How the Universe Was Made:
Before the Big Bang … and After

by Ken Roberts
24-July-2017

One day God was working on his latest project. He was making a perfect golden sphere. The sphere was so round, that there was nothing rounder. It was so smooth, that there was nothing smoother. And it was so pure, made of gold using only one type of atom, that there was nothing purer or more perfect.

You may be wondering why I am speaking of God as He. Well, it is a constraint of the English language that I am using to tell this story. God does not have a gender; God is He, She, It and everything else. God is plant, animal, rock, water and air. And time — God is past, present, and future, if those can be said to exist before the Universe. We will simply have to do the best we can in order to tell this story, using metaphors and frail vocabulary.

So … God had made a perfect sphere. It was almost done. Only a name was needed. The sphere was so perfect that only one bit of information would be needed to describe the sphere. God would call it 1. Or maybe 0. God hadn’t yet decided.

1 would be a good name, because it suggests One-ness, a Uni-Verse, a Poem that says everything. 0 would be a good name because it suggests the roundness of a perfect sphere, and the syllable Om. Either way, one bit would suffice for the sphere’s name.

While thinking about his decision, God took a coffee break. There was no rush … Infinite time, actually. After preparing his coffee, God returned to his workbench, where he had made the sphere. He set his coffee cup down on the workbench, and turned to examining the sphere, making sure it was perfectly smooth and pure.

Well, we’re here, so you know what happened. As God was concentrating on the sphere, his elbow nudged the coffee cup, which spilled coffee all over God’s workbench. God grabbed for the coffee cup, and the sphere, without his full attention, rolled to the edge of the workbench and fell onto the floor.

There was a Big Bang ! The perfect sphere was smashed into millions of bits. Coffee dripped off the workbench and mixed into the breakage, and created little bits of dark coffee and light cream. That became empty space and stary galaxies, and everything else in the Universe. “Oops!”, said God.

What happened after the Big Bang? Well, God is probably working on another sphere. Or, perhaps, She has a new project.