Entropy
It's all down to the Second Law of Thermodynamics: as Flanders and Swann explained "Heat will not of itself pass from one body to a hotter body."
Since energy can only degrade, once it reaches the lowest possible state it can only disappear. But what happens to all those little bits of decay. Do they really just disappear? That's hardly logical. If they disappear where do they disappear to?
Douglas Adams in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy models the Big Bang as sand running out of the plug hole of a conical, ebony bath filmed and the film run backwards. It's a crazy image and meant to be a joke. But who knows, maybe that's what the big bang was like: the bottom half of an egg timer. Suppose the other half of that egg timer contains the decayed energy and entropy is simply the connection between our universe and another, the neck between the two conical ebony baths. So energy seeps out of one universe and into another.
It's a crazy idea and probably totally unprovable. But it is rather beautiful.
One objection might be that the Big Bang happened rather quickly whereas entropy is exceeding slow. But time and energy are variables in Einstein's famous equation. When the whole subject of the discussion is the destruction and creation of matter and energy, what does time mean? In one ebony bath 100 billion years elapses while in the other ebony bath only a hundred billionth of a second goes by!
In fact some have speculated that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is about the creation of time or perhaps the description of the fact that time exists.
The Egg Timer theory is certainly a lot more elegant than the idea of the Higgs Boson, but here's hoping no-one ever builds anything like that Large Hadron Collider to check it out. I think it should remain just a neat idea.
Image of Divine Feminine- in progress by Donna Raymond.
Posted by Jonathan Brind at 11:54