Genesis, The Big Bang and Imaginary Time

I have been thinking a lot lately about the origin of our universe. According to some cosmological theories, there may be as many universes as there are stars in our universe. But, for this discussion, I’m going to deal with the one we see. And I am going to simplify the discussion for purposes of this blog.

There is an extraordinary group of brilliant men studying our universe, in ways that most of us could never understand. There are some women in this field, but not enough. One of the common theories we laymen hear about is the Big Bang. This concept was first popularized by Alexander Friedmann, a Russian physicist who developed his models in the early 1920s. According to the Big Bang theory of the universe, it all began with an extremely dense and hot state of matter. The gravitational pull of this matter grew so great that it all compressed into a ball of infinite density. The density and energy within this ball cause it to explode, sending the matter out into empty space at enormous speed. The universe is still expanding, and may do so forever (unless there is far more matter than we currently can see).

The bible has explained creation in Genesis. And it sounds an awful lot like the Big Bang. In fact, the more (that) scientists have tried to explain the universe in terms of mathematical laws, the more it seems to give credence to the biblical explanation.

Physicists and mathematicians construct enormously complex formulas to prove that there are “laws” to the behavior of matter, and of our universe. They tend to examine what they see, how it behaves, and make the assumption that these universal laws will hold up under any circumstances. In this manner, physicists have been able to explain most everything we see. These laws are then used to try to explain the beginning, or the moment of creation. These scientists tend not to think of things in terms of a “God,” but more in terms of universal constants. Religious scholars would argue that maybe God just made the rules.

The Big Bang erupted from what is known as a “singularity.” This is that point of infinite density, where the quantities that are used to measure the gravitational field becomes infinite. This affects the curvature of something called spacetime, and is the point where all of the physical “laws” of nature break down. Uh, oh.

We experience Time as something that moves forward, not backward. In our world, time as we know it probably began at the Big Bang. We can think of time as a horizontal line moving from one side, the beginning, to the other side, the future. Some point in the middle is the present time.

Physicists cannot explain how the universal laws can function in a singularity without creating something known as Imaginary Time. This is like putting a perpendicular axis to the horizontal one time. This allows time to have a new dimension, something we don’t see, but something that allows us to create universal formulas that work with all types of matter.

String Theory is one of the latest crazes to (re) emerge on the theoretical scene. But for string theory to work, we need 10, 11 or 26 dimensions, not the four we know (with time being one).


These theories were the “genesis” for the concept of time and travel that I used in The Alchemist Conspiracy. If you read deeply, time becomes intertwined with religion, allowing for other ways to explain what we know and what we see.

Most of us have our own vision of God. If we look at organized religion alone, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of different Gods. If one of them is truly “right,” does that mean that the others don’t exist? Is there a God for just a small portion of our world’s population, to the exclusion of all others? Somehow, I think God is above all that. But where we find God, and where God chooses to enter our lives, can be in many different places and many different ways.

My writing often deals with The Creator, God, or Christ-like figures. I see God with infinite powers, just like the infinite density of a singularity, who can influence our lives in ways we will never see or understand. Just like physicists, religious leaders aim to put God into something understandable, something tangible. But I think that we see only small bits of The Creator’s greatness and possibilities. I also believe that God will help us harness that greatness to better our lives.