Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being.
And then we cut ourselves off and don't feel that we're still the big bang, but you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually—if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning—you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you I see not just what you define yourself as...I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that too, but we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it.—Alan Watts, The Nature Of Consciousness
Characteristics
Time in seconds
Temp in degrees Kelvin
Energy of collisions in giga electron volts
Distance of collisions in cm
Size of today's observed universe in cm
End of inflation. Start of the epoch of the standard model of the
electroweak and
strong
interactions.
10-33
1027
1014
10-28
10
Breakdown of electroweak
symmetry. Epoch of the four separate
interactions (continuing to this day). LEP physics.
10-10
1015
100
10-16
1015
(Solar system)
(Solar system)
1013
(1 million years)
(1 million years)
4000
10-10
10-5
(1/1000 of the diameter of an atom)
(1/1000 of the diameter of an atom)
1025
(10 million light years)
(10 million light years)
It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall.
And all that ink spread, and in the middle it's dense...and as it gets out on the edge the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns...So in the same way there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread, and you and I sitting here in this room as complicated human beings are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting, but...we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique way out on the edge of that explosion, way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being, and then we cut ourselves off and don't feel that we're still the big bang, but you are. Depends how you define yourself.—Alan Watts, The Nature Of Consciousness
