We can’t say big questions aren’t being answered. We can’t say nothing ever changes.

“Truth springs out of the earth,” a Psalm says. Sometimes it’s not a truth, but a theory, a hypothesis, an idea, that, despite its lack of definitivity, suddenly emerges as a dominant reality.

Forty years ago, I didn’t think I’d be alive now, but health and mortality have changed so much since then that, decades ago, I faced the idea that I was more likely to live to 100 than to die by 50.

In a college class, we discussed an idea that has since been one of my keys to understanding. A thesis has an antithesis, and the two will come to a synthesis– a new thesis. Countered by its own antithesis.

Everybody has wondered, what existed before the Big Bang? Where was the Big Bang? What was it? What was the context for it? And if and/or when we learn the answers, we’ll surely think, “That is so obvious!”

It’s not surprising that a lover of carcaradon carcarias, the Great White Shark, also loves Black Holes. There’s got to be some really cool stuff in those things! A “singularity–” that’s what’s in one, and that is an invisible, tiny piece of infinity.

The “multiverse” is becoming a household word. We have our universe, but is there any reason why this has to be the only one? No. Where is our universe? Our universe raises the same questions the Big Bang raises.  

“This universe is governed by certain laws and realities that effectively create a self-contained system of which its boundaries are such that we cannot as yet perceive of them as such. Furthermore, such a universe as this can only exist within a larger, superstructural framework of such a nature that, within it, individual universes come to exist.”

That sounds reasonable.

One thesis has been that this universe is the one and only universe. The antithesis is that this is one of an untold number of universes. The synthesis is that we can take all these multiverses and lump them together as the one universe, which I define as “everything there is.”

So, what about the singularities, and the Big Bang? No one knows what happens with a singularity, but when a singularity is explained, when the Big Bang is explained, the connection is magnificently obvious– that tiny, invisible piece of infinity was the fuel for the Big Bang, the seed that grew the universe.

In another universe, a Black Hole evaporated after its singularity evolved into this universe, which derives all its material from material absorbed by that Black Hole in its universe. In turn, our universe creates objects that become Black Holes with singularities.

Maybe not all singularities become Big Bangs. Maybe not all Big Bangs result in long-lived, complex universes like ours.

But I’m happy that, when my son asks me about the universe and the Big Bang, I’ll have more to tell him than anyone told me when I was growing up!