Let There Be Light!

If you are in the philosophical camp of those who believe the universe exploded into existence about a zillion years ago at a point about a vermillion light years away from our present position, your story may sound something like this:

"It was a dark and empty space. Suddenly, in a gnat's blink of a nanosecond, a single speck of compressed energy/matter/??? burst its invisible seams and exploded outward in all directions. The release of light in this explosion was so great it would have blinded anyone/thing in existence, so it's a good job all the organic forms came later."
This is fondly referred to as the "Big Bang."

Or, if you believe the universe is so nifty it must have been designed and created, your story might read:

"And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep...And God said, Let there be light, and there was light."
(Gen. 1:2-3, Lamsa version)

Whichever direction you tend to lean, if you're reading this article, I suspect you share something with all the other physics enthusiasts who have existed in the stream of time: a fascination with how it all works and a desire to know more.

Welcome aboard! That's what this site is all about. In this and future articles, we will take an interesting journey through "the mind" of our great thinkers in science, religion, and other fields, with stops along the way for sightseeing and a little R&D (rumination and discussion).

But first, since physics has turned into something way more complicated than the Greeks ever imagined, we'll all benefit from settling on some kind of definition for our topic.

The Science of Energy and Matter

Throughout the history of humankind, science, religion, spirituality, medicine, philosophy, even magic have been pretty much connected and overlapping. Alchemy was once a high priority and involved a number of these disciplines. To complicate things even further, the Western (Occidental) way of thinking about reality isn't the only boat on Heraclitus' river.

Even in the West, we have not always had a "mechanistic" concept of the universe. The world view under which Western society has been operating for about 300 years is drastically different from previous thought. However, by whatever name it is called, and under whatever world view it is incorporated, physics has always involved the study of the interaction of energy and matter. So this will do as our working definition...for now.

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