Co-inherence

All scientific observations of the Cosmos made to date are consistent with the idea that our universe emerged from a single, vanishingly small object in an explosion that occurred about 14 billion years ago – the famous Big Bang. The coordinates of space and time that we use to describe our observations and frame our theories also began with the Big Bang.

The reason is easy to understand. Spatial coordinates measure the distance between objects and time measures change. In a universe that contains only one object, there is no way to measure distance and, if the one object remains one, nothing changes. So spacetime and the possibilities for observation began with the Big Bang and the subsequent multiplicity of material objects.

The single object from which the universe emerged is outside of our spacetime and the nature of that object is therefore unobservable – a scientific mystery. The nature and origin of the original object or the nature of existence outside of our spacetime are, of course, not outside the reach of our imagination, mathematics or metaphysics. But it should be kept in mind that any such speculations are beyond the reach of verification by scientific observation.

The fact that our universe contains stable matter in structures that have survived gravitational forces for almost 14 billion years is just one in a long string of facts that lead scientists to describe the Big Bang as being  “fine tuned.” By this we mean that the conditions present at the initiation of the Big Bang and the physical laws governing the stability and composition of ordinary matter had to be incredibly “fine tuned” in order for you and me to be here now. It’s hard to put a probability number against “fine tuning”, but just the one fact of the universe surviving gravity has a probability of only about 10^-60. Our existence is so scientifically improbable that it can arguably be called “miraculous”. The Big Bang therefore qualifies, to this scientist’s mind, as a miraculous and mysterious event.