THIS IS GROUND CONTROL

Longtime and careful readers of the blog know that we are, at heart, cosmologists. 
No,  that does not mean we are interested in nails, make-up and hair styling  (as a Judge who once saw a book we were holding on cosmology asked us - true story.). It means we, along with the other great minds of the twenty-first century study the origins of the universe and ponder questions about time, space, the unification between quantum mechanics (the operation of very very small particles) and special relativity (the operation of spacetime (yes, that should be one word) ).  In our cosmological world we call this GUT =Grand Unification Theory. 

BREAKING NEWS....we interrupt this fascinating article to inform you that El Gordo Cafe, the new food service area in the REGJB will be opening in February...2020. And as the multitude of bureaucrats who have worked diligently (remember the promise of food trucks to tide us over?) to bring a dining establishment back to the REGJB will tell you, this is ahead of schedule. Yup, only four short years until the folks who run things give us the ability to get a salad for lunch or a pastellito for breakfast at our beloved court house. 

Back to Cosmology. 
Many of us Cosmologists are thinking lately about what was before the Big Bang? The Big Bang was the start of it all- when in a tremendous explosion of heat our universe emerged from a particle about a million-billion-billion times smaller than a single atom. 
But what was before then?

There are two theories. One is the Two Headed Time theory- that for billions of years before the big bang there was a universe shrinking with time moving backward until the universe collapsed upon itself and then ...BANG! The universe began to expand. We like to think of this as the second chance theory. Whatever we screwed up in a prior life/universe- we get to try all over again. 

Or there is the Nothing-ness theory-  that out of nothing, came something, which then caused the Big Bang.  "In the beginning..."
Genesis 2:1 : And the earth was formless and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep and the spirit of god moved upon the face of the waters." 

We know that before the big bang there was nothing. But then there came something, so small and tiny, and yet imbued with the entire contents and energy of the entire universe. This subatomic particle contained all that is and all that will be forever, because special relativity recognizes the law of conservation of mass (the first law of thermodynamics): that for a closed system the mass of the system must remain constant over time. This is commonly expressed as the saying matter cannot be created nor destroyed, merely altered. 

We know  that in Quantum Mechanics there is a proven phenomenon called Q-tunneling in which a quantum particle appears out of nothing in two different places at the same time.  
But where did that particle come from? 
Or was there nothing until the spirit of the almighty moved upon the face of the void? 

What we do know is that the Big Bang did occur. We all came out of that subatomic particle. Even civil lawyers and roller derby and Hialeah and Donald Trump supporters.  

So David Bowie passed away and we've been humming "This is ground control to Major Tom" (which isn't even a great song) all day for some reason. And we've been dabbling in cosmology. 

See you in court. Yes, when it opens in 2020, El Chappo Cafe....Gordo Cafe also emerged from the big bang. (along with cronuts, cheap beer, people who like truck-pulls, bell bottoms, and plaid sports coats, and bunny rabbits and Waterworld and Sean Penn interviewing El Chapo, and the Edsel...and Kim Jong Un's Sushi Chef.....and.... )