Cosmology

“Who splashed the stars across the sky pop­pop?” , little Isabel asked her grandfather, sitting beside her on their creaky front­porch swing, one unusually clear night in late­Autumn. Edward took another long puff from his pipe and proceeded to blow smoke rings into the velvet­blue night sky, which really did look like someone had accidentally overturned a bucketful of stars. The little girl patiently watched the nearly circular smoke rings climb, their edges dissipating slowly into nothingness as they disappeared into the spaces between the little pinpricks of shimmering white light that had been the subject of her query. When the last of the rings had vanished, straining to reach distances far beyond their tenuous grasp, Isabel’s grandfather cleared his throat and tapped the remaining embers of his pipe into his ashtray. Isabel looked up at him expectantly, her dark eyes reflecting, or so for a brief moment Edward imagined, the intricate tapestry of the night.“To all things, he began, “there is a beginning and an end, and since we find it so hard to distinguish between the two, I will start to answer you, as best an ignorant old man can, from the centre.”“The centre of what?” “Of everything” And Isabel wondered at this, while her grandfather went on.. “There is a fish... ” “Like the ones in our aquarium?” .“Yes”, Edward said, “but greater, vaster, than anything you or I or anyone else can possibly imagine. They say that all the seas of the world, placed in one of the fish’s nostrils, would be like a mustard seed placed in the desert. This fish swims, in all its unfathomable immensity, on an equally fathomless sea. On this giant fish there stands a bull, of many thousand eyes and tongues and nostrils and feet and this bull, on his able back, supports a crag made entirely of rubies... ”“Rubies? Like mother’s ring?”“Yes, only redder, the colour of the setting Sun. And above everything I have described, there is a .... man, whose feet rest on the surface of the crag”“And what does this man do?”“Well, this man, you see, he has a very crucial task, crucial for us at least, for he holds up the Earth, this world of ours, with its joys and its foibles and everything else in between. And above the Earth is the sky, and everything you see tonight, the scattered innumerable burning stars, the stray comet, dying as it streaks one final flame across the horizon and the waning Moon, the solitary sliver that the Sun condescended to leave behind when He was done slicing his presumptuous satellite down to size.”“But who created the stars?”, persisted little Isabel“And another thing you must realize young lady”, said Edward, too engrossed in his near­soliloquy to answer, “ , what I describe to you, it spans not only space, distances as we measure between lamp­posts shimmering on a highway at early dawn, but also time. The glittering lights you see above you now are the light from these stars as they were millions of years ago. Even as we speak they may be burning themselves out, if they aren't already dead cold star carcasses floating in the vast depths of space or they may be exploding, right at this moment, into impossibly beautiful firework displays in the skies, but you and I will never know, for the stars are too far away. Our race may not even survive long enough to know. ”“And if we keep going up, what do we reach?”“If we keep going upward, above the sea, and the bull, and the crag, and the man with the burden of the world on his shoulders and the infinite heavens, we eventually reach the beginning of space, and time, and creation itself; when everything everywhere exploded simultaneously into rapidly propagating existence, and ultimately started forming the structures that were the ancestors of the stars that you see twinkling so prettily in the sky tonight. And what then lies beneath the fathomless sea on which the fish swims? If things have a beginning and a middle, must they not necessarily have an end?”“I guess”, said his granddaughter a little uncertainly, for her age still made her almost wholly unaware of the inexorable nature of things.“And, though beneath the sea is opaque darkness, if you go far enough.. and to far enough depths, to where even the giant shadow of the fish swimming above fades out of sight, there things begin to come to a close, to grow cold, like in the darkest depths of our own oceans.. but then even farther below, things heat up again, till they start tearing apart once more, like in the beginning, so infinitely high above.”“And then?”“And then, ultimately, everything ends with a whimper.. when all the candles have burned out and all that can be done has been done, further than thought and time extend, farther than measurable distances.. and everything just.. stops.”So the discourse concluded and the crickets took primary position in the orchestra of the late November night. Grandfather and granddaughter sat in silence for a while, looking up at the same sky. After some time Isabel said,“But what about the stars? And the meteors? And everything else above us... who made them? Someone must have caused it all to start, when we go back, really really high up... ”And she looked at her grandfather expectantly, but Edward had resumed smoking, lost deep in thought. So Isabel looked back up at the night sky, splashed with an endless array of refracted lights, uncertain of whether she had received her answer, but feeling rather content with the proceedings of the evening nonetheless, as she watched the smoke rings and the fireflies play an elaborate game of hide and seek in the spaces between the scattered stars.