History of the Universe, Part I: Myths of Creation

Myth predates history, never mind science: all Myths are equally valid.  So I may as well make up my own:

God, or somebody like him, was playing around with numbers, but had only come up with Zero and Infinity.  They were both big numbers, in their different ways, but God needed Time to make them interesting.  So he invented One.  (We call it ‘Singularity’, which is just a posh word for the same thing.)

One, Zero and Infinity’s relationship proved to be unsustainable.  One won, and exploded with joy.  (Whether God had planned it that way is now anyone’s guess.  Or indeed, whether it was in fact joy, or rage: I lean towards joy.)  One thing is certain, though – Time was born at that moment, and the Universe began.

You know the rest.  Zero and Infinity were relegated to the sidelines, not to reappear for a very long time.  One (the Singularity) and its offspring (two, three, five, eight, thirteen, elementary particles, atoms, molecules, gas clouds, galaxies, stars, planets) just got on with it, for nearly fourteen billion years, until the next big invention (which may or may not have been God’s idea too) came along – Thought.

The next entry in this series will cover the history of Thought.