One of the great achievements of modern cosmology is the discovery of the Big Bang as a theoretical consequence of General Relativity and now as an empirically detectable process of expansion from a starting point approximately 13.7 billion years ago. Emerging as a consequence of Einstein’s relativity equations in the work of such figures as Lemaitre and Hubble who discovered an expanding universe, Big Bang cosmology found its instant dialectical opposite in the steady state theory of Hoyle, then finding its empirical confirmation in the discovery in 1965 of the primordial background radiation left over from the t-zero, or rather the t>0 moment. The remarkable reconstruction of this emergentist sequence beginning with a primordial atom at trillions of degrees has led to the crystallization of a new ‘creation myth’, one with a mysterious, and quite Kantian crypto-metaphysical, raggedness precisely at its curtain rise.[i]

In the first second from Planck time to the separation of the fundamental forces to the drama of cosmic inflation and the appearance of quarks and antiquarks the spectacular first sequence proceeds in the first minutes to the appearance of hydrogen and helium nuclei. The first three hundred thousand years show the beginning appearance of atoms and the new universe is on its way toward the formation of galactic then stellar formations. By the period of four billion years ago the beginnings of life will initiate the planetary scale of Earth evolution. The ambiguous first instant of the primordial atom is not like the sudden explosion of a bomb, but is a more complex process involving the unfolding of the spatial matrix itself. The early form of the Big Bang cosmology was soon extended with the theory of inflation which demonstrated the rapid expansion of the universe, faster than the speed of light in a fantastic scenario of sudden origins completed within fractions of a second.

With the spectacular drama of creation complete, the world of galaxies and stellar evolution begins and our stage is soon set with the appearance of the sun, earth and planets 4.56 billions of years ago, followed by the emergence of life less than a billion years later. By 1.5 billion years ago, the first cells are emerging, and then we have the dramatic beginnings of life as we know it now with the first multicellular organisms, and the rapid proliferation of basic body types in the Cambrian era over half a billion years before the rise of man. As we ponder the question of evolution, any dogmatism as to its dynamics must confront the mystery of the origin of life, to say nothing of the Cambrian explosion. In any case the origin of life via the random assembly of the first DNA molecule is a proposition difficult to accept, and this difficulty will stalk us every step of the way until we reach our story of the rise of civilization.  

10^-43 seconds: the universe is smaller than the Planck length.

10^-33 to 10^-33: onset of cosmic inflation

10^-10: separation of fundamental forces, quarks, anti-quarks

3 minutes: nuclei of hydrogen and helium

300,000 years: atoms form, and galaxy, then stellar, formation begins

5.6 billion years ago: Our sun appears from debris of a supernova explosion

3.9 to 1.8 billion years ago: emergence of life as bacteria

550 million years ago: The Cambrian era

55-60 million years ago: first primates

3-5 million years ago: Australopithecus, emergence of hominids

50, 000 years ago: homo sapiens

 Despite the cogency of the Big Bang cosmology, there is something strange about this creation story, as a metaphysical murkiness lingers at the fuzzy edges of its account. The concept of a beginning in time betrays its lack of definition, as does its opposite. Indeed it is the interplay with its antithesis, the steady state, and its resemblance to a classic antinomy of Kant, ‘there is no beginning in time’, ‘there is a beginning in time’, that should warn us that everything about the theory is quite acceptable, t>0, and nothing better than head-scratching before that. We seem to be philosophers before we are cosmologists, and in the footsteps of Alice in wonderland. We are forced to the implicit question, unanswered, that lurks behind the Kantian challenge to our sense of space-time as a representation, and no easy resolution of that mystery. Although we cannot use Kant to solve the problems of physics, we do know the symptoms of antinomial empiricism and are left to wonder at the characteristic dualism or dialectic that is clearly in some way a property of our instruments of thought.

Indeed, sure enough, in a recent new perspective, Endless Universe, Beyond The Big Bang, we have already the swinging of the pendulum in an attempt to proceed beyond the Big Bang by incorporating it in a scheme of larger, repeating, perhaps endless, cycles of cosmic evolution. The discovery of Dark Matter and Dark energy, and the attempted extension of the Standard Paradigm into the realm of string theory with its hyperdimensional implications has begun to suggest a new understanding beyond Big Bang cosmology of cyclical models of cosmic evolution. Each cycle begins with a Big Bang, but this is an event in time with a before and after, the exact same a priori form that we see in the eonic effect. We can only smile at this direct evidence of a Kantian antinomy in action.[ii]