We're non-physicists, and we vote*

Why would something – like the original substance of the Big Bang – explode into an essentially infinite quantity of perfectly identical insanely small particles, such as electrons, or quarks, or superstrings? This doesn’t seem logical or possible. If someone blows up a building or a boulder, are the resulting fragments all identical, whether small, tiny, or sub-sub-sub-microscopic? What could make this happen? The only cause I can conceive is not an explosion, but the most powerful pulverizing force. That is, the universe would have come not out of an explosion, but out of a crushing or an implosion. That doesn’t seem to make any sense either, but how else would there come to be nothing but infinitesimality?

I think we also have to assume that the result of this bang explosion or pulverizing implosion is the creation of the ultimate, irreducible elements of nature itself – those quarks and strings. But that, of course, sounds absurd, as it seems necessary to our brains that one would start with that ultimate particle, not create it by the application of some internal (explosive) or external (pulverizing) force upon something bigger.

So what could have granulated the material of the cosmos to a cosmos of radical particles? God’s angry fist? And what would His smashable clay have been? God Himself? Was He a self-mutilator? And why can’t our minds wrap around something as absurdly basic as What had to be in the beginning, even if “the beginning” is thought of as an eternal regress? Is it the smallest possible unit, or not the smallest possible unit? I think it’s very sad that we can’t even get that, can’t even settle that question.

Let’s assume that this conundrum is an accurate (but not necessarily the only accurate) appraisal of the situation. Standing on that, we’d then have to accept that human logic is ultimately invalid, or that human sight is so blind as to create an invalid logic. What we see and think may have nothing true to say about the real universe. Is this analogous to the validity of Newton’s insights, which apply to the pre-relativistic, pre-quantum world? Our blindness is in beautiful mathematical and testable sync with the opaque world we blindly perceive. Maybe our ultimate hope for the future of our race has to be to become something other than what we are.

For now, I’m voting for the Big Smash.

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* Other amateurish thoughts about the universe and creation -- https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/07/my-philosophy-changes-my-psychology.html, https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2015/03/slapdash-profundity-1-only-smart-way.html, https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/04/mungo-psychology-part-one.html.