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Something Wonderful: “God is the photograph of everything at once.” Seen from the Outside.

Timelapse of the Entire Universe:

On a cosmic time scale, human history is as brief as the blink of an eye. By compressing all 13.8 billion years of time into a 10 minute scale, this video shows just how young we truly are, and just how ancient and vast our universe is. Starting with the big bang and culminating in the appearance of homo sapiens, this experience follows the unfolding of time at 22 million years per second, adhering closely to current scientific understanding.

Who knows? Perhaps the entire expansion and then contraction of this Universe, our Universe, is but one breath in the life of God.

Or are we yet the center of such circles,
our fall a rise above the shawl of night,
where all shall shine contained within
that single soul, that heart of stars;
that interface where souls and suns
and Earth’s far scattered waters meet?

– – Interface

“God is the photograph of everything at once.” Seen from the Outside.

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Casey Klahn March 20, 2018, 7:37 AM

    I well recall, back when I was a mortar gunnery officer, the time that we were firing mortars, and something incredible happened! Instead of the target being destroyed, out of the dirt cloud of an explosion, a house appeared from nothing, and inside was a family and a dog. They spoke, Slav, but there you have it. Life from chaos!

  • Eskyman March 20, 2018, 1:12 PM

    “And suddenly, life appeared.”

    Yep, I just love these scientific expositions! That’s much more rational than saying, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

    Very pretty photography. I wonder how much of it is actually true?

  • Ten March 20, 2018, 2:50 PM

    Coupla points:

    The big bang is the invention of a Catholic Priest and is built on the premise that the universe can be dated by background radiation and redshift. Since, it’s become the de facto creation myth and accepted by, of all things, Christian believers as a Genesis account.

    Universal expansion is presumed from the above, another unfalsifiable premise and like the big bang, a theory and not an accepted fact. The video needed to include these points.

    According to theories on such things, the LHC at Cern disproved both the big bang and the multiverse, and for a short time was re-purposed into a big bang disprover. Now it’s been reinvented into something else. A series of other discoveries also put the big bang on thin ice, to put it mildly. https://youtu.be/_c9M33FLH40

    And so on and so on. The big bang is not, as conventional wisdom seems to have forgotten, a fact or even a reasonable theory. It is conjecture. Like dark matter and energy, it’s just a placeholder for what we do not know.

  • ghostsniper March 20, 2018, 3:00 PM

    It’s always been here and always has, mere atom sized specks (people – for the slow of thought) cannot change that, hell, they can’t even change themselves. If that big bang happened, and I’m not convinced it did, what’s to say it didn’t happen before, many times? Or not at all. If it did happen, you just can’t get around that part about, “Well, what was here BEFORE?”

    “the eternal sceptic”
    –2099

  • Vanderleun March 20, 2018, 5:20 PM

    God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins |

    The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
    Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
    Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
    Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

    And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
    And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
    Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

  • Vanderleun March 20, 2018, 5:25 PM

    “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things….”

    An all wise, omniscient, omnipotent God could do worse that set the current universe up with the kind of unfolding process we witness in the Big Bang (Genesis 1 / John 1) and just let it run. It’s a big universe and it takes a lot of tending. He might want to take a break from doing all the detail work over and over again when, except for free will, it’s all sort of a template from particle strings to the CfA2 Great Wall.

    Conservation of Mass and Energy: It’s not only a good idea, it’s the LAW.

  • Fletcher Christian March 20, 2018, 7:06 PM

    Vanderleun: I was about to say something like that. But I would like to add something. Traditional sources seem to indicate that the Universe is a messy kludge that was indeed started up in the beginning, but then needed (and still needs) continual adjustment and, at irregular intervals, new things inserted into it. Oh, and that selfsame Creator is also willing to break Her own rules because one of we ultramicroscopic specks with the lifespan of a mayfly asks Her to, nicely. This strikes me as inelegant at best.

    How much more elegant and suited to the understanding and viewpoint of God to set up all the equations in the beginning, with all the various numbers set just so, in just such a way that somewhere in Creation life, and then intelligence, will arise – and then breathe fire into the construction, and let it run.

  • John A. Fleming March 20, 2018, 8:50 PM

    When I was a young man of teen years, very much interested in the sciences and astronomy, I gave this question some thought. It made my head hurt. I was trying to determine what is is that I should do.

    I concluded that the nature of the universe was a profoundly vast unknowable mystery beyond all possible imagining. As likewise is the gift of life given to all of us. What exactly is this life thing of which we speak? No one alive today, no one ever alive, knows or knew even the slightest truth of it.
    And anybody who says they do is a charlatan and a fraud.

    And yet, here we are, and we must do something with the time that we have been given. Better make it a good one.

    In all the years since, I’ve found no reason to change my youthful conclusion.

    Perhaps the Poets have come the closest to expressing the nature of the world. Tolkien recounted that the sound of the waves on the shore was said by the Elves (who in turn learned it from the Valar) to be the faint echo of the Music of the Ainur, the Music that sung the World into Being. It’s as good a story as any. To stand at the shore and watch and listen to the waves is always for me a moment outside of time.

  • Ten March 21, 2018, 4:29 AM

    Conservation of Mass and Energy: It’s not only a good idea, it’s the LAW.

    Consider this purported bang itself, the ultimate unlawful violation of the apparently unnaturally-natural non-state state of non-existence…

  • Fletcher Christian March 21, 2018, 4:40 AM

    Ten: Actually, we don’t know that. It might well be that the state of non-existence is unstable according to Nature’s laws; in fact, that seems to be the current view. However, that doesn’t really matter – because that still leaves the question of Who wrote the laws in the first place.

  • ghostsniper March 21, 2018, 6:39 AM

    “Who wrote the laws in the first place”
    Abbott & Costello
    (Who’s on first?)

  • Ten March 21, 2018, 7:10 AM

    In The Void’s inherent non-state state no such purported laws could exist, Christian. Laws were created – in the Original context – or invented – in ours – post-existence, or at the least, as a simultaneous component thereof – laws of thermodynamics obviously could not precede thermodynamics, therefore the biggie banger either violated them or they didn’t exist for it to fashion itself around, a thorny problem for it and us to consider. Nobody can so much as conjecture prior to that, or actually, even during whatever process it was, if it was a process.

    Likewise, technically “G-d” is just another construct, whether in the classical sense where no two adjacent denominations can even agree on Its entirely evident principles and purposes, or in the metaphysical sense where we haven’t the slightest foggiest whatsoever. Cosmologically, forget about it. (Incidentally, since theology invariable gets involved, the notion that free will is a self-actualizable redeemer is obviously a salvation of works, and an easily prideful one at that. So even the purported “choice” to believe – if belief has some inherent value, which is another concoction of our pride – is a humanistic projection. Far as we know, we made the whole thing up, albeit along eminently logical premises … logical premises that end up knocking us into the wall. Om.)

    No matter how you look at It, by essence – and perhaps Purpose – It is a mystery. The question of Who wrote the laws in the first place is, with all due respect – and with all due respect to It – an inherent fallacy and not worth conjecturing any more than you can realistically consider the most fundamental the forces in this Universe, our post-creation creation: Not a person on earth, far as we know, has any idea why an immaterial electron orbits, why it is a probability state and not a thing, or even what gravity is.

    It’s a dualistic place to be: Forever allowing its conscious creations to ask what they can never legitimately ask. Our confident musings into creation are at least tacitly hubristic and our big bangism is the height of that. There was no big bang; not strictly scientifically or even credibly theoretically, therefore “there was no big bang” is technically the truer statement if we’re going to make statements. Like so many of our other cosmological fantasies that go fifty or a hundred years before being overthrown – it took the collider at Cern just a few years – it’ll far more likely than not get passed by in some gigantic orgy of breathless scientific scientism and press releases and champagne corks like we have no memory.

    Speaking of which, we recall that much of our current “knowledge” of these things hinges on completely invisible matter, entirely undetectable energy, and particles we name God that lend properties sufficient to glue a universe together over to other particles, don’t we?

    And we thought faith was faith. This stuff has it all over us in that regard.

  • Casey Klahn March 21, 2018, 7:26 AM

    Science sheds very little light on religious matters, and even less light on the origin of life. Otherwise, it’s a useful tool, as far as it goes. Ask a smart scientist what the origin of life is, and they have to shrug their shoulders, if they’re being honest. If they have hubris, and often times they do, then they sputter and fumble and start saying stupid stuff like it piggybacked to Earth on a meteor.

    Do not mistake Genesis for science, either. It is much , much more, and to me much more rewarding than science. It is poetry. It is scripture. It is sacred.

    In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis, chapter 1. Now, this is not not about the origin. It is specifically about the origins of life. It places God before, above and in charge of the beginning. This is big! The origin of life is within the purview of theology, and if you disagree I think you’d better be able to argue with several millennia of history, scholarship and all this to say nothing of faith (which is important). No, I did not confuse science with religion when I commented on the origins of life.

    The late Stephen Hawking soiled his reputation pretty badly when he tried to be an authority on God. Not very smart at all, in my opinion. Ironic, that. He should’ve stuck to only science.

    A bang did not generate life. Get real.

    I heard once about a typesetting factory that had a great explosion. Out plopped the Encyclopedia Brittanica! It was the damnedest thing I ever heard…

  • Ten March 21, 2018, 7:59 AM

    A bang did not generate life. Get real.

    Unsupportable. The metaphor of the spontaneous Swiss watch is as dumb as biggie bangerism and absolute statements on origins are absolutely unsupportable.

  • Casey Klahn March 21, 2018, 8:11 AM

    OK. I will correct myself. A bang could not, and is incapable of, creating life. Science shows this via physics. My “absolute” statement is a form of rhetoric. It “did not,” because, scientifically speaking, it could not.

    Scientific statements on the origins are unsupportable, at least so far as proofs are concerned. Faith statements, however, are valid.

    Put another way. If I were at a convention on varied topics, and in theater one there was a talk by a scientist on origins, and in theater 2 the same subject but the speaker were a theologian, I’d choose theater 2. It is logical. If the subject were plate tectonics, I’d choose the geophysics guy; if nuclear fission, I’d choose the scientist.

  • Ten March 21, 2018, 8:58 AM

    Coupla more points:

    1. X is implausible therefore Y is fallacious, one of scores surrounding these such things.

    2. Faith is not inherently valid – Santa Claus – but not to quibble: Faith can be apparently rational or so we hope – see the big bangerist creation myth. On its face it’s preposterous but as an article of allegorical import it’s about as good as we got. It makes huge sense; just not as a cudgel to enforce views or determine character or establish rank with but then the humble, ventured conjecture is always the nature of faith, or should be.

    3. Big bangism is one such faith, one of the more pernicious, and scientifically* unsupportable, whether for want of testability or more recently, because of outright contradiction of findings (or findings of what are apparent contradictory phenomenon).

    4. Much of its church includes the scientifically* defective beliefs in invisible matter, entirely undetectable energy, particles named God, fabrics of spacetime to replace aethers, and so on. It has granted itself a great many faiths and the latitude to then go and get them funded.

    5. Notwithstanding theoretical physics and “scientists believe” and the like, possibly the majority of the uses of science in the usual vernacular refer to accepted convention – science du jour and scientism – and not *science as knowledge of a certain discipline. So too scientist.

  • Vanderleun March 21, 2018, 9:15 AM

    And as we can see the study of Cosmology is where Physics and Metaphysics meet.

  • Vanderleun March 21, 2018, 9:18 AM

    The Devout Newton knew: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
    — Isaac Newton
    Said to have been uttered a“ little before he died.

  • John A. Fleming March 21, 2018, 10:34 AM

    No need to get all wrought up about big-bangery. It’s all just math. We see some stuff in our telescopes, and write it up as equations. And then we see some other stuff, and woohoo! our equations predict that. So we run our equations back in time and oops! a singularity appears.

    And then we see some more stuff that our equations didn’t predict. Like the rotation of galaxies. And we think and we think and we doodle more math and we say, the galaxies are acting like they’re embedded in the center a vast sphere of matter. Matter that we can’t seem to see in our telescopes.

    They had come up with something. “Invisible matter” would have got them laughed off the stage, and even John Q. Public would have known the jig is up. So “dark matter” it is.

    All these equations are just convenient placeholders that predict some stuff we think we see. The elucidation of the nature of the Universe is going to go on for a long long time, perhaps forever. We all who live here may never know the truth. Until and unless we can discover Neo’s “Whoa! Deja vu!”, the bug in the Matrix that show us it’s all an illusion.

  • Casey Klahn March 21, 2018, 12:30 PM

    Our host makes simple, precise points. Why he is the host; talent shows.

    Mr. Ten, you fill in a lot I never say. Go back to the college HUB and order a mocha. Faith is not inherently valid? But, my friend, mine is, and you’ll note I quote from the Bible. This is the authority on faith.

    Note: I never support a bang theory of any kind, and Mr. Fleming has said mostly why I don’t. We see the molecule on the grain on the gray on the elephant’s hind quarters.

  • Ten March 21, 2018, 2:05 PM

    You take offense where none exists, Kahn. (And your faith reference is circular.)

  • Ten March 21, 2018, 2:06 PM

    …galaxies are acting like they’re embedded in the center a vast sphere of matter. Matter that we can’t seem to see in our telescopes. They had come up with something. “Invisible matter” would have got them laughed off the stage…

    Nicely put.

  • Howard Nelson March 21, 2018, 3:57 PM

    Casey, you spoke the Truth early on, “Life from chaos.” Miracle made immensely mundane, experienced, inarguable.
    And what is chaos? A pot of possibilities beyond our ken stirred and ladled out by The Master Chef. You want to know all the truth? Take any selfless, Selfmost path to the end. If you stumble over fear, greed, or despair review the steps taken forth and back by Buddha, Jesus, Shankarachaya and the rest of those Truthers who’ve been there, done that. Find your path that is both Grace and Goal.
    As the great monologist, Brother Theodore, put it, “We want to know what’s beyond the Beyond, while we don’t know what’s behind our behinds.”
    Big Bang or Smart Fart or … how do you choose to live your life?

  • John A. Fleming March 21, 2018, 6:44 PM

    Woohoo! Mr. Ten didn’t rip me a new one, instead I got a compliment. I must be getting better at this whole writing thingie. Thanks Mr. Ten.

    I occasionally get moments of … surrealism? phantasmagoria? Out-of-body experience? I don’t know what to call it. It happened again just a few days before this article. Maybe it was something else that GVDL said. He likes this space stuff.

    I was walking down the street, looking at how the clouds and blue sky were against the rude noises and sights of the city. Wham! Suddenly I’m thinking about how all this, everything was once all hot churning star vomit in the deeps of space-time, and our vast comforting beautiful Earth is but a mote of a mote of a mote, with me mote-ier still. And our universe is yet still young, there’s hundreds of billions more years to go until the heat death. I saw it all. It’s like being able to sense and encompass the infinite.

    Alas, it was only for a few seconds. There was a upcoming crack in the sidewalk, with some weeds growing out, and poof! the feeling was gone. Eh, it must have been “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato”.

    And for all you scoffers out there, I have been recreational drug-free since forever. Real life comin’ atcha is far more exciting than dulling it with vicarious chemical concoctions.

  • ghostsniper March 21, 2018, 7:15 PM

    After all it’s only a weed that turns into a flower in your mind.

  • Howard Nelson March 21, 2018, 8:58 PM

    Dear ConCERNed Cosmologists,
    Reports of the demise of the Big Bang Theory are premature. BBT is alive and thriving supported by the presence of nearly undectable dark matter in the ratio to ordinary matter (protons, electrons, neutrons) required by BBT.
    See Hugh Ross, 1-21-2018 lecture
    https://YouTube.be/4-rugmRe35A

    Lamont Cranston strikes again!

  • Howard Nelson March 21, 2018, 9:01 PM

    That link should be https://youtu.be/4-rugmRe35A

  • Howard Nelson March 21, 2018, 9:08 PM

    4-letter word! Now with my mittens off,

    https://youtu.be/4-rugmRe3SA

  • Ben David March 25, 2018, 11:17 AM

    Aahhhhhh so it’s Gravity that “creates… and steers galaxies” and the “relentless flow of time” that “drives evolution” – gotta get the e-word in as soon as possible – and it, too, is described as “creating”.

    But back when I got my double bachelor’s degrees in Physics and Engineering, gravity, time – and “unbounded space” (cue the organ music) – were un-self-aware physical phenomena – or even postulates devised by men to describe what they observed.

    Sorry – I could not sit through more of this anthropomorphizing Gaia-gobbledygook.

    Remember Chesterton?
    The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything.
    ————————-
    This is Chesterton backed by rejected effects from an antacid commercial.

    Or as a REAL physicist would say:

    Das ist nicht einmal falsch