally had “a trillion”, but thought this was far too modest a number to cover the entire universe. I read that centillion – which was the biggest number I found listed, according to Google – has 303 zeros; so I guess that gets substantially closer!

I think the bigger question about the Big Bang theory is this:  how does something arise out of nothing? I understand physicists answer this by positing that everything in the universe is a zero sum:  if you take all the energy, matter, anti-matter, and dark energy and dark matter, they all cancel out. So the laws of thermodynamics are not violated, after all.

Other questions are equally fascinating, and even more ineffable:  is there some kind of meta-consciousness to creation, some purpose or meaning? …was there anything before the Big Bang? …is this a one-off event, with the universe is expanding to infinite nothingness; or will it rebound like a yo-yo in repeated acts of collapse and creation? …are there multi-universes, existing in overlapping and non-intersecting space/time?

Not to mention this whopper:  if the universe is expanding from the Big Bang, then what is it expanding into? That is, if it has a boundary, what lies outside? I’m sure the physicists have an answer for this, as well. As for me, both quantum physics and cosmology – the very small and the very large – make my head spin, so I’ll leave it for them to answer.