All this fuss about Stephen Hawking’s new book, the Grand Design, prompted me into finally writing about something I made notes on several months ago. (There’s a good commentary on the book and arguments for and against Hawking’s ideas in The Telegraph if you wish to take a look.)
I think I was reading an article about ‘multiverses’ (not this one, but this gives some explanation about the theory) and the creation of the universe in general and started thinking ‘Well, that doesn’t sound so new after all’.
In fact, as is usual when it comes to high-end theoretical stuff about astronomy, I clearly hadn’t understood it all. But it reminded me of evenings spent in my mate Dave’s house many many years ago (ok, 1980 – 1981), along with our mutual friend Nick, playing Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon” and the Human League’s “The Black Hit of Space”, no doubt drinking his dad’s cans of Kestrel lager. (This was before we graduated to going to Nick’s house because his local off-license would sell us, as 15 year-olds, cider, sherry or Carlsberg Special Brew – or Martini if we were feeling particularly sophisticated and Nick had just got paid for his paper round.)
I remember Nick describing to me and Dave how a black hole is so ‘dense’ that something the size of a bean would be fantastically heavy and crash through the centre of the earth. (Not entirely accurate, but we were only 15.) We discussed all manner of things, including how there must be an infinite number of parallel worlds and, because of this, how it was perfectly plausible for us to exist ‘elsewhere’, but with just one variation on our lives. And ‘infinite’ meant that there was no ‘end’ to the universe. For good measure, what was in the universe before the Big Bang? – there must have been something there, even if it was ‘nothing’. God could not exist, otherwise how did God come into being? He couldn’t have created Himself and if there was a time before God, what was there and who created it?
Breathless, we would then take another sip of Kestrel before putting “Debbie HarrRy” on the turntable….Perhaps, had we not drunk those Martinis, one of us could have been the next Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, rather than Michael Green.