The Universe and me

Me? Well, I’m mostly H₂O, though they tell me
that I’m not always the same packet of these very common
molecules.  (They like to remind me that I am common). It seems a
range of other more determined, or at least more complicated,
chemicals with mysterious characteristics keep replenishing the
package. There is a particular one which keeps renewing itself, and
has being doing so with the odd mistake for donkey’s years.
It’s called DNA, and by all accounts it is the boss and it
controls everything through its minions, the genes.

My own genes have been washing about the north Atlantic coasts of
Britain for 7,000 years or so, but God knows where they came from
before that.  Apparently my boss DNA really can trace its ancestry
back to the amoeba and, beyond that, to even simpler organisms.
Before that were earlier versions of proto-DNA even earlier proteins
(though this might be presuming too much) and so on back through
complex chemicals to basic elements, like the H and the O and a
hundred odd others. But how my genes got to Scotland, I cannot say.

As well as being a bag of H₂0+, or, to be honest, more
likely because of that, I am a conscious being. This notion of
consciousness is one of those things that are hard to explain to
anyone who has never experienced it, but to me it is the most
obvious, as well as most important, part of my existence. I genuinely
don’t know what I’d be without it.  Anyway, this
consciousness is obviously related to the H and the O and all these
mysterious elements. Where in God’s name did they come from?
This is where the story is gets really fantastic.

They were all locked up in a quasi-nothingness, a positonless
point, or something non-thingy, when a “singularity”
started the Big Bang. Or perhaps the Big Bang had a singularity, or
whatever. Anyway, out of this came the Laws of the Universe, Space,
Time, Mathematics, and all that, as well as a thing (or a thingless
thing) called “Energy”. Don’t ask me what “Energy”
was, but it seems to have been something basic, hence the capital
letter. No, wait a minute, I think the Laws of the Universe might
have been basic, or maybe it was the Maths. Now I come to think of
it,  “Energy” was supposed to be infinitely concentrated,
so maybe it was already “mass”, though you wouldn’t
recognise it as such. Maybe LoU were in there, in the infinitely
concentrated “Mass”! One way or another, the “Energy”,
the maths and the laws of the universe collectively produced a Big
Bang/singularity something, in some sequence. This it was that
produced the elaborate interplay of energy and mass in space and in
time which is both the pre-history and the continuing drama of the
elements in question, including H and O.

The Laws of the Universe, in some sort of partnership with
Mathematics, seem to play some sort of boss-man, DNA role here.
Anyway, they either guided or directed a process of forming
“particles” from the energy. These particles are curious
things, so don’t be surprised if you don’t understand a
thing. They might be all energy, or be partly mass, or mass with some
energy, and they can interact in Space-Time, in countless, literally
unimaginable ways. They also seem to be able to recognise one
another, and even to remember their encounters, communicating over
any distance at the speed of light.  This is a bit anthropomorphic, I
know, but I can assure you it looks more respectable written out in
the best Mathematics. Of course, consciousness is obviously in there
somewhere, but whether it is a particle, or the obscure communication
process between them, or in the structure of their interaction, or
the maths or the laws which direct them, I am not in a position to
say. That it had its origins in the Big Bang scenario is not in
doubt. There is nowhere else for it to come from.

Anyway, all these interactions produced an expanding Universe with
a tendency to produce “clumps” of particles. (I believe
lumpy porridge is the preferred reference.) I am really not sure if
this “tendency” was an instruction from the Laws of the
Universe or was down to the demands of Mathematics, especially its
curiously rigorous rules of Chance, but it apparently produced
proto-stars, those cosmic furnaces which in turn produced the
elements, which formed the molecules, proteins, DNA, genes,
consciousness, etc, which ended up several years ago in North West
Europe producing me. I do not know, and probably never will know, how
my genes ended up in such a remote place, but they did, and I am,
more or less, grateful to them for that.  I am also still not sure
where the Laws of the Universe came from, but they ordered the
particles, via my genes, to bring me to consciousness, so I am
grateful.