Blackness

One hundred eighty million years ago, dinosaurs had just become the dominant form of life on earth.  It was another 179,640,000 years before homo sapiens appeared in the fossil record -- i.e., just 160,000 years ago.  The first cave paintings did not appear until about 32,000 years ago.

Thus, during the past 180 million years, a creature similar to us today, capable of making graffiti on cave walls, has existed for only 0.017 percent of the time.  Dinosaurs and other pre-human life forms roamed the earth unmolested by mankind during the first 99.983 percent of that 180 million years.

My point is -- 180 million years is a heck of a long time.

I emphasize "very long time" to provide a little context for some science news this week.  Astronomers at Arizona State University announced that they have detected faint radio signals from the very first stars to form in the universe.  These first stars came into being 180 million years after the Big Bang -- the Big Bang being the creation of the Universe from an infinitely dense point of infinitesimally small size, a "singularity" in mathematical terms..

The entire concept of such a Big Bang is almost impossible to grasp.  Many scientific theories have been offered to explain how such an event could have come about, but to the simple layman it shines as an illumination of the words of Genesis -- "Let there be light, and there was light."

But at first there was no light. Not for 180 million years.

The concept of the Big Bang has now been with us for a long time.  Long enough for the entertainment industry to name a television comedy after it, indicating that the idea has percolated far down the food chain.  What disturbs me, however, is less the Big Bang itself than the thought of those 180 million years that passed between the Big Bang and the first stars.

As scientists explain it, as the first stars formed, they provided the first glimmerings of illumination.  For 180 million years, the Universe had been totally dark.  Not only was there nothing solid to be seen, there was absolutely no light whatsoever to illuminate anything if anything had in fact existed.

Charles Darwin joked that "A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black hat which isn’t there."  That's almost a description of the awkward position you'd find yourself in should you take a time machine and go back in time to check out those first 180 million years, "just to see what's there."  You would be surrounded by an incredible amount of energy, of course, but energy doesn't make good scenery.

I just find it frightening, irrationally frightening, to think of 180 million years of total darkness.  Irrational, because no one was there to experience it or to be worried by it.  But the absence of an observer is, to me, no consolation.  How can one even conceive of 180 million years passing, year by year, if no witness existed and if there had been nothing to see if he had existed?

Does a tree falling in an empty forest make a noise?  It does, of course, if we interpret "noise" to include the vibrations our ears detect as noise.  But the fact that many people consider the question to be one that suggests a paradox shows that we have a natural reluctance to consider unobserved and unobservable events as in some way possessing reality.

It isn't reality's fault.  It isn't the Universe's fault.  It's just our own lack of imagination and inability to think in terms of events so far out of our daily experience.  Those 180 million years of utter darkness make much more sense as part of a mathematician's calculations on paper than they do when talked about over a beer, using layman's language.