Sunday 27 January 2013

Answering The Talking Heads


The Talking Heads song 'Once in a lifetime' poses the question 'well, how did I get here?' and that's probably the most asked question which we never get an answer to.
I assume David Byrne didn't mean his kitchen or living room, i took it as the Universe and us standing on the 3rd rock from the Sun. Deep stuff for a Sunday morning i agree but i have woken up in a philosophical mood and besides, it has always bugged me that the band never got a proper answer to the question they asked 31 years ago.
Those of a religious bent will mention God creating the heavens and the earth and everything and everyone else will mention the Big Bang and the Universe and everything in it exploding out from a central core.
Great, but God and the mass that everything came from didn't just blink into existence, so what came before them according to those theories? 
Luckily i have a Reverend living opposite to pose just such theological questions to and after a tactful 'That's a very good question' answer and some time buying while he went to find his lighter and make a coffee, he came up with some babble about time being a human concept and before God there was no time until God created it so there was no 'Time' so no definition of before, only an after. Or something like that which is a bit of a fluffy answer and if i am being honest, the idea that a Deity creating things is a bit far fetched for me anyway so i am looking towards science and mostly the Internet.
One theory is that the Universe is continually expanding and then it will reach a point and then a Big Crunch will occur and it will shrink back into that one mass again somewhere in the middle and then rebound out so the Universe is a continuous process of Big Bangs and Big Crunchs but still, that mass never just happened, it must have got there somehow to be able to expand and contract.
What existed before the big bang? Nobody seems to know, the focus seems to be on how the Universe was created but very little is asked about how the stuff that it was created from got there in the first place.
It can't just be nothing because you can't get something from nothing and we are here so there must have been something.  
So to answer the Talking Heads, we don't know but a piece of advice is if you do ever find you are telling yourself 'this is not my beautiful house' and 'this is not my beautiful wife', it is a good indication that you are probably at the wrong address.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

One argument I heard is that there was never nothing and that we are overly obsessed with beginnings and endings.

Q

Lucy said...

I was told i was making the mistake of thinking about it in a linear way but any way you think of it, it must have a start. If there was never nothing, there must of been something and somehow that something got there. I remember a long running argument with a RE teacher at school about God and i would say who made God and her answer would be God always existed and we would go back and forth with me saying but he couldn't have always existed, he didn't just blink into existence because at some point he must have gone from not being there to being there which is the same as the Big Bang, all that material didn't just suddenly exist out of nothing. Bah, gives me a headache!!!