It all started with a Big Bang, it is said. We don’t quite know what that was, but we have a Standard Model which explains the evolution from hyper-inflation, to hot plasma, to particles & elements, and so on. We have also found some “smoking gun” evidence for many of the postulates. But ……. The moment and the very nature and the instigator of Big Bang/Hyper-inflation remain shrouded behind the Planck time-length: the time it takes for light to travel the Planck length, which is the smallest distance about which current experimentally corroborated models of physics can make meaningful conclusions. That implies that we cannot make any experimentally corroborated statements about the first 10-43 seconds and that is a very, very, very small amount of time. Nevertheless, that Planck time implies that we cannot know anything about the start, because the first billionth of a billionth of a billionth …. second is a Singularity. What is a singularity, you ask? Well, among a number of definitions there is “singularity is a point at which a given object is not defined or not ‘well-behaved’”. And that is exactly what the first Planck time period of the universe is. If you want to know more, start with Wikipedia.
The story is that once we go past the big bang, the rest is a question of time and evolution, and life is a result of Abiogenesis here and there, and Abiogenesis is defined as the “natural process by which life has risen from non-living matter”. Again if you want to know more about Abiogenesis, start with Wikipedia.
The scientific view today is that the cosmos started with a singularity leading to Big Bang and then matter & energy evolution led to Abiogenesis when certain conditions (some of which we are not familiar with) were met here and there in the cosmos. After that, a set of models (such as mutation and the survival of the fittest) explain how we got from single microbes to coconut trees, whales, monkeys, lizards, humans, and countless other creatures in about 4 billion years. But so far, we have only observed life on our planet.
Wait a minute though! If we look at life, we see that we have a set of models that collectively explain how we got from a single tiny living thing to us, and there are some “smoking gun” evidence for it. But we only have thoughts and conjectures about how organized compounds turned live. In other words, how did Earth turn from a chemical system into a biological system? This is a singularity as well, because that first spark of life is not defined and so far (at least) our science cannot explain it experimentally.
Now we have two singularities to explain about how we got to where we are: The BIG BANG & LIFE. We now have reached to the real topic of our writing:
Both Cosmos and Life are singularities and even though life could not have happened if cosmos had not happened, life is not a natural evolution of cosmos. Once we relax this natural evolution assumption, imagination gives us stories and a multitude of fictional science which will be the subjects of our writings in Dual Cosmic Singularity.
January 2023, Cambridge,
Berta Seintan, PhD & Charlene Wardin, PhD