I still remember my adult cousin, on one fourth of July, leaning his head over an unexploded canister of fireworks. He should have lost his roman nose to the candle of the same name. This is the same man that built a machine that replicates old ornate plaster moldings for Victorian homes. He is not a dumb man. In fact, it was fairly clever how he smuggled the 3rd artillery into the back of his house without either of our wives knowing. Of course, once the colors crackle and pop across the sky, every one jumps on board with enthusiastic 'oohs' and 'aahs', regardless of the legality.
Don’t get me wrong. His early pyrotechnics education began with me. I am totally to blame for The Summers of the Burning, as we refer to it now. I started him off with matches a few summers before, then candles then small fire crackers, just enough to whet his appetite. He became hungry and as the summers grew more numerous, I would start fires in a 55 gallon barrel and then throw in cans of spray paint, blowing up the back yard with each one and with each time a different color redecorated the smoldering grass. One more summer passed and Molotov cocktails and arrows with burning heads were our daily fare. I taught him everything, but somewhere along the line, he forgot about safety.
The one leason I learned by being an adolescent pyro, was that everything that blows up has a cause. Anytime it was local it was me but what about the real big explosions? So with this young man's reflection, it occurred to me that the Big Bang, as a means of explaining the Universe, may be true but it also may be false. I have thought, for some time now, that it never happened. Of course, I was never going to write a paper on it since I am not equiped. I need grammar and spell check just to pull off this blog, let alone I would have to use more math than what is required to explain to my girlfriend why I religiously over draw the checking account. If you are bent to the religious, you may get excited, but don't. Nothing is more ridiculous than Moses' description of the beginning. The Big Bang never explained Creation, as some christians liked to claim.; in fact it , hands down, disproved it. The star and star stuff that would have come from the boom would have had to come on the first day, not the fourth, like the bible describes. (You can read this on page one of the book, not sure why so many have missed it)
Einstein believed that the universe was static, that it did not expand or contract. He put in a cosmological constant so his equations would work with this premise. Every time I tried to add something extra to my math equations, I got an F. The real genius of Einstein was he was able to do it and still get an A. Later, others took it out and showed that his work actually meant the universe was either expanding or contracting. That all that we know, see and can sense, started from a point of infinite density. Edwin Hubble (yep, the telescope guy) noticed that stars that are farther away have a red shift (we call this the Doppler Effect) and hence are moving away from us. The Big Bang theory was birthed from about this time, the 1930's. The problem is that around 1960 we noticed that the red shift was entirely unreliable as a means of determining distance . ( you may need to know a bit about quasars for this thought ) So how come no one knows anything about this?
Unlike me, who will try on a new idea like a new pair of socks, science moves slowly. It took 12 years for Einstein to be believed. Other than my dad’s tools and a few brain cells, I don’t have anything that is 12 years old. I usually don’t mind waiting a bit for something worthwhile but I really want to go to my grave with a better explanation than a large firecracker going off 15 billion years ago. The problem for us impulsive types is that science will wait because she is a patient mistress. A new theory or explanation has to present it's self and as of today, no one has come to the dance with a new date. So more than likely, I will live out my years like my cousin, blindly staring at the sky and wondering “What Happened?’
No comments:
Post a Comment