1. Everywhere we look in the sky, stars are apparently receding from us. Up, down, left, right, in all directions we see distant objects moving away. How do we know this? The Doppler shift. The so-called red shift.

2. There is a limit to our looking. Depending on whose figures you use, the limit of visibility is somewhere between 12 billion and 20 billion light years. Beyond that limit? We don't know. Orthodoxy says we can't know.

These two factoids form the foundation of present-day cosmology, of our picture and understanding of the universe. Of course, these factoids are not pure fiction. They are based on observations with the best available technology.

So we get the Big Bang theory, because that's the best way we have of explaining this movement of everything away from everything. The theory is seductive in its simplicity. But reductive in its unchallenged implications.

Because the theory requires two rather knotty conditions. First, it implies a unified condensation of everything in one ur-glob eons ago which then exploded and expanded into, well, the "this" which we inhabit and perceive.

The Big Bang theory also implies an undefined, unexplained, unimaginable, um, "Nothing," way, way out there beyond the "edge" of the expanding universe.

Well, as Rusty Godowski observed when presented with the facts of Myra Breckinridge's little experiment in creating an entire nuclear family inside one person, it sort of does your head.

Careers have been built (are still being built!) and prizes won by those able to cleverly contemplate these matters of cosmogeny.

2. WHERE WE MAY BE, SORT OF
Let's try a little thought experiment re the universe, try to think outside the box of orthodoxy and see what happens.

Let's imagine a universe which in some sense is toroidal, donut shaped, like the illustration above. Don't worry for now about the hole, or about what's outside the donut. Just imagine that our entire observable universe has a donut shape.

If so, interesting resolutions of some problems immediately arise. (Note: we're not doing this experiment to solve everything. The donut shaped leaves many questions unresolved--but, don't forget, present orthodox cosmology does too.)

OK. We've got a universe shaped like a donut. Right away, we want measurements. Ah, what interesting possibilities arise when we start trying to map current observational measurements onto the donut.

For example. Present cosmology says the universe is, oh, maybe 20 billion lights years across (because that's as far as we've been able to see). Now. If the universe is a torus like the picture above, where do we put that measurement? Is it line "A"? Is it line "B" Or, heaven forfend, might it be line "C"?

Good grief! Think of the implication if it's line "C". That would mean that the "infinity" that we THINK we are observing when we look "outward" in every direction is ACTUALLY a false infinity, and what we are actually seeing is a closed loop of very large dimension.

(Please remember, we're not suggesting that the universe IS a torus. We would not be THAT foolish. We're just doing a little thought experiment here.)

Thus it COULD be that what we are observing if we look in one "direction" around the torus is a mirror image (again, on a very large scale) of what we observe when we look in the other "direction." Not duplicate images, of course, because the time factor in such a large phenomenon as the universe is so many orders of magnitude greater than the minuscule time that humans have spent making observations.

But that brings us back to the scale problem. We, barely out of the old evolutionary jungle, are observing with such limited, yea, primitive equipment (no matter how much we pride ourselves on it, it is limited and primitive, given the phenomena in front of us), that we not only don't know what we're looking at; we also presently have no way of determining how big "it" is. For example, one of the dots in the line on the drawing above may in fact be 20 billion light years in length. And if just one dot is that "large", well, where does that leave us with our cosmology?

For one thing, it leaves such constructions as the Big Bang Theory (and the red shift) looking rather like the Lilliputians looked when they caught a glimpse of Gulliver's reproductive organ through a rip in his pants: agog, shocked, frightened, confused, and longing strongly for the good old days before Giants and Giant Universes.

Among many points one can stumble over in contemplating this little thought experiment of universe-as-torus is the quite real possibility that maybe the Big Bang (while in some sense "real") is actually a Very Small Bang, and in fact one which implies absolutely nothing about beginnings or ends of universes but reflects the "reality" of only a tiny part of a phenomenon whose vastness we remain both physically and imaginatively blind to.

END

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