Final Fridays by John Barth Read Free Book Online Page A

our physical universe in one sense came into existence “all at once”—at the moment dubbed by astrophysicists “Planck Time” (10-43 seconds after T-Zero), prior to which the concept time is virtually as unintelligible as are physical processes at the infinitely high
temperature of the original “naked singularity.” Exquisite scientific reasoning from known physical laws and processes has made possible a remarkably precise scenario/timetable for the universe’s subsequent expansion and differentiation, through its radical metamorphoses in later fractions of that first second, 5 to the formation of galaxies and solar systems over subsequent billions of years and the evolution of life on Earth—including, if not culminating, in the day-before-yesterday development of human consciousness and intelligences capable of such rigorous formulations as the Big Bang hypothesis in all its scientific/mathematical splendor. In two other senses, however, the astrophysical creation-story ongoes still:
    â€¢ The observable universe continues the “creative” expansion and exfoliation more or less implicit in its first instant (in the language of complexity physics, or chaos theory, its processes are “sensitively dependent on initial conditions,” more particularly on certain aboriginal inhomogeneities crucial to the uneven distribution of matter into galactic clusters, superclusters, and superclusteral “superstrings”)—a continuation whose own continuation apparently depends on the as-yet-imprecisely-known amount and distribution of “dark matter” out there. Moreover,
    â€¢ The intelligence capable of observing, experimenting, reasoning, theorizing, and reporting on these astrophysical matters likewise continues to evolve, refine itself, and
build upon its accumulated knowledge, toward the point where the question of the universe’s ultimate denouement (infinite expansion, apocalyptic Big Crunch, whatever) will in all likelihood prove answerable, perhaps also the question whether the extraordinary intelligence that can conceive and successfully address such questions is confined to a few Homo sapiens on planet Earth or is after all less parochial than that.
    In the astrophysical beginning, in short, were the seeds of several beginnings-within-beginnings: the beginning of spacetime, the beginning of matter, of radiant energy, and of galaxy formation, down (or up) to the beginnings of life, of human consciousness, of rational inquiry, of scientific reasoning and experiment, and of contemporary cosmological speculation capable even of some empirical verification of these several beginnings.
    Analogously, Genesis 1:1—“In the beginning, God created heaven and earth” 6 —in one sense says it all. And then the next four verses (i.e., Day One: the creation of light, its division from darkness, their naming as Day and Night, and, coincidentally, the initiation of time) sort of say it all again; and then the remaining 26 verses of Chapter One (the ensuing five days of creation, echoing on a larger scale and with more particulars the first five verses, themselves an expansion of 1:1) sort of say it all again . Whereafter, Chapter Two (following God’s three-verse rest on Day Seven) proceeds to say it all yet again—“This is the generations of the sky and the earth in their creation on the day in which God made the earth and the sky,” et cetera—replaying the same creation-riffs in so different a key that some scholars take it to be another tune altogether (Sacks, pp. 18 ff.).
In either case, what’s undeniable is that each successive expansion is an expansion, both in textual space, like the universe’s expansion of physical space (not, strictly speaking, in physical space, since at any moment its expanding space is all the space there is), and also in particularity, differentiation, multiplicity. From mere sky and earth