It is nice to have some idea of where one is. You move about your house and get to know it so well that if someone were to undertake to explain your house to you, you might even take offence.

I did that once, explain somebody's house to them, not take offence. I had driven a motorcycle to the top of a big hill overlooking the Greek city of Saloniki. There were no other vehicles, and a man was curious and polite enough to invite my companion and me into his home for tea. Eventually he got around to asking why we had made the rather perilous climb over tracks otherwise used only donkeys and people afoot. I said we were curious about "when the castle was built." He asked what castle, and I said the one we were in.

"This is my house," he said.

"That wall, that wall and that wall are your house," I said with aplomb. "But this wall I am sitting against is a castle." I patted it.

He was understandably puzzled, so I took him outside and showed him. The hilltop was packed with little cottages and informal tracks, but far away was a tower and a portion of a crenellated wall we had seen from the city below. He agreed that that, at least, was a part of a castle. I pointed out portions of standing wall, enough remaining to give the general outline of the fortification. There was not much left of the castle near us, but you could see a fragment of a massive wall several yards away. The inner side of the wall was exactly in line with the wall I had indicated; otherwise it only looked as if the house had been build against a low hill. He declared he had never seen the castle before.

Nevertheless, as a general rule, most people consider themselves experts on their own homes. Boys with bicycles likewise know their own neighborhoods exhaustively. Beyond that, we vary but generally we know less and less in turn about our state, our nation and the world at large. Not many years ago a survey of American high school graduates were given a test, one question of which involved finding the Pacific Ocean. So few got it right that you would have had a better chance of finding the Pacific by throwing a dart at a spinning globe than by asking the average graduate. Here's a hint: look for a really big ocean. Its size is the First Problem.

In the next hour we are going to look briefly around our room on the largest available scale. What we are talking about is not far away, any more than your room, your country or the planet earth is far away. We will just look at it on the grand scale, notice some problems and draw conclusions that are not the usual ones.

The world is round; I hope we all know that. The earth turns around once a day, which is why the sun seems to rise and set. The earth and the sun revolve around each other once a year; the center of rotation is actually inside the sun. Because the axis of the revolution of the earth is not exactly parallel to the axis of the earth's orbit around the sun, the Northern Hemisphere gets more sun for part of the year - the spring and summer - and less sun the rest of the year. Over thousands of years the axis of the earth wobbles, so that the North Star, which is almost fixed over the geographic North Pole now, will seem to move away and some day come back again.

The sun is a hot ball of gas, which most people believe is because of a "nuclear reaction" going on in its depths, the same reaction more-or-less that gives a hydrogen bomb its oomph. The fact that it doesn't just go bang is the Second Problem.

If you take a look at the sky some time when the sun is down and there aren't a lot of artificial lights, you will notice that there are some stars. We have a lot of evidence that suggests that the sun is a reasonably ordinary star. Most stars are in pairs, as it turns out, but a lot have a sort of a family relationship with the sun. There is a band across the sky called the Milky Way where the stars are so numerous that although mostly they are too small to distinguish with the human eye, they add up to a faint glow.

Now this was once a problem. It even had a name: Obler's paradox. This holds that if the universe is infinitely old and infinitely large, the whole sky should look like the Milky Way, only as hot at the surface of the sun. Since it is not, the universe must be limited in size, age or both.

If the universe was infinitely old, but limited in size, it should long since have collapsed into a single lump. It didn't, so it cannot be infinitely old. But how did it get this way? You could say it came about by supernatural activity, but that is an odd way to look at it. I mean you don't look for supernatural activity to explain how your living room looks, why start now?

If your religion makes you to think that the universe was manufactured five thousand years ago, then you must be ready to accommodate the presence of things that are much older. Light arriving from a quasar a billion light years away must have been manufactured in mid flight. No problem, really. As we will see, putting an age on the universe and finding it has things that are older than that is also a problem astronomers are dealing with.

There was a man named Hubbell; you've heard of him. He has a telescope named after him. He had an assistant who had been a muleskinner; I don't remember his name. Maybe some day they'll name a telescope after him. Well these two men did some careful measurements of the light from very distant galaxies.

A galaxy is a bunch of stars. The one we are in is the Milky Way. Some night when you are with someone looking at the night sky and in a romantic mood, point it out and say, "I wonder how far away it is. I wonder what it would be like to live there." Answer: we do live there. Years ago, when we were all more innocent, a computer programmer decided to build a computer model of a galaxy. So he had the computer create a "space" where all this would happen. He populated the space with "stars" which had mass but no size, so they would almost never collide. Then he had the computer calculate how they moved under gravity, taking the first star and calculating the effect of each of the other stars on it, then taking the second star, then the third. Then he would go back and do the calculation on the first with all the stars now in their new location. Then he stood back and watched how the galaxy would collapse under its own gravity.

Sorry, it didn't collapse. It threw out the stars one by one or two by two until there was nothing left. So how could a bunch of stars that started out mutually at rest ALL reach escape velocity? The problem was that the computer was calculating things at discrete moments. From time to time two stars would lie very close to each other. They would then give each other a very strong acceleration. By the next time the computer looked at them, they were very far apart and their now much lower gravitational pull on each other was not enough to slow them down much; they left the system.

We still don't know why galaxies are shaped as they are. Flat ellipses are no big surprise. But there are spiral galaxies and galaxies with bars in them. Also the galaxies themselves are arranged in huge clusters, and the clusters lie in walls around huge voids. So the Third Problem is that there is limited structure to the universe at all scales.

Before we go one with Hubbell's discovery, we must talk about things briefly on a small scale.

Consider a single atom with a nucleus and one electron. The electron lies in a probability distribution near the atom; its location is not actually specified, but it has possibilities. Think of a customer at a restaurant. He has a menu but he has not ordered. We know something about what he might order, but his "order" does not actually exist yet. Similarly, we say the position of the electron does not actually exist most of the time. To thrash the analogy a little farther, this particular restaurant has a policy of pay-when-you-get-the-menu. So the customer gives the waiter two dollars and gets a menu. He decides he is hungrier. He gives the waiter more money and gets a menu with more offered. Perhaps he then decides that is a bit too much, asks for a slightly cheaper menu and gets a little money back. If all the prices are different, and you know them and know how much money is changing hands, you are in a position to say, "Aha, he has just given up the $15.17 menu and now has the $13.95 menu."

Well, when an electron gives up or absorbs energy, it changes its "menu" of places it might be around the atom. And the energies associated with those changes are known with tremendous accuracy. Light is a form of energy. So if there is a star giving off light, and there is helium in the atmosphere of the star that is absorbing some of the light. The absorption will be seen as a dark line on the spectrum of the light from the star.

You know the spectrum. You break up light with a prism and get all these colors. Every color in the spectrum has a certain energy associated with it, and you can think of it sort of like an energy wave traveling at the speed of light with a wavelength and a frequency. Light with a shorter wavelength has a higher energy. You will remember that, won't you?

If an object is moving away from you and giving off light, you can look at it and look at the light coming from it with a spectrograph; it shows you the spectrum. Since the light is going away, its frequency is lower and its wavelength longer than if it were sitting still. That's like the bell of a steam engine. It sounds lower when the train is going away then when the train is approaching.

So the two workers looked at light coming from distant galaxy clusters and found that light from the most distant ones was redder, shifted toward lower frequencies, than light from nearby one. And this was a systematic phenomenon. On a very large scale, everything was affected.

So they reasoned thus: Everything is moving away. Things farther away are moving away faster. So at some time in the past, everything must have been very close together and then it was blown apart by a big explosion, a cosmic flash of light.

The time of the beginning of the universe is around seven billion years ago, by the best recent measures. That is a pity, because there are stars and galaxy cluster that are older. As I said: if you believe in a four thousand-year-old universe but are faced with pre-human remains a million years old, your problem is only different in degree from that of scientists. (Recently the scientists have fudged their calculations, I suspect for this very reason. They are now saying 12 billion years.) For us this is the Fourth Problem.

This is the Big Bang theory of the universe, first described by Edgar Allen Poe and now widely accepted as the most probable way to account for all the facts.

Two refinements: If the universe started as a huge flash of light, that light might still be around, coming from all directions and enormously red-shifted. Such radiation has, indeed, been found.

Second, the universe is kind of close to uniform over enormous scales. But things at such distances have never had the time to exchange light, much less galaxies; how did they get into equilibrium? Also, unless the universe is expanding at a particular speed within exceedingly close tolerances, it would either have become too diffuse too fast for stars ever to have formed or stayed so dense it would have collapsed on itself long long ago. (This is the "Flatness problem" or our Fifth Problem.)

Both of these problems are addressed by invoking a process they have named "inflation." Briefly, you know E=MC² which we take to mean that matter and energy can be interconverted. That initial flash of light would have at some point been so intense that as it cooled it sort of precipitated out into matter, like clouds dropping rain. And before that, under the truly cosmic conditions before matter, even the ordinary laws of physics may not have existed; they too precipitated during the first torrid but cooling moment.

In a thundercloud, the precipitation of rain releases the same heat that was absorbed when the water evaporated. This release of heat keeps the cloud from cooling as fast as the air through which it is rising, so that the storm winds accelerate and the cloud top rises very fast.

Similarly, the precipitation of matter, and more the precipitation of some of the physical laws of nature (things like nuclear binding forces) released so much energy that for a brief time the universe expanded faster than the speed of light. We are told not to worry about exceeding the speed of light. Nothing exceeds the speed of light though space, but in this case it was space itself that was expanding. However, this is the Sixth Problem.

That, as briefly and as clearly as I can manage, is where we live. Although I have made six reservations, as near as I can manage that is the current general consensus. If you get more specific or more elaborate, you begin to reach the point where opinions are changing. For instance it cannot be long before someone comes up with a better way to explain the fact that the universe does not seem to be as old as some of the things in it.

We will now leave the havens of the scientific consensus and strike out for the unknown. What follows is not commonly accepted at all. I will review our six problems.

1. The ocean is large.
2. The sun is stable.
3. There is both structure and randomness on every scale.
4. The universe is not as old as some of the things in it.
5. The universe is "flat."
6. It appears that the early universe may have been expanding at greater than the speed of light.

Taking the last problem first, how could the universe expand so fast? In fact, how could it expand at all?

Imagine a non-spinning earth isolated in space. Stand on that earth and throw a rock straight up at ten miles an hour. It will promptly come back down and you can catch it. Throw it upward at a thousand miles an hour and it will come back down, but too fast to catch. Throw it upward at a hundred thousand miles an hour and it will fly away never to return, at least not because of the gravity of the earth. Something would have to throw it back. Ah, but throw it upward at 24 thousand miles an hour and it will rise indefinitely, slower and slower, never breaking free but never coming back. At infinity it will hover stationary. 24 thousand miles an hour is the "escape velocity" at the surface of the earth. If the earth were heavier and the same size or smaller and the same mass, it would have a higher escape velocity.

Well suppose you had something that was say the size of the sun and weighed ten times the sun. If memory holds the surface of that object would have and escape velocity of the speed of light. Nothing can exceed the speed of light. The object would be a "black hole," a name coined by John Archebald Wheeler and since well accepted by the scientific community.

Nothing escapes a black hole: that's not quite true. A man named Hawking pointed out that if an electron can exist at any distance from its nucleus simply because it did not specify its exact location, that electron (starting inside a black hole) can simply "turn up" outside the black hole without actually having to fly out at greater than the speed of light. His mathematical proof is above reproach. He proved that very small black holes should leak matter (anything can jump around like an electron, only less often) so fast they eventually stop being black holes and explode. The fact that this has not been observed remains a puzzle.

Well forgive me for saying it but IF YOU STUCK ALL THE MATTER IN THE UNIVERSE IN ONE PILE, IT WOULD BE A BLACK HOLE. There. I said it. The big bang cannot have happened, inflation theory or not.

I have no patience with the concept "things weren't exceeding the speed of light locally, it was space itself that was moving." If that worked, getting out of a black hole would be easy; just move the space you are in out. In fact, jumping to a distant galaxy would be easy: just move the space you are in.

How?

The only way I know to move space is with a concentration of matter. And it was a concentration of matter that made the black hole in the first place. No Big Bang.

But it LOOKS like the universe is expanding. Hubbell's work has never been challenged. Well if it's not getting bigger because that would be impossible, and it's not staying the same, because that's not possible, it must be collapsing.

And if it's collapsing and looks like it's expanding, we just have the wrong notion about time.

What is time? For once I am going to give you a physical explanation.

The future is indeterminate. We can influence it, but we cannot know it entirely. The past is fixed. We can know much about it, but we cannot change it at all.

If you made a catalogue of every thing in the universe and its location, that catalogue would have a finite size. (Bigger than the universe itself, but no matter. We aren't really going to make it anyway.) There would be so much information in the catalogue that you could make the universe smaller and, looking things up in the catalogue you could know where everything belonged. Each address in your catalogue would be more than enough to locate something in the smaller universe, just as seven digits may be enough to call somebody in your own city, but it takes eleven to call cross country.

And similarly, if you made the universe larger, you would never be able quite to locate everything exactly. It would take more information than your catalogue would hold. The larger universe would be indeterminate from observations taken in the middle-sized universe, just as the location of an electron is indeterminate.

So time is merely the sequence of sizes of the universe. We call the future the larger universe and the past the smaller, but in fact the universe is collapsing. This requires no creative gesture of biblical proportion. Some stuff just drifted together, formed a black hole and started to collapse under the force of gravity.

The notion of time running backwards in a black hole should not seem far-fetched. If you stand on the surface of the earth and air a flashlight at the moon, the light that arrives there will be slightly red-shifted because it has lost energy climbing against the gravity of the earth. Remember the wavelength and thus the color of light depends on its energy. Of course the change is too small to detect, but imagining a really massive earth, the effect would be greater. Imagine gravity so great that half the energy of the light is lost getting to the moon; that would mean that the wavelength as measured at the moon would be twice what it was when it left your flashlight.

If you measure the speed of light on the moon, you will find it exactly the same as the speed of light on the massive earth. Also, the energy of the electron orbitals that give light its color - those energies will be the same. So the color of the flashlight will be the same on the massive earth - as seen close at hand - will be the same as the color on the moon as seen on the moon. But if speed is constant and wavelength is longer then frequency is slower and TIME IS MOVING SLOWER ON THE MASSIVE EARTH.

Make the earth more massive, the difference increases until the earth becomes a black hole, energy arriving at the moon drops to zero, wavelength rises to infinity, frequency drops to zero and time on the earth has stopped. Now toss in just a little more stuff and it seems not unreasonable to suggest that time on earth is running backwards.

So if it is the universe, where things become a black hole billions of years before they are so dense that gravity is a local problem, things quietly become a black hole and time quietly sets off in what seems to us the reverse direction.

Outside our universe, of course, there is no fixed direction of time or fixed speed. Indeed in some places time may be moving in one direction along one axis and in another direction along another axis. Space may swirl like the turbulence at the bottom of a waterfall. Life would be precarious. Moral order would be hard to interpret. What is the difference between giving life and taking life if there is no standard direction of time?

That was the sixth problem. The fifth problem was that the universe is "flat." If you walk in a straight line for ten feet, say east, then you turn ninety degrees to the left and walk for then feet pretty much north, then you turn left and walk ten feet again, you have about crossed three sides of a square and are ten feet from where you started. But suppose you start on the equator and walk six thousand miles east, a left turn starts you north. Six thousand miles later you are at the north pole. Take a ninety-degree turn left and another six thousand miles takes you right back where you started. The only difference in the two procedures was the distance traveled, but the result was different. That, obviously, is because the world is not flat.

If you tried the same thing on the seat of a riding saddle, you would find that your final position was farther from the start than if you were on a flat surface.

But space is flat, which is the same as to say (I am told) that all those galaxies are speeding away just at escape velocity. And I mean JUST at escape velocity. I mean the universe had to be contrived with, dare I say it? DEVINE precision to be so flat. On the other hand, if we are just a bunch of stuff that happened to get next each other and started falling inward, we would observe a universe that was EXACTLY flat, just as a stone dropped from infinitely far away would strike the earth at exactly escape velocity.

The fourth problem was that there are things in the universe that seem to be older than the universe itself. If it started with a voice magnified by a cosmic sub-woofer and a searing flash of light, then there is just no way a star or galaxy cluster could be older than that. It wasn't a galaxy cluster when it was just light. But if we are made of hunks of stuff left over

from other universes, that exploded, turned themselves inside out, or whatever, then you could find anything at all, even (hold your hats) folks.

The third problem was that there is both order and randomness at every scale of the universe. Well if the universe if a black hole with time running backwards, then nothing can escape. Of course it looks like it's all escaping, because the universe looks to be expanding. And we can't see the hideous chaos outside our universe, because for light to get IN from THERE in our normal sense of time, it would have to get OUT of HERE in true time sense, and neither light nor energy escape a black hole.

And, information and energy are forms of the same thing. If I had a steel tank and a tiny valve and knew exactly what every molecule of air in the room was doing, I could open the valve when air would enter (molecule by molecule) but not when air would leave. I could thus get a tank of compressed air without doing any work. (Assume no work to work the valve.)

So information cannot get out any more than energy or matter. So, in true which is to say reversed time sensing, information is piling up and matter is becoming ordered on every scale. But it will not achieve absolute order until the very moment, at about 7 billion BC when it all gets crushed into an infinitesimal point. In normal time sense, things always get more disordered.

The second problem is the sun. The sun is supposed to be a big hydrogen bomb going off, and perhaps it is, but it seems so stable. Furthermore, there should be neutrinos, little subatomic particles, coming from the sun. Not enough have been found to account for its energy.

Here's a thought. Suppose the sun is a black hole running in reverse time. Then all the stuff that might fall into a black hole is coming brimming out of it. Since this would be a process linked to the progression of the universe itself, it would be expected to be stable over a long time.

It's just a thought. It doesn't have to be that way. (Although the reverse time DOES just about have to be that way.) In fact, they now have a neutrino detector that is so capable that it can hint at the DIRECTION neutrinos are coming from. It has already suggested that neutrinos have rest mass, which is thought to be necessary if they are to help explain the flatness of the universe - there isn't enough matter to account for it. So we will have a lot better idea of how many neutrinos are coming from the sun and whether they may have changed form on the way.

The first problem was how big the oceans are, or why we have oceans at all.

If the earth started as a big ball of stuff that came into existence because of the impacts of lots of smaller things, it presumable started off as very hot, hot enough to melt everything anything like close to the surface.

Lighter stuff should have risen to the top to form a light outer crust on a heavier inner crust. And indeed today we have lighter formations which are the continents floating conveniently higher than the heavier formations, which are the seas and oceans. Only there isn't enough continent to go around. We are mostly ocean. What happened to most of the continental crust?

If anyone asks you, give them the standard answer. Pull a long face and say, "Plate tectonics." The crust of the earth is a number of plates floating on the mantle of the earth below; as the mantle slowly moves because of convection of heat rising from below (the heaviest elements, which should be putting out the radioactivity that warms the inside of the earth, those elements should have sunk to the core.), the movement of the mantle drags the plates along and they break, collide and override each other. Over the millions of years, most of the continental plates have been drawn under.

Yep. Maybe. But if so, they ought to have popped up somewhere. They're light, aren't they? They can't all be under the continents we have left unless they are piled up several layers thick. Several layers in some areas and MOST of the earth lacking them? Seems odd.

We were bold enough to suggest a black hole at the center of the sun, why not one at the earth's core? When the earth was young, the crust just covered it. Since then matter has entered the universe from the time reversed black hole in the core. The heavier rock below is the ocean floor. There must have been a time when there was not enough ocean to accommodate all the water. The water covered the earth. Oops. There we go getting biblical again.

Maybe, maybe not. Modern surveys are wonderfully accurate, and if the earth is actually enlarging, we ought to know soon.

So that is my idea about where we all live. It is not the accepted one. There is only one sticky bit I ought to let you know about.

If the universe started as a casual assembly of matter that just happened to be uniform enough and the right size and the right mix of matter and anti matter, and only three dimensions that had not collapsed on themselves and no overall spin or net charge … and so forth,

And if the universe is to end crushed by monumental forces into a geometric point,

And if time is running backwards,

So that it looks like the universe began with a Big Bang,

Then…

It will LOOK like the universe ends abruptly by coming into continuity with the chaos beyond, time will cease to have a specified direction, the graves COULD open and we, who thought ourselves safely dead for eternity, may find ourselves back at work coping with problems we now cannot conceive of.

Not to worry. There is nothing to do about it anyway.

I would suggest, however, you attend the church of your choice.